Can AI make smart homes get rid of the status quo?

Smart homes are probably the first big pit in IT history, because you can find photos of Bill Gates, Larry Page and even Lei Jun in the pit after you fall.

Now that AI is coming, will it make this pit full of gold or will it make this pit a little deeper?

When I talked with Lao Chen (Chen Xiaoliang, Doctor of Engineering, Acoustics, Speech Recognition Expert) about this issue, Lao Chen felt that this AI did bring about a disruptive opportunity, but the core problem was to recognize the boundaries of technical capabilities and make products. And the solution is not only to know what the current technology can do, but more importantly, to recognize what it can't do. The irrational expectation of technology will in fact still be bounced. This article will explore this issue.

Microsoft and Google share Waterloo

Older IT people may remember that Bill Gates brought a Venus plan when he visited China in 1999. This

The plan is to make a set-top box running Windows CE. This set-top box can play both the role of the current TV box and a cheap PC with Internet access (only one-fifth of the price of a normal PC).

At that time, this was called computer home appliance, all the big things in the computer and home appliance industry (such as Liu Chuanzhi, president of Lenovo at the time, Duan Yongji, president of Stone, Zhang Ruimin, president of Haier, Duan Yongping, general manager of Guangdong Bubugao, and Zhu Wei, chairman of Beijing Yuxing Sha) has opened his arms.

Unfortunately, this is a tactical direction but it is not easy to use the product to land. The TV can be a computer (now a lot of TV is an Android-based computer), but obviously the computer is not a TV (the computer's usage scene and watching TV are completely mismatched), coupled with the business model problem, the final wave of the smart home attempt failed. .

Microsoft hasn't tossed the general concept of smart home for a long time, but spent a lot of effort to make XBox, but the rising star Google has taken this direction.

In 2014, Google did a shocking thing. It spent $3.2 billion to acquire a company called NestLabs. The company's products are a thermostat. The thermostat is not used domestically. However, the American people may have a large house and therefore use a lot. The core function of the product is to keep the temperature in the house constant by controlling the air conditioner. Nest is not the same as the previous thermostat, it has the ability to learn, you can learn to remember the user's habits and preferences.

In 2014, the annual shipments were 500,000, that is, the price of 249 US dollars was estimated to be less than 200 million US dollars at that time, so Google is at least the company that bought P/S16 or above.

Then there is no more then.

The latest news is that Nest is no longer operating independently and merged into Google as a department. The core mission of the future should be to cooperate with GoogleHome. Nest is a bit of a product, but as a thermostat, the imagination space is actually not big. Google is willing to pay a high premium. It should mainly focus on the direction of smart home and think that Nest can go out of the simple thermostat positioning, and can become a family center. product.

If Venus and Nest are two battles, there are still a lot of small local wars, such as Xiaomi's router with 1T hard drive, Amazon's Echo, Apple's AppleTV and so on.

For example, the smart home is a difficult mountain, but everyone is going to the mountains and rushing to the mountains, although there are people in the front who are falling into the pit. The core driving force here is undoubtedly the huge market opportunity hidden in this hill.

Gold mine larger than PC and PAD

TV is undoubtedly a product of grandfathers in electronic products. People pay more attention to home appliance companies because they lose money or sell a building, but there is an extremely common sense that the gold content behind these old products is not only Less is still higher than the hot mobile Internet. Even though the mobile advertising share has not exceeded TV by now, the distribution of advertising costs is as follows:

Obviously, the share of TV and computer-based antiques in the advertising industry is 56% in 2015, even 49% by 2018, which is much higher than 22.4% of the mobile Internet. That is to say, the growth rate of advertisements happening in the home is not good, but the stock is extremely large.

In terms of TV, it not only affects advertising, but also involves content payment. To feel the weight of this part, you can see another picture. The following picture shows the American time allocation given by KPCB in 2015:

The same state: TV increments are not good, but the stock is huge. If you add TV computers, you can take more than 60% of the time.

The capacity of this market is not limited to this, there are various new hardware involved, such as smart lights, door locks, security, thermostats, etc. The market for these devices is not big, but after being superimposed, the United States is estimated to be 20 billion. Around the dollar. (The speaker category is not counted, and if it is counted, the share will be even greater.)

So smart home is a gold mine bigger than PC and PAD, but such a gold mine has actually been in a state of no center. PCs are overlord (Microsoft), mobile phones are overlord (Android), so the giants must covet this market. Suppose the family has a hub like an app store. The content on various devices and devices is just the service attached to the center. How much is this center worth?

The domestic Dalai Li Leijun is probably aware of this, so three of the four products that Xiaomi has made are related to the home: TV, router, and speaker.

What's interesting is that although the smart home has huge profits, no matter who comes to it, the essence of the giant pit remains unchanged. Venus is like this, Nest is like this, and so is the millet router.

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