THE INTERNET OF THINGS S
ometime in the 1990’s, when the Web was young, the savants at Xerox PARC connected a drinking fountain to the Internet such that the height of the stream provided a real-time indicator of their parent company’s stock performance throughout the day. While this watery exercise might have seemed little more than a stunt by zany nerds with too much time on their hands, it was a harbinger of things to come, indeed of the Internet of Things. The PARC people didn’t use that phrase back then, but their leader at the time, John Seely Brown, often spoke of ubiquitous or pervasive computing. The premise was that as microprocessors found their way into more “things,” we would soon live in a world where computation was everywhere. Like a lot of
bright ideas from PARC, this one was slow to gain traction. After all, who needed a microprocessor-controlled, Internet-connected refrigerator to tell them the milk was past its sell date? But now that microprocessors have proliferated, the Internet of Things has gone from vague hypothesis to strategic imperative. Networking giant Cisco, which prefers the term Internet of Everything, projects that the coming ubiquity of computation and connectivity will generate at least $613 billion in global corporate profits during calendar year 2013, and that $14.4 trillion of value (net profit) will be at stake globally over the next decade, driven by connecting the unconnected—people-topeople, machine-to-people and machine-to-machine— via the Internet of Everything.
That would certainly be good news for Cisco, which as a leading purveyor of Internet infrastructure is positioned to reap a substantial portion of those profits, almost regardless of how the scenario shakes out. Of course, that depends on Cisco following a coherent strategy and executing with few fumbles, and many a dominant incumbent has stumbled at such an inflection point. If Cisco and other tech-savvy prognosticators are correct, we are about to enter, or have already entered, an era of exponential growth accompanied by exponential change. New fortunes will be made on the right side of that equation, long-held hegemonies lost on the other. And if the Internet of Things got off to a slow start, it is now moving very fast.
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