It takes a former IBMer to design your own home systems like an IBM mainframe. But, while the concept may initially seem 22nd century, once you think about it, designing a home system the way you would design Big Iron may not be all that far-fetched. I realized this when I visited John Patrick, who retired from running IBM’s Internet business several years ago. He gave me a tour of his suburban home earlier this month. It opened my eyes to the challenges and opportunities VAR home systems will face in the years to come as more people demand this type of technology. Not to mention the challenges we all face when trying to implement advanced technologies in our homes.
VARs face three major obstacles to delivering well-executed home systems. First, people don’t know what they want and what they want is not something that most VARs know how to deliver. Second, the skills that most VARs grapple with are huge and finding the right mix of people to deliver a solid solution is not easy. Third, the issues are not one of technology, but one of usability and execution. Let’s look at each of these.
What I’ve seen is that most of us don’t really know what we want when it comes to high-tech homes. For example, people have only a vague notion of what a “smart home” really is. Some people want their computers to be located in strategic places, sharing an Internet connection. But after it’s rolled out, they realize they don’t want to be running around their houses trying to find a document on a particular PC or being able to share printers as well. Therefore, the home network becomes more than just sharing a wide bandwidth. Some people want a home that they can control through a web browser. But then they want to be notified when something goes wrong and to get an idea of what is going on in their home when they are geographically distant. And many of us want more sophisticated entertainment delivery or ways to interact with our televisions to save our favorite shows, which is why Tivo is so popular. But then you realize when you have Tivo that you need to be able to program the unit remotely, when you are not at home, for example.
Part of this is just human nature: You get better at defining your needs when you see what high-tech toys actually do. But part of this is because high-tech doesn’t really work out of the box.
The problem with implementing these things is that the skill sets are huge, especially as you demand increasingly smart homes that meet multiple needs. I learned from my tour of chez Patrick that you should segregate your services into separate components. But before you can segregate them, you must identify them. This goes back to my first point, and more importantly, this identification process is not something that most VARs can offer.
Let me give you an example. At first glance, electrical power looks like a simple system: There is a circuit breaker box in your basement, and each circuit breaker is connected to a series of sockets or switches in a room or collection of rooms that it controls. But that’s not enough for a truly smart home. You have power for certain systems that you want to run 24/7, like your refrigerator and heating systems, and power for other places that aren’t as critical or not even 110 volts, like cell phones, security sensors and touch panels that can operate at lower voltages.
What Patrick did was segregate his systems into many different discrete categories. Let’s take audio services as another example. The speakers that transmit the music are placed on the walls of various rooms. Those speakers are hooked up to a music streaming system that can play multiple channels and from multiple sources, including a Linux-based MP3 server that sits in your basement. But you might not want to go down to the basement to find the right clue to play dinner with – so you have a trackpad in the dining room that you can scroll through your tunes and pick the right song for your mood. But to do this properly, you have to write some code so that your touchpad can access the music library and understand the ID tags of the files stored in it. Suddenly, you need to have someone who understands:
* how to copy and encode your entire music library;
* how to display song identification tags on various screens, including your PCs and touch panels around the house;
* how this information is updated when you add new music to your library;
* how to access the programming interfaces of your touch panels, music delivery system and music servers, which may be running different operating systems and code bases (and may not have programming interfaces either)
And that’s just music. The most difficult are security, heating and cooling, propane supply, computer networks, video, and signage for various house operations.
This is where the mainframer came out of the closet, so to speak. In fact, several different cabinets. Common practice in home system design is to glue everything with a cable into a single cabinet, so you can access everything from one central location. The problem with that is that you need locations distributed around your home that have some control function. For example, if you have all your music services in one closet, you may not want to go to that closet when you want to play a CD or DVD.
When you go back to the old systems / 360 days, this is exactly what IBM did with its Systems Network Architecture: distribute some control functions, but keep some central processing. For Patrick’s house, he set up separate areas in his basement that would take care of each service – his propane pipes, for example, all end in one area, so he can shut down outdoor barbecue service from there. place where you can close. the valve on your stove or water heater. Of course, it spends a little more on all the pipes to get “home runs” from the propane supply, but it makes the installation cleaner and more manageable.
This brings us to our final problem, namely that most problems have to do with usability and execution, not technology. What Patrick did to improve usability was define a set of scenarios about how he lives in his home and what systems “events” should happen as part of his daily routines. For example, watching a movie in the living room means dimming the lights, lowering the screen, turning on the projector, and turning on the sound system. What was great was the way you designed the overrides and controls (for example, you want to turn everything off at night when you go to bed) but still make it all somewhat consistent and logical so you can switch things over. the march (for example, if Letterman is really interested and is worth staying up later).
Patrick was very proud of the solutions he improvised from common pieces that are available at Radio Shack. While your home integrator was quite experienced, there were some things you wanted to do differently that the integrator couldn’t quite handle. The various technologies had to be easy enough to operate and debug, and feature uniform interfaces so that they could be operated from various interfaces, including the ubiquitous touch panels on the walls, a web browser, and video screens found around the house. .
Even the best-designed mainframe needs a bit of customization. And perhaps others will pick up on Patrick’s architectural innovations when designing other smart homes in the future.
