Domestic smart home market cools down: lack of models leads to capital waiting

In 2014, the concept of smart home seems to be becoming a reality, but judging from the usage scenarios described by manufacturers, there is not much difference from when it was proposed more than a decade ago, but the number of market participants has expanded countless times. A market that has not yet been opened has already made participants fight to the death, and they are happy to do so.

In fact, the concept of smart home was proposed more than a decade ago. However, from the time it was proposed to the present, smart home is often associated with high overall costs and user demand has not kept up, which makes it difficult to implement many projects after they are proposed. In addition, due to the participation of many manufacturers and the lack of unified standards, it is difficult for the market to form a joint force, and the strength of popularization has also been sharply reduced.

In recent years, the trend of smart phones has swept into China, and manufacturers hope to replicate this success and use intelligence to "transform" other traditions to create new value. Concepts such as smart TVs and smart routers have emerged, and at the same time, smart homes have returned to the public eye.

Although the concept of smart home has not been sublimated in essence, with the upgrading of hardware, the introduction of the concept of Internet of Things, and the extension of platform thinking of Internet companies , the market has once again attracted attention.

Market prospects are optimistic for analysts. Research company Juniper has predicted that the smart home market will reach $60 billion in 2017. Given the growth rate of about $8 billion in 2013, it is not difficult to achieve this goal. A domestic industry organization predicts that by 2017, the market size of China's smart home industry will reach 8 billion yuan.

Therefore, in 2014, both traditional home appliance manufacturers and Internet companies proposed smart home solutions based on their own background characteristics, and some emerging startups also proposed their own views on this market. This market with frequent connotations and gradually lowered technical barriers quickly became bloated.

Practitioners always expect the market to open up further, but one thing that has to be said is that this round of smart home fever may still just be a tide under the great wave of Internet technology.

There is no model behind the mismatch of requirements

You can use your phone to open the curtains, play music on the speakers , or even change the color of the light bulbs; or when someone breaks in, the system will automatically alarm and the phone can capture the real-time picture... This is what some current smart home solutions describe. In short, it is to set a scene and integrate its switches through a terminal.

However, the design of these usage scenarios is not based on user needs, but rather a patchwork of existing products by technicians.

This model originated from the ideas of traditional home appliance manufacturers. They started to explore this model more than a decade ago. At that time, the concept was called "digital home". However, since its capabilities only extend to home appliances and are limited to its own product series, it is difficult to apply it in a user's home. Therefore, it currently works best in high-end hotels, where users can mobilize most of the facilities in the room through terminal control.

With the rise of smart router products, the idea of ​​strengthening the control center has been mentioned again. However, even though it is technically easy to make some home devices smarter, the answer is still no. Except for a small number of enthusiasts, ordinary users still have a certain threshold for "smart" transformation of their homes.

More importantly, although there are many innovative small products on the market, such as smart sockets, waterproof speaker shower curtains, smart door locks, and sleep sensors, there is no "killer" product yet. The industry generally believes that only by making human-computer interaction more diverse through big data analysis, and by reflecting intelligence and automation, can smart homes develop further.

There are also pessimists who point out that because there are no smart home models in overseas markets, Chinese manufacturers have no cases to "copy". Recently, Google and Apple have proposed corresponding solutions, but it is too early to wait for mature products to come out.

The dispute over the right to speak in traditional home telephones affects industrial cooperation

In order to solve the interconnection problem between products of different manufacturers, the Chinese market, with the support of the competent authorities, has conducted industrial interaction among relevant institutions, IT companies and home appliance companies , and finally formed two major network plus point standards, namely IGRS and Ejiajia. The IGRS camp mainly includes Lenovo, TCL, Konka, Hisense, etc.; the Ejiajia camp mainly includes Haier, Tsinghua Tongfang, etc.

The two companies initially had different positioning, but competition quickly arose, and in the end, neither company came up with products and solutions that could have an impact. Now that Haier is working with Apple and IGRS has expressed interest in Google's Android, the competition between the two companies may continue, but the impact on the industry is not significant.

Instead, home appliance manufacturers are transforming from single-handed operations to smart home development. In 2014, many domestic home appliance companies, including Haier, Changhong, and Midea, have announced relevant strategies and deployments, among which the differences are very obvious: Haier aims to launch a more comprehensive solution in addition to the original U-home smart home system; Changhong hopes to integrate its black and white appliances into the home Internet strategy; Midea aims to build a community with tens of millions of users.

Following the smart black appliances, the smart white appliances are inevitable. For example, smart refrigerators with remote monitoring can provide food management and recipe customization. Smart cloud appliances combined with cloud computing will also provide higher value as technologies such as sensors are improved.

What worries industry insiders is that manufacturers all hope to develop along their own product lines, but this will lead to closed systems and data incommunicability, which will in turn affect the overall development of smart homes. For ordinary users, it is impossible to buy a complete set of products from the same manufacturer, so the smart home "model rooms" currently displayed by home appliance manufacturers are just castles in the air.

In other words, no single home appliance manufacturer can achieve the popularization and promotion of smart home through its own intelligent strategy. They must work together, and the unification of standards is a prerequisite. At the same time, Internet companies have proposed their own smart home platform strategies and even launched corresponding smart hardware products. This step-by-step market pressure may further open up the original closed platform of the traditional home appliance market.

Capital enthusiasm is not as high as that of entrepreneurial teams

Compared with the hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in home appliance companies, the entrepreneurial team has a much harder time. The latter also keenly senses the prospects of smart home, but the capital market rarely invests due to caution.

One of the reasons is that entrepreneurial teams are prone to failure. Yuan Zhennan, who fought hard to enter the smart router market, should have felt this way.

Yuan Zhennan is one of the co-founders of Zhilue. After he received financing, Yuan Zhennan described the ultimate vision of the product as being able to integrate data centers, media centers, and smart home control centers like a computer, and even made plans to ship it in the first quarter of this year. However, now that we have entered the third quarter, the product and the team have long disappeared. People familiar with the matter said that they are already considering transformation.

This is not an isolated case. Some investors said that because domestic smart home is still in its early stages, the products of entrepreneurial teams are mostly single products, which make it difficult to form a system. In addition, popular products need to take into account old equipment, which poses a huge cost threshold for entrepreneurs.

In addition, with the rise of crowdfunding platforms such as Dianmingshijian, hardware crowdfunding is becoming a fashion, which can reduce the trial and error costs of entrepreneurial teams. However, for a product to be used by ordinary users, it must be simple and easy to use, rather than satisfying the needs of a few geeks. Therefore, before the product is further improved, capital can only wait and see.

As a concept that has been proposed for more than a decade, smart home has always painted a beautiful future for users, but it still needs to be explored and developed. Although the emergence of smart phones and mobile Internet has accelerated the industry's desire, market competition has also become increasingly fierce. Therefore, it is time to cool down the Chinese smart home craze.

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.