People want to spend money to fix a problem that fundamentally requires effort on their part, not tech.
Vacuuming is actually the easiest bit of cleaning a house IMO - getting the floor clear (if you have kids, or out of control hobbies, or are just lazy or a bit of a horder) is hard.
People aren't stupid, they kind of know this. But just like buying expensive gym equipment they think that a new toy will incentivise them do the hard bits.
"If I buy a new gizmo I'll finally start cooking healthy delicious food" is a great pitch.
It was “easy” to vacuum before but we never did a thorough job. All too often we just vacuum what we can see, never under the couches, etc.
Now that we have to move everything so it can complete the full map we have a much cleaner house. It encourages us to move all of the chairs, toys, etc.
I worked on an IoT project at one of the big German car makers and it was a mess. More money than sense. They didn't really have any idea why they were putting software into stuff. Just some vague notion that some software systems needed to exist to then present its existence to the next boss up; presumably all the way up and out to investors. Discussing the actual functionality or how the product(s) would actually be experienced in the real world was essentially taboo.
There was a podcast called garbage.fm [1] with one of the hosts working for General Electric at the time it was recorded. It sounded like GE were yet another one of those incumbent companies doing "smart" Internet of Things products just because they were worried about being left behind.
wisty|2 months ago
Vacuuming is actually the easiest bit of cleaning a house IMO - getting the floor clear (if you have kids, or out of control hobbies, or are just lazy or a bit of a horder) is hard.
People aren't stupid, they kind of know this. But just like buying expensive gym equipment they think that a new toy will incentivise them do the hard bits.
"If I buy a new gizmo I'll finally start cooking healthy delicious food" is a great pitch.
mingus88|2 months ago
It was “easy” to vacuum before but we never did a thorough job. All too often we just vacuum what we can see, never under the couches, etc.
Now that we have to move everything so it can complete the full map we have a much cleaner house. It encourages us to move all of the chairs, toys, etc.
olowe|2 months ago
I worked on an IoT project at one of the big German car makers and it was a mess. More money than sense. They didn't really have any idea why they were putting software into stuff. Just some vague notion that some software systems needed to exist to then present its existence to the next boss up; presumably all the way up and out to investors. Discussing the actual functionality or how the product(s) would actually be experienced in the real world was essentially taboo.
There was a podcast called garbage.fm [1] with one of the hosts working for General Electric at the time it was recorded. It sounded like GE were yet another one of those incumbent companies doing "smart" Internet of Things products just because they were worried about being left behind.
[1]: https://garbage.jcs.org