A Tale of Two IoT Pioneers
Adesto’s acquisition of Echelon and Intel’s sale of Wind River to a private equity firm reminds me how little we know about how the IoT will play out.
In 1990, Echelon was a startup, coaching us in the emerging market for home networks. We wrote stories about whether these nets would come in the form of Echelon’s proprietary powerline technology, interesting new wireless options like HomeRF promoted by Intel or some dumbed down version of the Ethernet just starting to take off in the office. We imagined home media servers and all sorts of consumer tech exotica.
Then Intel made a big bet to integrate Wi-Fi in notebooks. It spent a couple hundred million bucks driving the idea of hot spots, and after a few years it was game over – sort of. Wi-Fi became king of the home network, but the many smart connected devices we imagined are still fairly exotic items for the adventurous.