Tony Faddell is tired of the hype.

“I don’t believe in the Internet of Things,” Faddell told Fast Company journo Harry McCracken at a Nest launch last week. “I believe in really great individual products.”

This struck me as a odd thing to say as the co-founder of Nest: a company which - kind of, maybe, really - relies on the Internet of Things to exist.

But in reality, Nest specialises in hardware - making “smart” smoke alarms, thermostats and now security cameras. Of course, Faddell wouldn’t want to be pigeon-holed, being one of the most closely-watched companies in the realm of the IoT.

The connection between these products, however, is the foundation of the Internet of Things. So disassociating yourself from those kind of roots in order to appear as a humble hardware-maker just seems… pointless.

IoT has a problem

There’s not much point to IoT either if we don’t fix what SPARKL calls the black box swamp.

A typical global bank, for example, has well over 5,000 applications for internal use as well as for customers.

Every system is a black box, complete with infrastructure that is impossible to track. Much worse though, is the combination of all those systems. They talk to each other in a myriad of untraceable ways.

This black box swamp kills agility, kills flexibility, stifles innovation and ramps up the key concern of conduct risk.

Nest is no solution

No wonder Faddell wants to stick to developing “really great individual products”. The complexity of the problems faced by the Internet of Things is almost too exhausting to contemplate.

Photo courtesy of gizmodo.com.