Smart Home Ecology Has Brought Unprecedented Challenges and Opportunities

Here comes the wolf?

In the past five years, there has been a subsidy war in the smart speaker market, which has overwhelmed a number of small manufacturers. Ali, Baidu and Xiaomi, which have sufficient funds, stand out and become recognized as the three giants in the domestic industry. Among them, tmall elf occupies the top position, with a global shipment of 3.9 million in the third quarter of 2019.

Moreover, more and more giants are stepping up their catch-up. Huawei has established a smart home strategy with "entrance connection ecology" as the core from the beginning.

Specifically, with AI speakers, smart screens, routers and smart phones as the entrance and hilink platform as the core, build a smart home ecosystem, and comprehensively cut in from the perspectives of entrance, connection and ecology to create a full scene intelligent experience for consumers.

For example, Huawei's first AI speaker launched in 2019 has so far supported the control of many single products of Huawei intelligent selection and Huawei hilink ecological products, including air conditioner, lighting, curtain, air purifier, fan, socket / plug, water heater, clothes hanger, air sensor, security, humidifier, floor sweeping robot, etc.

Users can also customize home life scenes, such as home, away from home, sleep, reading and other modes. They can always experience the convenience of intelligent life by adding corresponding household appliances and calling Xiaoyi.

The most attractive thing is that the three digit price is very close to the people, so that intelligence is no longer far away from the people.

In other words, whether it is the head team of smart speakers or backward giants, what they care most is that smart speakers will become the first control center of smart home and the central platform of family life in the long run. That's the original intention.

This also means that if smart homes are controlled by these "outsiders", home manufacturers will face at least two threats:

1、 Batch reduced to an alternative "agent factory". When a large number of entrances are controlled, home appliance manufacturers have to actively or passively cooperate with smart manufacturers, or make profits, or weaken their own brand strength.

2、 The original market was "robbed". Smart manufacturers have pushed their own brands of smart TVs, smart door locks, smart clothes racks, etc., and quickly grabbed the market with the popularity of Xiaomi, Huawei and Baidu, causing a greater and greater impact on traditional home appliance manufacturers.

No wonder the home appliance industry will shout "the wolf is coming".

False proposition?

Smart home seems lively and huge. In fact, it is still far from the goal.

Because, whether Xiaomi or Huawei, more and more companies have realized that the interconnection of equipment is a problem; Seamless interconnection of equipment is another problem; The third problem is to achieve a seamless experience acceptable to consumers.

The "cooperation that can be seamlessly connected with XX air conditioner and XX TV" blown by those smart speaker enterprises is mostly "miserable" and the effect is very bony.

From downloading various apps, to figuring out the control mode of the remote control (RF and infrared), to confirming whether the category and model of electrical appliances are compatible, and even breaking the router for a while... The time and cost to solve the problems in these links is several times that you can complete the task of "pulling the curtain" with your hands.

"At present, no smart home company is successful. On the surface, Xiaomi is more 'successful', but this success does not create new value, but uses the concept of intelligence to eat traditional industries." a smart home analyst said that the viewpoint of Internet companies that do the Internet of things is problematic. They think that the Internet extends and it is OK to get the data, Violent and ineffective.

"Even if they achieve the first sales of TV, table lamp and TV, many users will not use smart functions. From the perspective of smart home, they do not create new value, but only the victory of business operation, which has no longer long-term value."

Therefore, the key to the dispute over the entrance of the Internet of things is not to "find the entrance", nor to fight for life and death from the sales and market levels, or to put a Starbucks co branded shell on the smart speaker

But how to chain all the wooden boats on the lake, so as to open a new situation with a fire.

Only one party's openness and one party's leading ecology will never allow users to complete cognitive upgrading at the experience end, and it will never really open the smart home market.

Just a dozen days ago, Amazon, Google and apple made an admirable move to promote the development of animal networking.

As the leading enterprises in the global smart home market, they are each other's biggest competitors, but they also know that the incompatible and chaotic network standard behind the Internet of things - a brand microwave oven in Amazon ecology cannot "respond" to Google home.

Therefore, they decided to jointly develop an open source network standard to make it easier for IOT hardware suppliers and software developers to realize the interconnection of devices based on "home" through IP (Internet Protocol) connection, making it possible to communicate between smart home devices, mobile applications and cloud services.

Only by making these people relaxed can they make us relaxed.

At present, this strange alliance is trying to find common ground of open source for new network standards. Their approach is particularly similar to the success of open source software in the first decade of this century.

In any case, they see a longer-term benefit - by using open source software to make smart home devices work safely and seamlessly, they have always attracted more software and hardware developers; More supporters will bring a larger market for their equipment and services.

When this "separation and integration" from the inside and outside is really realized, it is the time for traditional household appliances people to really worry!

And this day, according to the law, is not far away.