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Recently, the "2014 China Building Materials and Home Furnishing Industry Development Report" published by the Materials Branch of the China Building Materials Association predicted that the industry market size is expected to reach 4273.5 billion yuan in 2015. In the home furnishing industry, the wave of intelligentization has begun for nearly ten years. The same concept is popular, but the user acceptance does not seem to be high. Although there are statistics that it has reached a scale of 100 billion, compared with the entire home furnishing industry, the gap is huge. To this day, at least in terms of what smart homes can do, most users do not have a unified impression. One APP controls all homes? Smart lighting? Anti-theft alarm? Especially in the face of prices that are ten or dozens of times more expensive than ordinary products, the attitude of most users is to wait and see.
However, in contrast to the cold outside, smart home startups are booming, with professional players such as RICI and Control4, as well as traditional home giants such as Haier, Gree, and Midea, and even Internet giants Baidu, Alibaba, JD.com, and Xiaomi accelerating their smart home layout. For example, it is known that 280 exhibitors will participate in the Shanghai International Smart Home Exhibition held at the end of September, while this number was only 180 exhibitors at the Shanghai International Intelligent Building Exhibition held at the same venue a year ago. This shows the enthusiasm of China's smart home startups in just one year.
In addition, according to the data forecast of the "China Smart Home Market Research Report 2015" released by iResearch, China's smart home market will reach 180 billion yuan in 2018. Some optimistic analysts even believe that this is already a trillion-yuan market, but in these bullish forecasts, is smart home really so optimistic? The answer is NO. We can't help but ask, why is it so difficult to implement smart home, which has been developed for more than ten years. Is it that users don't need it? Is it that the technology is not up to the task? There seems to be no correct answer. There is no doubt that smart home still has a long way to go from concept to reality. How to pry open this fat market is a question that the entire industry will face.
Behind users’ lack of interest: confusion and exploration of smart homes
The first user of smart home is Bill Gates, the world's richest man. It has been more than 30 years since his smart mansion was launched, and it is still talked about in the technology circle today. According to a survey on smart home in the United States conducted by CNET and Coldwell Banker last month, more than a quarter of Americans (28%) already own some kind of smart home product. But in China, the picture is different, with this figure not even reaching 5%. It is worth thinking about why the industry that is developing rapidly on the other side of the ocean is not popular among users in China.
Behind this is the fact that the entire smart home industry is confused about the future but has never stopped exploring. Currently, China's smart home players are mainly divided into three categories: the first category is traditional home furnishing companies, such as Haier, Gree, Midea, etc.; the second category is emerging smart home companies, represented by RICI and Control4; and the third category is the Internet giants such as Alibaba, Baidu, JD.com, Xiaomi, etc. The three forces in the smart home entrepreneurial field have different origins and development pursuits, and currently have the following main problems.
Traditional home appliance companies: The first to notice the trend of smart home are probably traditional home appliance companies. Haier launched the Internet of Things air conditioner in 2009. This year, under the leadership of Dong Mingzhu, Gree Group officially launched the Gree mobile phone as the entrance to the smart home. For example, Midea and TCL have also launched their own smart home products. These traditional home furnishing players have strong advantages in hardware technology accumulation, sales channels and user awareness. The contradiction is that they are the objects of the smart home revolution. When entering the smart home, they want more defense than change. For example, the smart control terminals of major air conditioner manufacturers set obstacles to each other and do not open the air conditioner code base to each other. The confusion of specifications makes it difficult to systematize. This contradictory mentality has caused them to fall into a state of confusion in the field of smart home, and they want more improvement than revolution.
Emerging smart home enterprises: This major force is professional players, mostly emerging entrants. Their pursuit is purest, and they are stronger than traditional home hardware and have obvious advantages in software. At present, the main representatives are RICI Shenzhen Ruiqi Zhishang Technology in China and Control4 in the United States. They are in the middle layer, with both advantages and disadvantages. For example, they are more determined than traditional home enterprises to promote the transformation of smart homes, and pay more attention to and vertical ecological considerations than Internet giants. But the disadvantages are also obvious. Compared with traditional home enterprises, they have poor accumulation in hardware technology, and cannot compete with Internet giants in financial resources and influence. But in terms of driving force, they are relatively more in-depth. For example, at the 20th Guangzhou International Lighting Exhibition held not long ago, RICI brought 65 high-end smart home products and a full set of system solutions to the exhibition, which caused a great sensation. For emerging smart home enterprises, the confusion before them is how to find an effective business model and how to survive is a problem. In comparison, the original business of traditional home enterprises is enough to support profits, while Internet giants such as Xiaomi and JD.com are more like strategic layouts that will not face profit pressure in the short term.
