Anybody who is a somebody in IoT believes that they have the ultimate solution for solving world problems. However, when you look at the scenario today, companies are confused and simply unable to sustain their viral growth.
Major league companies have bought smaller IoT players in the last few years and are now shelving their plans or are shutting these down completely. Most companies are unable to sustain their product lines due to non-integration or due to a complete mismatch in the portfolio. These behemoths are letting go of their acquisitions.
A few decades ago, the IT industry came up with a fantastic innovation called the ‘Mainframe’ but couldn’t sustain it, since the market wasn’t mature enough. The need of the hour was the personal computer (and later the laptop), but the Big Brother thought otherwise and lost out. Companies like the Apple computer, Dell, etc., took over.
This happened due to the short-sightedness of the market leader. They couldn’t see what was lying beneath their noses. If only these giant entities would have listened to the market pulse and not believed in their own rhetoric, they would have ‘broken’ the internet.
Today, we are at the same threshold once again and these are the same giants who don’t seem to know the pulse of the market. They are in the process of making the same mistake again and are already repenting their early failures.
The first rule of business is to understand what your customer needs. Why not provide this? Creating an infrastructure and spending billions of dollars in research and product development and having no customers at all at the end of the line amounts to the biggest goof up of all time.
There are countless specialists out there who are advising these billion dollar clients to put in more money in creating such a flimsy infrastructure. A perfect example of this would be the ghost cities of China where no one stays but the developers and the government have spent pots of money developing them. Well, for whom?
I think it is first important to understand the pulse of the end user/customer before investing billions. Otherwise, you will end up with another ‘Mainframe’ foolishness at your doorstep with no one willing to buy it.
