Is Smart Home Consolidation Coming?

It has been a bin unexpected start of the Smart Home Year 2016. Greg Burns moved from Qualcomm to Intel. And now in an unusual style both companies are shaking hands together merging Allseen/Alljoyn with OIC. What comes out is the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF), backed by both eternal enemies, as well as some other industry heavy weights: Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Honeywell, Samsung and a bunch of others. And if you did not follow the news, the entire UPnP is there already.

Only Google and Apple are missing. But having Intel and Qualcomm joining forces, and especially Qualcomm accepting the defeat of Alljoyn, is both unexpected and positive. This may really hint for reduced technology fragmentation in Smart Homes. Fragmentation that has been the key reason this market is still far from the full potential.

So it suddenly looks like we are down to three Smart Home platforms: OCF, Google/Weave and Apple/Homekit. Apple will probably not be able to pull it off, as they are still conceptually in the world of "my iPhone is a universal remote", which is a far cry from anything that may be considered a Smart system (doing things on its own). Google, as always, has potential, but Weave is still a very early concept with no products on the market and even without standard enforcing certification procedures. And as it was a case with Google many times: it may or may not be scrapped in future. Google likes to "fail fast", which helps them a lot, but makes companies sitting on sidelines until an initiative really takes off.

And then there is the dark horse: Bluetooth (Smart Mesh). If it delivers on promises later this year, it may become the defacto standard for Smart Homes. After all, Bluetooth is a 28-thousand strong organization, with the most compelling and fastest executed roadmap. Bluetooth has not been focused on Smart Homes yet. They "only" grabbed personal wireless audio, wearables and accessories markets. But once home automation becomes their target, Bluetooth may be the roller that will level the entire playground.