Is the Internet of Things still a thing?

Traveling in the Valley, I drove past a billboard from a company boasting of its role in helping build the Internet of Things.  That made me pause for a second.  I hadn't really heard the term in a while, and this isn't one of those cases where the Valley is ahead of the tech trend.  Not so long ago, I seem to recall, the Internet of Things was getting quite a bit of hype in the world at large.

What is this IoT, by the way?  It's the idea that all the things in your life, or at least way more of them than now, are connected to the Net and in some cases happily talking to each other.  So, say, when your toaster pops up a slice of toast you can get a text on your phone that you can't read because you're driving to work and forgot you'd even put anything in the toaster to begin with.  Or if all your clothes have RFIDs sewn in, you can easily track what's in your closet and what's in the wash (or what you're wearing, but you may already know that).

OK, that's a bit glib.  There are some interesting applications.  I'm pretty sure.

There are a couple of kinds of hype terms, I think.  Some are just pure hype.  You'll hear them for a while, then it will turn out that there wasn't any there there, and they quietly go away.  There was a lot of this flying around in the dot com days, of course.

Some hype terms, however, have an actual useful idea behind them.  The internet and the Web, for example.  That doesn't necessarily mean that the particular hype term will survive -- remember the Information Superhighway?  We call it the internet now, but the concept behind it hasn't gone away and will continue to develop.

Some of these kinds of terms will fade in and out as the underlying concept goes through cycles of hype, backlash, rehabilitation and possibly hype again.  AI is one.  E-commerce would be another.

I suspect that the IoT is one of these.  We can expect surges in hype, followed by periods of "meh", and maybe a name change or two, but over time more and more things with computing power or computer friendly id tags in them will get connected to the world at large -- thermostats, TVs, cars, security systems, stoplights, dishwashers, consumer goods ... maybe even toasters.  Possibly things that don't have significant computing power will get enough to get on the net, too.  Maybe roads and bridges get large numbers of sensors that can communicate conditions back to some control center.

So, even if the billboard is a bit jarring to someone not immersed in the Valley's particular media bath, the company behind it is probably engaged in something significant, and maybe even useful.

Silicon valley, then and now

There is a strip of land between the 101 and the Bay, from the boundary of Moffett Field north a ways (and when I say "north", I mean "west", of course). I don't know its history intimately but, from having visited the area intermittently since the early 80s and having spent a good chunk of the 90s living nearby, it seems to have gone through three major stages:

1. Upstart companies, riding the wave of silicon miracles, moved in and made the biggest, boldest mark they possibly could. Glass and steel buildings rose, their curves and odd angles shouting "I am not a box!" Rents and property values went through the roof, but who cared?
2. The wave broke, leaving a glut of empty not-boxes and an economic hangover the likes of which would not be seen again for, oh, at least a few years.
3. The Valley licked its wounds and regrouped. A new generation arose and what had we here? A bunch of pretty cool buildings available at reasonable rates. The buildings stirred back to life.

The Boom has left its indelible stamp on the Valley. Even the new construction these days could, for the most part, have gone up ten years ago and still fit right in, had only the engine not run out of steam. But now both that new construction and those buildings that had proclaimed their new-and-differentness back in the day have, to my eye at least, a comforting, almost nostalgic look. Moving in may have been a coldly economic decision, like buying so much dark fiber to light up, but there's also just that hint of the 21st-century boutique law firm setting up shop in an old Victorian house.

Think of it as recycling, putting the byproducts of the manic energy of those times to useful work. Just so, the overheated "everything's different now" vibe that pervaded the region seems to have died away, leaving room for a steady stream of commercially viable improvements and maybe even the occasional boom-era fever dream come true.

Granted it's always tricky to tell how much the times have changed and how much oneself has changed. Maybe it's really the same as it ever was; maybe it's still all different now. I really don't know. All I know is that we're all a few years older now.

And, one hopes, a bit wiser.