CES opened in Las Vegas this morning and by nine my inbox had four newsletters about a Samsung robot named Ballie, a rolling yellow sphere that follows you around the house like a tennis ball with ambitions. Also on the floor: a faucet you talk to, a toilet with a voice assistant and ambient lighting, a shower that takes instructions from an app.
I read the coverage from a table at Ovation with the rain going sideways outside, and the thing that struck me was not that any of it is stupid. Some of it is genuinely good engineering.
What struck me is that nobody in any of those press releases could say why.
When every company in a category adds intelligence in the same twelve months, intelligence stops being a difference and becomes an expensive way to arrive exactly where your competitors already are.
A screen on a product is usually a confession. It says the category ran out of reasons and reached for an interface. The faucet does not need a display. The display exists because the competing faucet got one last year, and because a screen is the fastest thing a hardware roadmap can produce when the honest answer is that the product was already finished in 1994 and works fine.
Here is what separates the ones that earn it. A smart product survives when the intelligence removes a specific, nameable chore that the owner would describe out loud to a friend. The learning thermostat earned it because it stopped people from heating an empty house, and you can say that sentence in nine words. Impossible is at the show this week with a pork product, which is not smart in the software sense at all, but it answers a question somebody was actually asking. Compare that to a connected toilet, where the chore being removed appears to be reaching.
This is a positioning problem wearing an innovation costume. Adding capability is not the same as adding a reason, and only one of those two things shows up in a customer's six-word description of what you sell. If the reason does not exist, the screen will not manufacture one, it will only raise the price and add a firmware update to a thing that used to just work.
The brands that come out of this cycle well will be the ones that skipped a year. That is a hard memo to write and a harder one to survive in a budget meeting, and it is almost always correct.
A screen on a product is usually a confession.
Truffles and Barnaby have not asked for a companion robot. They have a sunbeam, a paper bag, and a deep indifference to the future of ambient computing, and honestly the bag has better retention numbers than anything rolling around that convention floor.