Internet giants: In the eyes of Internet giants, the entrance to smart home is more significant than commercial significance, so the most urgent problem is to quickly occupy this entrance and then find a profit model. In the long run, Xiaomi's strategic investment in Midea, JD's JD+ plan, smart cloud, JD Microlink App, etc. are all moves on smart home. Alibaba also released a smart audio solution this year, trying to use smart speakers as the entrance to smart home in the future. The confusion in their eyes is that the combination of software and hardware in smart home is contrary to their business model. The giants who are used to doing small business have always been ambivalent about smart home with high input and low output. Although they have the advantage of big data, they still rely on subsidies to promote the expansion of hardware. Although 360's Zhou Hongyi once boasted that he would bring 360 smart cameras into the free era, it soon came to nothing. For smart homes that are mainly hardware-based, the marginal cost advantage does not exist. Is it worth it for giants to use software to grab the hardware entrance?
However, although these confusions slowed down their progress, they did not hinder their efforts to explore breakthroughs in smart homes.
For traditional home furnishing companies, Haier's route is to launch smart bathrooms and smart kitchens from point to surface, choosing a step-by-step strategy. Midea's strategy is to form alliances, such as attracting Lei Jun's investment and catching up with Xiaomi's MIUI ecosystem. Gree's route is more special, taking a closed-loop model, first launching Gree mobile phones as a smart home entrance, and then connecting with many of its own products. However, from the above, it can be seen that the exploration of traditional home furnishing companies has a characteristic. The first is exclusivity. Even if Midea joins hands with Xiaomi, it will not hinder its external exclusion. Second, smart home has not become the main strategy. Most of them are tentative attempts. No traditional home furnishing company will burn its boats and give it a try.
The biggest contradiction within the emerging smart home enterprise system comes from the path dispute. Independent development or industrial alliance? Go high-end or low-end? System ecological development or single-point breakthroughs in smart lighting, anti-theft alarm and other directions? For example, emerging smart home enterprises are not strong in technology accumulation channels, so they actively seek cooperation with traditional home furnishing enterprises. For example, many traditional home furnishing enterprises refuse to open their air conditioning code base, which is a blow to the vision of industrial alliance of emerging smart home enterprises. High-end and low-end are differences in business models. RICI is an outlier in this. First of all, it insists on taking the high-end route, insists on independent design, and introduces Foxconn's strength in manufacturing to make a strategic alliance, and strives to establish an alliance with traditional home furnishing enterprises. In addition to unveiling high-end smart home products at the exhibition, another wish is to break the ice with traditional home appliances.
Earlier, at the Guangya Exhibition that just ended, RICI CEO Tong Hui put forward the call that "only when all hardware forms intercommunication, interaction and interconnection can it be called a smart home." This time, RICI still continues this idea when participating in the Shanghai International Smart Home Exhibition. Of course, in addition to making an appearance for its own products, it is more important to promote industrial alliances and industry standardization. Tong Hui believes that the international wireless standard Zigbee technology should be the core of the future smart home. Another important idea is to break the ice with traditional home appliances. Tong Hui believes that "smart home cannot be separated from smart home appliances. Home appliances are the focus of the entire smart home. Peripheral smart home companies cannot deeply penetrate into the field of smart home appliances, nor can they make refrigerators, rice cookers, and TVs in order to enter this market, so it is best to cooperate with these traditional home appliance giants." This is probably a very representative view of emerging smart home companies with software advantages.
The Internet giants, on the other hand, do the exact opposite. They want to be the industry standard setters, so they first build a platform, hoping that all hardware will be able to play according to its standards in the future. By integrating all the hardware into a super platform, they can become the top of the industry and use this as capital to find new business opportunities. The most typical example is the smart hardware ecosystem built by Xiaomi with MIUI, but this loose ecosystem has stability and time issues, and cannot be solved in the short term.
After analyzing the confusion and exploration of the above three mainstream forces, in fact, for users, the focus is nothing more than three: what is the use for me? How much do I need to spend for it? Is the stability of the smart home up to standard after installation?
