Just Another Blackbox.

Emily Hier @sparklhq

Nest co-founder Tony Faddell is tired of the hype.

“I don’t believe in the Internet of Things. I just believe in really great products.”

But doesn’t his company - kind of, maybe, really - rely on the Internet of Things in order to work?

Though in reality, Nest specialises in hardware - “smart” smoke alarms, thermostats and now security cameras

Of course Faddell wouldn’t want to be pigeonholed, being in charge of one the most closely-watched companies in the IoT realm

The connection between these products, however, is the foundation of the Internet of Things. So disassociating yourself from those kind of roots to appear as just a humble hardware maker just seems… pointless.

There’s not much point to the Internet of Things either if we don’t fix what SPARKL likes to call the black box swamp.

A typical global bank, for example, has well over 5,000 applications running in excess of 10,000 systems.

Every system is a black box, complete with infrastructure that is impossible to track. Much worse though, is the combination of all those systems. They talk to each other in a myriad of untraceable ways.

This black box swamp kills agility, wipes out flexibility and stifles innovation.

No wonder Faddell wants to stick to creating “really great” products. The complexity of the problems faced by IoT is almost too exhausting to contemplate.