Do you know the internet-connected fridge? That poster child of past visions of the future, the zombie of Design Fiction that wanted to mark the “everything’s connected” scenario but somehow survived the inevitable purge and now refuses to die, the thing to ridicule the moment you see it (and the company that put money into it, for that matter.)

Well, it seems the thinking that went into the Internet Fridge is still alive and kicking in the world that claims ground in discussing the Internet of Things. Because the discussions are being had by players so entrenched in the status quo that they hardly can see beyond the next quarterly earnings statement or election cycle.

Take for instance this comment, whose source shall go unnamed:

Do I want to base my business model on a network of sensors of which I cannot tell how reliable they are or whether they are going to be there tomorrow at all?

Nevermind the fact that Pachube, the company you couldn’t not talk about here, built a business around exactly this premise, this is exactly the kind of thinking that discounts Social Media on the basis of it not being a verified and ‘credible’ news source.

Or take the constant insistence that we better come up with a definition of what this fabled and miraculous land of the Internet of Things is going to look like.

“Tell me, I want to know, what will this machinery do?”

You can’t define an ongoing technical shift of this magnitude, without either going into a such broad definition as to catch basically everything there is with it, or too small and exclusive as to shut important and emergent developments out of the wall you create.

Today marked the first meeting of the “Internet of Things – International Forum.” And it seems like an old-boys club discussing the roll-out of just another technical upgrade. What they’re missing is the profound implications of the simple statement which is: “Everything’ll be connected.”