Why is the "Internet of Things" overhyped?

While reading this article, you should have heard IoT everywhere in Industry. This is one of the buzz words in recent time. The same as Internet once was. My intention of this article is to give a clear idea about the IoT and its future for the new work generation who are carried away with just the IoT word.

Remeber when the Internet was introduced?. People everywhere just talking about connectivity. Now it's the second wave of connecting all the non-living objects to the internet to give life to it. But are we ready for next shift?. We have a whole lot of basic infrastructure problems before moving into next wave. I take a side to justify that most people have understood Internet of Things concept in wrong way. It's not just about connecting the dump machines, refrigerator, and television to the internet. It's about more of practicality and usability.

Most companies who are into IoT product development think that customer would be willing to pay if you can show the technical capabilities of the product. Smartwatch is the best example which has taken bad shape due to this hype. We need to understand that the product's real value is when it can actually bring down the cost of ownership by providing value to the customer at a longer run. Be it for B2B or B2C. I have seen many startups putting so much effort into making the product which cannot penetrate into even 1% of the society. Any product which has its own value should able to penetrate deep into society without any "Push". Startups or well-established organizations should try to bring in the "Pull" factor for the product. The below image can give a clear idea of how the hype cycle is playing around in the industry.

The second major issue is the workforce. The new generation of engineers are carried away with the word IoT and I could able to see it when I am actually interacting with them. IoT is not about just using Arduino, RaspberryPi, NodeMCU. There is a bigger picture behind this. It's very disappointing to see that most of the industry experienced engineers cannot even differentiate between the M2M and IoT. I feel that to move to next-gen technology we need to understand how it has evolved. Without knowing the history, future is just fiction. There are a whole lot of problems related to infrastructure for developing these products. I would suggest the new-gen engineers work on the basic underlying technology and find out how it can be enhanced to next level. Before designing your product ask yourself "If your solution can run for next 5 years?" not next 5 minutes.