Smart home faces four major obstacles

Smart home faces four major obstacles

As an important part of the Internet of Things, the concept of smart home has been proposed for many years, but it has always been "thunder and rainy," and it seems to be less visible in the homes of ordinary domestic users. However, this year Apple, Google, Samsung, etc. began to enter the field of smart homes, driving the development of smart home in the domestic upsurge. Whether Google acquired the home smart thermostat Nest in January 2014, or Samsung acquired Smartthings smart home platform in August 2014. It is not difficult to see that the smart home concept will continue to heat up in 2015, but in the face of a series of problems such as overheating investment, disorderly market, and lack of product interoperability, the industry will solve the problem and let smart homes embark on the applause and applause as quickly as possible.

In any case, industry confusion is the current status of smart homes. All parties involved in the merger, there is no clear idea of ​​development, there is no uniform standards and norms, the lack of a good user experience, there is no explosive industry explosions and interconnection can not be achieved, so that the industry's development situation is worrying, but this does not Dispel the ambitions of all companies to "discussion high and low." There are several major obstacles that will surely push the industry further. From the following aspects of the current industry's most worrying "standards, compatibility, price, user experience" and other aspects of the analysis.

(a) The standard is not uniform

To develop a healthy and orderly industry requires the unification of standards. The establishment of standards cannot be achieved overnight. It is government-led or enterprise-led. It is also worth exploring.

Wang Bin, deputy secretary-general of the IGRS Information Industry Association, told reporters that European and American companies mostly led and advanced through the alliance, but there are certain difficulties in China: First, the domestic market environment is very different from that of foreign countries, such as disorderly vicious competition. The indifference to intellectual property rights and the incompleteness of laws, etc. Second, the problems of honesty and honesty mechanisms. Under the current Chinese environment, let the companies unite together to be a jointly recognized standard, and then do things in accordance with the constraints of this standard. More difficult, so there will be more than one standard in a period of time.

In the end, the standard of someone who will win will depend on two things. One is whether there are some adjustments in the policy of the state and the other is how the people vote.

Haier Chen Hailin also stated that at present, industrial development has entered a stalemate, products cannot be interconnected and interoperable, fragmentation and fragmentation are serious, and the reason is that there is no standard. “We want to be a U+ open platform, and we want to be a standard for interconnection and interoperability in smart homes.” He said that so far this standard has not been widely used, and he hopes to form a partnership with third parties through Haier’s products. Standards that everyone can share.

Wang Bin also stressed that the maturity of an industry requires the joint maturity of many hardware and software vendors in the upstream and downstream of the industry chain. For instance, operators need a network and they need back-end Internet companies to provide cloud services and data centers to form a truly ecological environment. surroundings. Similarly, the establishment of an industry standard does not depend on which company can do well. It also requires the joint efforts and open minds of the enterprises in the industry chain.

(B) Compatibility: Various Communication Protocols

Compatibility here refers to the interconnection and intercommunication between smart hardware products in the home. To achieve interoperability between products, compatibility issues must be resolved. At present, different single products mostly use chips, modules, and communication protocols from different vendors, each of which has no compromise with each other. This results in the inability of products to communicate with each other. This is a major obstacle to the development of smart homes.

According to reports, on the chip side, companies such as Qualcomm, Broadcom and MTK have their own communication protocol standards, and companies specializing in wireless transmission also have their own communication protocols. As a result, a variety of protocols and standards such as Bluetooth, WiFi, Zigbee, and "Bluetooth+WiFi" modular modules have emerged on the market, which is fundamental to the difficulty in achieving interconnection and interoperability between products.

These companies are willing to open up their own agreements, but everybody wants to be the leader who is unwilling to compromise.

Xiaomi Gao Ziguang said that it is important to have a unified agreement. “Now the smart home appliance industry is a melee state. Everyone is relying on their own understanding and understanding to make their own agreement. According to this idea, there are 30 home appliances in the user's home and 10 APPs may be installed to control it. The transmission protocol between each product is different, so this creates obstacles for the user to handle the linkage between multiple devices in the home. Moreover, it is impossible for all home appliances in the home to be installed in the same company. This is a user experience. It's very complicated," he said.

