*Interesting business projection there: the lords of the Cloud own every "thing" and they just rent unbundle "things" and rent out services, at lower prices but jacked-up profits. Hey, it worked for Apple.
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/how_the_internet_of_things_cha.html
(...)
"As consumers, we have all had a glimpse of how the relationship between buyer and seller changes when devices are connected to the internet. Nobody these days carries a Sony Walkman and cassettes; instead we carry Apple iPods — and our major access point for music has become the online iTunes Store, also by Apple. (((Don't try dying and giving the cassettes to your kids, though.))) The company sells the devices and the music, profiting handsomely from both. In the same way, industrial product buyers are seeing their relationship to equipment manufacturers changed by smart, connected things. In the field of mechanical and plant engineering, consider the advent of predictive maintenance. When a machine is fitted with sensors, it can know what condition it is in and, whenever necessary, initiate its own maintenance.
"Clearly, when things are networked, that has an impact on how actual value is produced. In many cases, it is no longer the industrially manufactured product that is the focus, but rather the web-based service that users access through that device. So, for example, we see the Daimler Group investing in mobility services such as car2go, myTaxi, and moovel; GE using what it prefers to call the "Industrial Internet" for mechanical and plant engineering services; LG paving the way to "smart homes" with IP-enabled televisions and home appliances and related services.
"A study undertaken by researchers from the Institute of Technology Management at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland (Service Business Development: Strategies for Value Creation in Manufacturing Firms) concludes that these services are most definitely lucrative for traditional manufacturers. Considering the example of a papermaking machine, they note that the sale of the machine itself generates a margin of around one to three percent, while selling a related service yields five to ten times as much. The ratio is much the same for the sale of rail cars versus related mobility and maintenance services.
"For "Old Economy" companies, the mere prospect of remaking traditional products into smart and connected ones is daunting. (My own company, for example, the Bosch Group, produces over half a million things each day across more than 1,500 product categories.) But embedding them into a services-based business model is much more fundamentally challenging. The new models have major impacts on processes at the corporate center such as product management and production and sales planning. And given the dynamism of the net, the innovations will have to come more quickly. In short order at Bosch we have founded Bosch Software Innovations as a new software and systems unit; launched an electromobility service in Singapore; introduced cloud-based security products; an IP-enabled Bosch security camera , and provided customers with an iPhone app for remote access to heating systems....."
