The chickens are coming home to roost in the smart home - Stacey on IoT Internet of Things news and analysis

The smart home is dead. I'm not sure exactly when the time of death should have been called, but it happened at some point between Google trying to rebrand the smart home as "the helpful home" and the publication of this article, which expresses dismay that at five years of age, Amazon's Alexa offers little more than a new way of interacting with things, without deep functionality or truly new use cases. This week in New York, at an IoT Consortium event, I listened to executives of dozens of companies associated with the smart home talk around its death but never address the fact directly. Instead, they talked about a lack of compelling use cases, how to move beyond a device-specific mindset, and the ways they are trying to handle consumer demand for interoperability in the smart home without actually providing such interoperability. For example, Google's Mark Spates, who works in the smart display and speaker division, said onstage, "I don't think we've done a good job explaining our value proposition to consumers. We have to come up with new stories that isn't just'Go buy another Mini.'"