It’s only been 18 months - but we’ve all forgotten how to act in 3D.

I am writing this from my gate at ATL, on my way back from a customer meeting. Juggling that fine line between where the mask fogs my glasses but it’s low enough on my nose that I can see most of what I’m typing.

I spent most of yesterday with a customer, in the flesh. It was awesome. In that 8 hours of in-person, real, connected human interaction, I was struck by how awkward everything was. Nobody knew how to act. In the reception area we had to raise our voices to be heard through the masks and the bullet proof glass. There were multiple attempts at temperature checks, we had to be careful to use the clean pens on the right, not the dirty ones on the left. Did anyone really know what part of the office and conference rooms required masks and which were ok to show our ugly mugs?

“I know you’re smart enough to build it. But are you smart enough not to build it?”

Two years ago in London, I had an enlightening conversation with a solution architect who worked for one of the major cloud vendors. Let’s call him Simon. Simon and I were talking about the insane proliferation of IoT vendors - a number that has exploded to more than 1,200 according to research firm IoT Analytics (June 2021). In a similar report at the end of 2019, IoT Analytics emphasized that the number of vendors in the IoT industry is not consolidating - rather, it’s expanding.

The expansion is clearly due to all the hot air in the IoT segment. Lots of hot air.