IEEE Future Directions
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The Digital Transformation is affecting the way products are designed, manufactured, offered and used. The whole value chain is affected. Let’s see an example.
Products are becoming more and more softwarized. Inside your digital camera -to take a familiar product-, and even inside its lens, you have plenty of software. This makes the product cheaper (functions developed in software cost in their design and “coding” but once you have them you can have thousands of copies at no cost at all), more flexible and lighter (bits have basically no weight at all).
When you buy a digital camera all the software it contains has been embedded by the manufacturer. As time goes by the manufacturer may release some software update that can be uploaded (with your help today, automatically in a few years once the digital cameras will be connected as IoT to the Internet) onto the camera to fix bugs and improve features.
There are also third parties that are developing software for your camera, radical software that replaces some functions of the original one, like Magic Lantern, or that flanks the original one (like software defined exposure curves you can download from the internet).
When you buy your camera you are asked to register it on the website of the manufacturer, e.g. Nikon. This creates a soft instance of your camera that inherits the characteristics of the product. This soft instance can be connected to the already registered lenses that you have bought from Nikon creating a cluster that is specific to you. You can also use this soft instance to back up the various personalisation you make on your camera. As time goes by your photographic set tends to diverge from other people’s sets. In the future it will diverge even faster as you will connect that Soft instance to other services (software) that you might have bought from third parties.
Give it a few more years and this soft instance will become a Soft IoT mirroring the characteristics of your camera set and its evolution, including the links to the photos you took and related settings. New services can exploit the information clustered in the Soft IoT and you will find yourself treasuring the Soft Iot more than you treasure your camera since you will be able to instantiate the Soft IoT into new hardware as it becomes available.
Welcome to Industry 4.0!
As I noted at the beginning of this post, I took a digital camera as an example, choosing it because it is a familiar product that “seems” to be made just of atoms, no bits whatsoever (because its form factor is very similar to the mechanical cameras we used in the last century). A smartphone will probably be a more convincing example on the role of software in delivering functionality and on the changes of the value chain which now extends far beyond the phone manufacturer (basically all apps we are using on our smartphone have not been created by the phone manufacturer).
Cars will follow a similar path, with third parties seeing the car as a platform to support a variety of services. It may take a few more years, but in the next decade this will happen, I am willing to bet on this.
