27 Oct Unbundling Of The Home: Amazon, Tesla & Apple
You could be on your iPhone or iPad reading this story, but you might also be at home at your desk. It’s a winter evening and it just got dark and cold in your office. But you are tired and just don’t feel like getting up to turn up the heat or boil a cup of tea or coffee. And, oh no, now someone is knocking at your door and you are not expecting a visitor. In the world of Intelligent Devices or the Internet of All Things, comfort, convenience and security are no biggie. Companies like Apple, Amazon and Tesla have a box full of “toys” that allow customers to turn up the heat and lights, check out who’ s at your front door, much more. Read on to learn more from this article by Seyi Fabode that appeared on Linkedin’s Pulse.
Photo credit: insider_monkey via Visualhunt.com / CC BY-ND
With every new product release, we see Amazon, Tesla and Apple unbundling the home. These companies have picked a home use case and they’re creating swarms (a group of intelligent products all serving the same goal) to completely own that use case. The traditional providers (TPs) of the services these companies are strategically coopting— tv stations, utilities, security providers etc.- aren’t quite sure how to respond. These TPs are scrambling, buying up companies, starting their own streaming services and spending money on all sorts of stuff unsure about how to avoid losing their lunch.
But the TPs are doing it all wrong. The TPs took their eye off the ball and, by focusing on their business models and not the customer, are bound to fail.
Looking Through The Eyes of The Customer
There are basically three buckets of need we have in our homes; Safety/Security, Comfort, and Convenience. With the advent of Intelligent Devices, also known as Internet of Things devices, the Amazon’s/Tesla’s of the world saw an opportunity to capture some value by providing us ‘toys’ as the gateway drug for owning the home.
1. Convenience
We’ve all heard of the Echo. Even the most beloved of smart home intelligent devices provided nothing but easier access to music through voice activation. And we loved it. Until it started providing more. Just last week (late Sept), Amazon announced The Echo Plus, it’s relatively inexpensive (at $149) smart home hub, that allows the customer to control the Philips Hue light bulbs and several other smart home devices including thermostats. It was one of the several products released on that day masking what was a strategic move from Amazon. The company moved from owning just the convenience use case into competing for the comfort use case. At a reasonable price point.
Amazon’s brightest new innovation might just be the smart home bundle: Techcrunch
2. Comfort
Under the comfort bucket are services in the home like heating/cooling and power to cook food or boil a cup of tea. The TPs thought of these as providing electricity. But no one cares about electricity. We care about what it does for us; heating/cooling, boiling a cup of tea/coffee and cooking food. The use case is about how we feel in the home. And that’s what a company like Nest is selling. From the utility TP’s viewpoint, that one small device (the thermostat) is not enough of an asset to charge for (a remnant of an outdated business model that I explain here). In a world where you are selling comfort, ‘what provides comfort?’, is the question utilities should be asking. Not the question of ‘how can we rate base our assets in a changing world?’. Companies like Tesla (with electric vehicles charged by solar panels on your roof) already found a way to provide that comfort at the high end of the market and they’re moving down towards the mass market.
The next phase of comfort will come from devices that take the work out of even charging our devices. The phrase ‘behind-the-meter’, what the utilities call our homes, will mean nothing when our devices generate their own energy. Apple’s charging pad, using the ‘Qi’ standard, while not the first of it’s kind, will likely usher in ubiquity for charging stations starting with the Apple fans who can afford to shell out the money for the convenience (taking us back to the first use case). It’s a gateway towards identifying other convenient connected home devices that can be charged wirelessly.
3. Safety
Ring, and now Nest with its Alexa voice-activated security camera has owned this most critical of use cases. Every species of animal has its young look towards its old for security and protection. It is the most basic of our needs. And it is the need that Ring (and IoT products in the security category) has tapped into. To put it bluntly, I haven’t met any low-income consumer who’s bought Echo (or Google Home) but I’ve met a few who’ve bought Ring (or similar IoT security products) for their homes. From my research/calculations, Ring sold ~407k units of products on Amazon over the last year. Just on Amazon! That’s enough reason for the TPs (ADT etc) to worry, especially as a generation of customers who are attached to their mobile phones, the hub for these security systems, start to turn their attention to protecting their own children.
What’s A Startup To Do?…
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