In recent years, when the smart home is in the development of verifying that the smart single product cannot work, and it needs to be implemented in the overall ecological form of the whole house intelligence, the battle for the entrance of the smart home has begun to fight fiercely. The addition of the Internet and Internet of Things giants has made the “entrance” more popular. Baidu, Ali, Huawei, etc. have all released smart speakers as a bargaining chip for the entry. The industry firmly believes that the next smart home explosion will appear in the “entrance”. “middle.
However, in the smart speaker market that the giants have invested heavily in, the growth is sales, and the income is very small. When smart speakers enter the family, they are more “children’s story machines” and “music players”, which are far from the “interactive entrance”. The goal is still far away. Therefore, there is also a voice in the industry that the smart panel may be the next “entrance” explosive product of the smart home.
The author does not deny that the smart panel has the potential to become an explosive product, but today I want to talk about it: If it is to become the next explosive product, what difficulties will the smart panel have to go through?
Competition between Round 1 and traditional panels
As an alternative to traditional panels, smart panels should become explosive, indicating that the number of traditional panels replaced by smart panels is sufficient.
Compared with traditional panels, smart panels have many advantages.
Most of the traditional panels are controlled by manual pressing, which is used for switch control of lighting products. Smart panels are not only controllers for lighting products, but also controllers for whole-house smart products such as access control, curtains, TVs, home appliances, and smoke detectors. According to the needs of different scenarios, smart panels can also control products in linkage. The key control realizes the user’s scene-based requirements. For example, after going home from get off work in the summer night, press the “home mode” of the smart panel, the possible scene is that the lights in the entrance and the living room are turned on together, the air conditioner in the living room is automatically turned on, and the water heater in the bathroom starts to adjust the water temperature to your liking. …
The expansion of the control range makes the smart panel look more practical, and the smart panel with technological factors is not only “smart”, but also has a high appearance in design, which is in line with popular aesthetics.
In this round, the smart panel is not difficult to win in this round.
Competition between Round 2 and other entrances
There are currently four popular smart home entrances, one is mobile phones, the other is speakers, the third is smart TVs, and the fourth is smart panels. Among them, smart TV does not constitute a strong competitive relationship with other entrances, because TVs mostly exist as entertainment centers in the living room, and intelligent control is its incidental function, which is more suitable as a supplementary scheme for other entrances.
The control terminal of mobile phones is mostly APP. In order to gain more control from the mobile phone, the smart panel began to “long” out of the screen, and was equipped with a processor, so that the smart panel could also operate the software system.
In the face of speakers, the smart panel has also adopted the same solution – superimposing a voice solution in the panel, and using the method of “what you can do, I can also” to strive for the “entrance” position.
The advantage of this method is that it strengthens the control function of the smart panel. The disadvantage is also obvious. The more functions the smart panel integrates, the more direct competitors it has. In the simplest example, two sets of functions will not be selected in a family. If the functions of smart panels and smart speakers are highly overlapping or even identical, the two cannot coexist.
As the saying goes, the more friends there are, the easier it is to walk. Smart panels take this measure to make many enemies. Smart panel companies need to consider and solve problems.
Secondly, panels are widely distributed in homes. According to consumer habits, each independent space will be equipped with panels. This is originally one of the advantages of panels as entrances, but the intensive use of highly integrated smart panels will greatly increase user costs. How to solve the problem? To balance costs while achieving intelligent scene control, smart panel companies have not yet provided a suitable solution.
The winner or loser of the smart panel in this round is undecided.
Round 3 gets rid of single product positioning
In addition to competitors, smart panels also need the help of “whole house intelligence” in order to become an explosive product. Panel companies do not spare any effort to develop smart panels, but it is not enough to upgrade the functions of the panel itself if the panel is to become an explosive product. The control entrance appears to meet the interactive needs of various scenarios in the whole-house intelligence. If there are not enough interactive products, the existence of the entrance is meaningless.
The biggest problem facing smart panels is how to break away from the “single product” positioning, integrate into the smart home ecosystem, and achieve interoperability and scene interaction with other smart products in the whole house. It is not difficult to do this technically at present, but it is not easy to do it commercially.
Many large panel companies have a small abacus of “focusing on smart panels and integrating other smart home products to build their own ecology”, and other high-quality smart home products also have this idea. When the single-product path does not work, and single-product companies choose to build their own ecology, what they make is a single-product ecology, and it is still not true whole-house intelligence.
In terms of getting rid of single product and single product ecology, smart panel companies have not done well.
Before solving the above problems, the smart panel is still far from the “explosive product”.
Post time: Feb-09-2022