The hippos and camels of connected products
In a recent attempt to explain, in a non-technical way, how the network and the integration with web-based services is changing the properties of our products and devices, I told someone that “the network is a habitat”. The network is a fundamental condition for many connected products to function well, so connectivity is almost like a natural resource which a population of products are dependent on. The network itself is not the same in different geographical and contextual environments, and each product has varying needs for network access, bandwidth, responsiveness, reliability and the amount and kind of data it needs to send and receive.
This is a little like animals living in different habitats in the nature. The network is like water, and access to water is to living creatures what access to the network is for connected products. Today’s tablets and smartphones are like hippos. Their habitat is where they can be soaked in the network-river. They can be on dry land for shorter periods of time, but they like it best if they can be in the water. An AppleTV or similar kinds of 1080p-pumping high def video devices are even more dependent on bandwidth and constant network access. Those things are like whales or something…
In an opposite corner we find products which are network-drought-adapted. Some of those are like camels in the sense that they go without access to the network for long periods of time. Today’s common cars are one example of network camels: once in a while, at the annual service, they connect to the network, they upload data from their black boxes and perhaps download some new firmware, and then they can go without accessing the network for another year.
Surely this analogy may have a few holes in it, but I guess we’re trying to explore several ways to talk about the product/service/cloud/network-landscape.
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photo: Rob Dray (cc) on flickr.com