I remember talking with my marketing team in the summer of 2014 about IoT (Internet of Things) vs. IoE (Internet of Everything). Cisco had come out with IoE hoping to take the thought leadership lead from GE on the transformation known today as the Internet of Things. I was reminiscing on this during a recent lunch time run and asked myself the question I try to ask daily – “What have I been surprised to learn?”

For me learning surprises usually come in three categories. First, I am surprised because I have just never thought about the subject that way. As a physicist this was the experience when I first learned of Einstein’s Simple Theory of Relativity. Basically, a different Point-of-View on the matter can give one a whole different perspective on how it works. A pragmatic, everyday example of a POV learning is rather than just worrying about the cost-of-a-service visit, one considers the cost-of-uncertainty of the visit – of not knowing when the expense will occur.

My second type of surprise learning is when I have formed a thesis or conclusion on the data at hand and am then surprised when more complete data leads to a Better Understanding. Typically, this comes from using simple correlation but then when more data is considered some new variable has the causal effect on the problem at hand. A practical example here is when one moves from simple equipment runtime to operating temperature and RPMs for equipment maintenance considerations.

Finally, there’s Behavioral Insights when we are surprised by the way people or society act — typically in a way that seems illogical. Richard Thayer’s Nobel Prize for behavior economics has made this a science and his follow-on book “The Nudge” is a manual for those looking to help people help themselves. His thesis is a driving force of healthcare costs today – people do not always act in their own best interests. Why do companies deploy IoT devices without device management and Over-the-Air (OTA) update capability, for example. Isn’t it clear that software has to be maintained and rolling trucks on thousands of devices will turn success into financial failure?

So, with this bit of self-examination and a construct for “surprise learning” I pondered what I have learned about the Internet of Things over the past five years.

Surprise #1: If you hear “It’s too expensive,” just walk away

This is both a behavioral insight and point-of-view surprise. The surprise is that it’s good advice to a salesperson to just walk away from a customer complaining about cost. If you are working with a client or part of your organization who upon hearing about the cost of deploying an IoT solution says, “It’s too expensive,” you should just walk away. After 50 years of Moore’s Law nothing is expensive anymore. The return on an investment may not cover that cost, but that is a value problem, not a cost problem. If a customer cannot focus on value, solve an important operational or user problem, then no amount of “but look at what we can do with technology” is going to move the project forward. Walk away and find someone who has a good reason “why” they are on an IoT journey.

Pundits continue to sound the alarm on manufacturer’s habits of producing IoT devices that are not secure, and governments are beginning to take action on their own. The problem is the Internet, and thus IoT, has no geographic borders and, further, those who follow good security tenants are not yet rewarded with high adoption and price.