This is just an anecdote as a consumer, but our interest in it when we were looking in to it heavily stemmed from environmental control products, broadly defined.
I'm not sure if I care about my fridge connecting to the internet, but I did care about the lights being off and not wasting energy, the thermostat being under our control when we were gone, controlling humidity and temp in different rooms, door locks, cameras, and so forth and so on. I suspect that as things like solar panels become more of a standard part of home heating & ac, people will become more concerned about regulating energy use, and so forth. And they won't want to micromanage, manually, they'll want it all networked, the components with each other, with whatever central sources are useful (e.g., the energy utility), and their phones and computers.
The concerns we ran into were really fourfold:
1. Idiosyncratic proprietary standards and lock-in. We wanted to buy lightbulb A from company X without being wedded to them forever, and without worrying about whether or not it would be compatible with thermostat C from company Y. Everyone instead seemed to be trying to lock you into something.
2. Security. Everyone here seems to get why that's important.
3. Autonomy. We ran into problems with the following scenario: what if company Z goes under? What if there's a power outage and we need to control device D without connecting to an outside server? A disturbing number of companies seemed to just suggest you're SOL in those situations, which wasn't acceptable.
4. Throughput/bandwidth/resource use. A lot of these things consumed a surprising amount of energy and/or bandwidth. Maybe not the one lightbulb itself, but all of them together with the routers, etc. to control them. It all seems reasonable until you realize what's involved in having your whole damn house reliably communicating with you 24/7 by first going through some router and possibly outside server.
I'm not sure if I care about my fridge connecting to the internet, but I did care about the lights being off and not wasting energy, the thermostat being under our control when we were gone, controlling humidity and temp in different rooms, door locks, cameras, and so forth and so on. I suspect that as things like solar panels become more of a standard part of home heating & ac, people will become more concerned about regulating energy use, and so forth. And they won't want to micromanage, manually, they'll want it all networked, the components with each other, with whatever central sources are useful (e.g., the energy utility), and their phones and computers.
The concerns we ran into were really fourfold:
1. Idiosyncratic proprietary standards and lock-in. We wanted to buy lightbulb A from company X without being wedded to them forever, and without worrying about whether or not it would be compatible with thermostat C from company Y. Everyone instead seemed to be trying to lock you into something.
2. Security. Everyone here seems to get why that's important.
3. Autonomy. We ran into problems with the following scenario: what if company Z goes under? What if there's a power outage and we need to control device D without connecting to an outside server? A disturbing number of companies seemed to just suggest you're SOL in those situations, which wasn't acceptable.
4. Throughput/bandwidth/resource use. A lot of these things consumed a surprising amount of energy and/or bandwidth. Maybe not the one lightbulb itself, but all of them together with the routers, etc. to control them. It all seems reasonable until you realize what's involved in having your whole damn house reliably communicating with you 24/7 by first going through some router and possibly outside server.