According to Deng Zhengping, director of the smart hardware division of Jingdong Cloud Platform, if the hardware companies cannot achieve this kind of interconnection, the so-called 'smart' concept will be greatly reduced. Companies are currently doing their own standards and products, but it is difficult to have a company that can tap all Chinese consumers and smart products. It may be the best in some areas, but it is impossible to do every category in the home appliance industry. To the best. Therefore, a third-party neutral platform is needed to help companies achieve interoperability.

(C) Cost: Hardware, R&D and operating costs are too high

Although many companies indicate that the cost is not an obstacle to the current development of smart homes, from the perspective of smart home appliances sold in offline stores, prices are still an obstacle to its rapid adoption. The question of cost can be divided into three points:

The first is the cost of the smart hardware itself. At present, the cost of smart hardware products on the market is much higher than that of traditional hardware, and even more than double the difference. For example, the price of an ordinary air conditioner is two or three thousand dollars, but some companies sell the product to eight in the name of “smart”. Thousands of dollars, this is very deadly and will not be accepted by the majority of users.

Secondly, the cost of R&D, a traditional hardware manufacturer, especially home appliance manufacturers, has a high cost for the development of smart products. From chip selection, to embedded software in the chip, to the corresponding cloud to APP, this series is very simple for Internet companies, but it is very difficult for traditional enterprises, they do not know how to do as Internet companies do Communication with the cloud, how to maintain a long connection, etc., R & D costs are inevitably high.

Once again, it is operating costs. Taking the example of several large home appliance companies in China, there will be tens of millions of home appliance shipments each year. This tens of millions of home appliances must all be connected to the cloud and remain online at the same time, requiring high server costs. For these traditional home appliance companies, it is also courageous to run so many costs without finding any profit model.

(four) user experience: poor ease of operation

Xiaomi Gao Ziguang summarized some of the problems existing in the current user experience. First, the usability of the operation needs to be improved, especially the process of connecting to the Internet. "Some products are too complex to design, and users will not use them at all, especially those WiFi devices without screens, making it difficult to connect to the Internet. In our experience, it is very important for users to use smart hardware conveniently, and even users do not need to install them. For any APP, home appliances can be basically controlled, installed, and networked. Even a plugged-in mobile phone can search for new connections around the site, clicking 'OK' to access, and networking with newly purchased home appliances.

He also said that companies must find some points to make users feel that this place is indeed much more convenient than before. For example, after several times of air conditioning, it knows when you like to turn on the air conditioner and what temperature you like. For example, after you have opened three times, you do not need to open it for the fourth time. When people approach it, it automatically opens. And it will do some automatic switch according to the weather, indoor temperature, indoor humidity, personal preference. If you can find such a point, perhaps this thing can be accepted by the user. ”

Huawei Huang Hao agreed that he said that smart hardware has not been developed. The fundamental reason is that it is not smart enough to solve the problem of common people's convenient operation. Connecting products with remote control, under certain circumstances, not only does not simplify life, but also complicates life. This is not the hope of ordinary people.

“Users hope that the entire smart home can automatically and consciously identify the situation. Like a housekeeper, this is the smart home they really want. But behind this is a series of technical problems, including image recognition and sound. The recognition of the scene, the identification of the scene, and the judgment of the abnormal event are quickly reflected based on this judgment, and the specific components are executed by the respective executing components, said Huang Hao.

From a comprehensive point of view, to solve these problems, we must first find the user's needs and let the product find the user's needs and move toward the user's family. This is the most fundamental. Followed by unified standards and agreements to enable products to achieve "interconnection." The third is to reduce the cost of hardware. The costs of smart hardware and traditional hardware cannot be too different, and users will accept it. In the end, it is very easy for users to manage multiple appliances at home and enhance their ease of use. Although there are many existing obstacles, the first thing to be solved is the issue of interconnection and interoperability. To solve the problem of "interconnection and interconnection," we must first establish a unified and systematic platform.

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