Amazon, Apple, and Google take a crack at a home Internet of Things networking standard

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have come a long way since David Nichols, a Carnegie Mellon University graduate student, hooked up a Coke machine to the school's intranet. One thing hasn't changed, though: The network standards behind IoT have been a bit of a confusing, incompatible mess. What works with one family of devices is total gibberish to another. Now, Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance are working on an open-source network standard to make life easier for IoT hardware vendors and software developers: Connected Home over IP. This is an interesting development for several reasons. First, Amazon, Apple, and Google own the smart home device market. Amazon's Alexa and Google Home have become household names. While Apple's Siri lags behind them, it still has Apple's sizable fan community as a large, potentially profitable audience. That these three would agree to work on a common standard is remarkable.