Obviously, no company can give users a clear answer at present. In fact, summarizing all the above content, there is only one problem with smart home, which is the unification of standards. ZigBee Alliance, the organizer of Shanghai Smart Home Exhibition, is an organization that promotes the standardization of smart home. Imagine if all smart home products such as smart refrigerators, smart air conditioners, smart washing machines, smart TVs, smart lighting, smart anti-theft and other products can be connected in series after standardization. In the future, smart home will be like assembling a computer. Users can freely choose "memory, hard disk, graphics card", and the trend of smart home will really come. There are already many people doing this, such as Google's Android@Home, Apple's HomeKit and ZigBee Alliance are trying to do this, but it is not difficult to imagine that this road is full of difficulties.
Where is the tipping point? What is missing for dreams to become reality?
Now, if you search the keyword "smart home" on Taobao, you can find 31,600 products, including WiFi sockets, smart switches, smart curtains, etc. It can be seen that in the past decade, the smart home industry has been flourishing despite many difficulties. In Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point", he summarized the three laws of popularity: the law of individual characters, the law of adhesion factors, and the law of environmental power.
Applying the tipping point theory and combining it with the current situation of smart home, we can summarize its three triggering factors: first, the cultivation of pioneer users, second, the breakthrough in the practicality of smart home, and third, the support from various social forces.
Cultivation of pioneer users: The development of smart home should focus on high-end users, capture their favor, and after cultivating high-end users, launch cheap versions to popularize them. For example, a series of high-tech products such as digital cameras, mobile phones, and tablets are all used by high-end users first and gradually sink to the whole society. Nowadays, many smart home companies expect to occupy the market with low-cost versions, which is obviously contrary to this law. According to the book "The Tipping Point", the popularity of any thing follows a law. First, it impresses the innovators, and the innovators drive the early adopters, followed by the early majority and the late majority to join, and then complete the process from birth to popularization of a thing. Obviously, in the smart home, those companies that hold the cheap doctrine launch a smart socket of more than ten yuan today and a smart sensor of tens of yuan tomorrow. This approach is not feasible. Too many pseudo-intelligent or weakly intelligent products will even have negative effects. To make intelligence better and more high-end, we must first cultivate pioneer users who are interested and able to try smart homes and influence others.
Practical breakthrough: At present, the intelligence of smart home is questionable, such as the complaints about smart sockets. In order to acquire users at a low price, many smart home manufacturers instill that homes that can be controlled by mobile apps are smart homes. Smart home is not as simple as replacing remote controls with smartphones. It must first solve practical problems for users, rather than being a high-tech toy. For example, Control4 and RICI provide diversified control functions, such as centralized control and management of lights, curtains, air conditioners, background music, home theaters, security, and monitoring; provide wired and wireless (Zigbee, WiFi) communication; provide a variety of control terminals, such as panels, touch screens, remote controls, and various sensors; and also have functional modularization, which can be flexibly configured according to user needs to control the budget, and powerful expansion functions can meet future functional expansion requirements. According to the popular theory in "The Tipping Point", pioneer users taking the lead in using and acting as representatives is a prerequisite for attracting more people to use, and the value of the content itself is the fundamental support for popularity.
Support from multiple forces: With pioneer users and practicality solved, the environmental power will definitely be the key to completely igniting smart homes. Find a good value positioning for smart homes in society, find out the advantages of smart homes in terms of energy saving, labor saving, and reduced expenses, attract policy support and real estate developers, and support from multiple forces for smart homes at the same time, create an environmental power, create a smart home trend, and make dreams come true to achieve twice the result with half the effort.
Current situation, future, vision, looking for opportunities for breakthroughs in survival and innovation
As a new industry, smart home is at a critical point between the introduction period and the growth period, and the market consumption concept has not yet been formed. However, with the further implementation of the promotion and popularization of the smart home market and the cultivation of consumers' usage habits, the consumption potential of the smart home market is bound to be huge, and the industry prospects are bright.
Fortunately, however, smart home has not developed the bad habit of burning money to gain market share like O2O. At present, it is difficult to unify standards, cheap products have impacted the image, and consumers' cognition is unclear. Smart home companies should remain vigilant, especially the emerging smart home companies among the three major forces, which understand the importance of survival. In contrast, traditional home furnishing companies and Internet giants still have a way out. We know that all new things are always born with doubts. The population of more than one billion and the growth of the middle class have provided a strong foundation for the explosion of smart home. Therefore, we must survive first and find opportunities for explosion in innovation.
As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity. |
