It's about the data

A friend of mine recently asked me what my thoughts were around connected home/small business.  He's kindly agreed to sharing the response.
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In my humble opinion, it's all just verticals until something comes along to unify things and make life simpler.

It is about the Platform today.  In the future it will be about how we act on the data we have.  This will most likely shift to AI in some IoT fashion.

At the moment, I think we're are approaching a Wardly WAR stage with quite a lot of the capabilities moving from custom into product. http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/02/on-evolution-disruption-and-pace-of.html

It's pre-industrialization of the capabilities that actually prove themselves both useful and offset either a cost, a time pressure or a labor effort that typically seem to win.

It'll almost always be about situational awareness though. A person will eventually see the thing that stands to make a serious and significant change that takes hold of one of the ecoystems and gives it a big push.

That's almost always an abstraction of the capability. I took a wild swing at one of the computing areas as an example. The abstraction of programming I called "codeless programming" that uses visual context rather than programming languages to build applications. It's the next step past "serverless" where inputs are tied to outputs by people not necessarily programming any of the intermediary application chains. http://www.abusedbits.com/2017/04/codeless-programming.html

Zuckerberg is running an experiment along these lines with his integration of capabilities using an AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvimBPJ3XGQ 

Thing is, getting everything to work together is ridiculously complex. Either commonality in method for integration or something that can manage the complexity is required before this is anything other than a really expensive and time consuming hobby. And then there's the data capture....

My brother has a sensor network that he literally built into his house to record a variety of data. The first dimension value of that data was to have it and be able to view it. The second dimension value of that data is to macroscopically act on it, like integrated thermostat control based on conditions and presets. The third dimension value would be to have similar information from 1500 houses and use it to design houses better, as an example.

In each one of the industries you are thinking of, the third dimension values far outweigh the two below it, but getting the data AND being able to act on it is ... difficult. The connected home products are about the only way to get at that data.