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Comment by alexandros | Hacker News Reader

I guess we're ruling out that GE might not have done a great job building a sw platform, and moving straight to "it can't be done, nobody can do it".

(Disclaimer: founder of horizontal IIoT startup, scaling just fine)

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I think the "scaling" is not about the software platform or connectivity etc, but that it's hard enough to transfer what you learned from the sensor data of a gas powered turbine to the sensor data of a steam powered turbine, and of course even harder or impossible to the pump motor in an ice cream manufacturing plant.

And there are millions of different pumps, motors, gears and whistles and their parameters and environment is so specific to the industry and actual machine.

It does not scale to offer the same thing "horizontally" across all industries. So they don't offer generalized "industrial" IoT to power plants and ice cream manufacturers alike, but focus on a few industries they know well.

You can of course call yourself horizontal across all industries if your offering ends at the software platform or some other building block, but that is apparently not what industrial clients are buying. They buy a wholesome solution.

I know for a fact that they've built some utter shite IoT hardware as well. Can't give details, but it's a sensor that gives data which can be used to detect early on the failure of a GE $very_expensive_machine. One of our clients bought hundreds of sensors, and after two years only ~30% of the sensors are providing sensible data. The rest are suffering from constant power failures, or just showing constant data, or even measurements decreasing with time (which is not physically possible).

I can envision N ways that they could make a platform that wouldn't scale, but I can't envision any valid excuses.

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