This year’s Gartner Hype Cycle chart puts the Internet of Things at the top of the Peak of Inflated Expectations.
That’s probably a fair place to put it. Too many overblown claims for how the IoT will transform our lives have been made and a slide down to the Trough of Disillusionment is bound to happen. However, behind the scenes and the media hype, engineers and entrepreneurs will continue to work on IoT products and services, developing business models and rolling out the technology which will take us to the Slope of Enlightenment.
Perhaps we are too hung up on the phrase itself. A quick bit of Google Trend analysis shows that while searches for IoT and Internet of Things may be peaking, M2M as a search phrase has been widely and consistently used over the last 10 years. I suspect M2M is a term more widely used by those in the industry than those outside it and is a better barometer of the state of the IoT sector.