Glenn Reid wants to sell you a washer and dryer. In that sense, he's just like any number of nearly identical salespeople pitching nearly identical appliances at your nearest Home Depot. Glenn Reid is no ordinary salesperson, though. And his washer and dryer are no ordinary appliances.
In fact, Reid believes that the Marathon Laundry machine may well be the Tesla of large appliances. Yes, you read that correctly. The Tesla of large appliances. It's not as crazy as it sounds. In fact, this thing is pretty freaking cool.
But first, let's start with Reid, since his company's story doesn't make nearly as much without knowing his story. Reid is tall, with short white hair and a readiness bordering on eagerness to introduce Steve Jobs into the conversation. It's an earned reference; Reid worked with Jobs at Apple and NeXT three times, filling those gaps with stints at places like Adobe. He led the team that created iMovie in 1998 and iPhoto in 2002. He's writing a book called Design Like Steve. It is safe to say he's got as much Apple DNA as anybody.
Reid's path after leaving Apple, presumably for the last time, in 2003, included consulting, launching a startup he sold to Cisco, and another stop at Adobe. Nothing about it indicates a willingness, let alone ability, to challenge the Whirlpools and Maytags of the world. He is, from all evidence and appearances, a software guy.
But Reid doesn't think of himself that way. "I call myself a product guy," he says. "To me that means you're interested in the products per se, not technology, not any particular approach." For what it's worth, he is, in this context, identifying with Jobs, a fellow product guy. And for decades of his life, that product was software. But that time has passed.
"I realized that if you're a product person you really can't be in the software industry anymore," Reid says. "Software has almost turned into the entertainment industry. Write stuff, give it away for free, and sell ads to support it. I kind of think if somebody doesn't give you money for it then there's no transaction. You can't really validate whether people like it or not."
So where does a product guy turn when his product of choice become a service, if not a commodity? To the same place every other start-up turns these days: To the Internet of Things.
The Internet of Things invites a deep, abiding skepticism. Even that name! What kind of a name is that? It sounds like someone gave up halfway. And then there are the products. An Internet-connected toilet. A refrigerator with a giant tablet in the door. A literal mat that weighs things and lets you know when you're running out. What kind of appliance needs a firmware update? Is this the world in which anyone really wants to live?
At first, Marathon Laundry sounds as though it inhabits that same cringe-worthy space. It even came out of a mountain of ill-fated ideas.
"This machine is one of the ideas that we dreamed up and prototyped five years ago," says Reid. The "we" is Inventor Labs, Reid's product development outfit and home to a dozen or so ideas that didn't work out. "The original idea was to combine washers and dryers together, which is a big idea, but you're competing with the appliance industry. Then a year and a half or so ago, I started thinking about the Internet of Things. What happens if you put a washing machine on the Internet? Is that any more interesting than one that isn't?"
Reid was cynical, as you may be now. But he thought about it. Then he thought about it some more. The more he thought about it, the more he saw potential for something that might actually be useful. Before you dismiss this out of hand, you should know two important things about the Marathon Laundry machine. First, it can wash and dry clothes in a single unit. It's not the first appliance to offer that, not by a long shot, but it combines the two functions in an innovative way. How it washes and dries is secondary, though, to the fact that it can do so regardless of whether you're hooked up to the Internet. As anyone who's been unable to conjure the time from their smartwatch can tell you, a connected device is worthless if it can't do its most basic job.
And how does Reid know his machine works? Because he didn't build it. Here, Reid switches from mentioning Jobs and Apple to mentioning Elon Musk and Tesla Motors. "We're kind of borrowing some business models from them. Their approach was to start with somebody else's car, the Lotus, and stick their motor in it, and stick their logo on it, and sell that. Then the next version they built themselves."
That oversimplifies just what Tesla did with the Roadster, but go with it. Similarly, Marathon Laundry's hardware comes from a name-brand manufacturer that Reid didn't disclose. It's just got electric dryer parts stuffed inside of it, along with a computer brain, a big touchscreen, and a Wi-Fi hookup.
The other thing to know about Reid's creation is it costs $1,200, which is about what you'd pay for any other decent washer/dryer combo. You're not paying extra for its A9 processor. Hell---you don't even have to connect it to the Internet. The smart features aren't premium; they're bonus. That's a big distinction.
It seems a little silly to have to establish that a connected device isn't overpriced and underperforming before you can talk about what it actually does. Welcome to the smart home of 2016.
The Marathon Laundry machine proposition is actually pretty simple. It washes and dries in one device, and has other features if and when you need them. Tracking energy usage? Check. User profiles that remember individual preferences? Sure. Coordinating with smart grids to run your laundry when electricity is cheapest, saving you money and relieving strain on our overtaxed utilities? Er...
Someday. Maybe. Depends. Smart grids don't exist in any meaningful quantity yet, but if they ever do, Marathon Laundry will be ready.
And here's where the seams start to show. The Marathon Laundry machine can do all kinds of things; Reid's just not entirely sure yet which of them will happen, or when. Some are beyond his control---he can't build a smart grid himself---while others depend on consumer interest and intent. But that's OK; regardless of all the smart stuff, the machine will do its job. It will wash and dry your clothes. You're not paying extra for uncertainty. You're buying what's hopefully a super-convenient washer/dryer combo. Take the rest as a pleasant surprise if and when it comes.
Of course, there may be some unpleasant, software-related surprises as well. Washing machines typically last a decade. What hardware do you have from 2005 that can run on contemporary software? When a dryer breaks, dozens of repairmen in your area can fix it in short order. There's no such infrastructure for a Marathon Laundry machine bug. Or hack, for that matter.
"I'm skeptical about [large home appliances] as an important element of the smart home," says Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett, "especially because of the 10-year product life cycle." Reid's confident, though, that his fledgling company has laid the groundwork for a sustainable product. He's quick to note that iMovie 1.0 could read iMovie 4.0 projects.
"You can sort that stuff out if you know that it's coming. We put an A9 processor and a gig of memory and all this stuff. It seems ridiculous now, but it won't seem ridiculous in five years," says Reid. "We think we've got at least five years of no-problems upgrading. We can gracefully just sort of stop updating at some point, but it'll keep working." Existing machines, he notes, don't update at all.
Existing machines also don't collect data, another feature that presents a potential benefit---and concern. Marathon Laundry could conceivably know how many cycles you run, when you prefer to run them, what settings you prefer to use, even your detergent of choice. Reid acknowledges it's thorny territory, especially given that the (anonymized) data it gathers is part of its business model, and says that Marathon will "follow everyone else's lead" in terms of practices, which given the state of data and privacy online today may not be as comforting as it's meant to sound.
"There's huge benefit in getting a lot of data from you, but there's also a transparency and trust issue," says Reid. "We're not going to be creepy on you. It's a fine line."
There are several ways to build a smart home, none of which has quite caught on. You can install some sort of hub like SmartThings and Wink sells, and buy a suite of compatible products. You can upgrade your existing devices through additions like the Roost Wi-Fi battery, which smartens up any smoke detector. Or you can buy a smart standalone device, like the Nest Learning Thermostat.
Reid sees Marathon Laundry taking the Internet of Things a step even further. "Right now everybody has the hub being smart and the thing being dumb," he says. "Furnaces are still dumb, and Nests are smart. It's possible that you'd rather the furnace was smart, and went straight to the Internet and went around the Nest. The furnace knows more about being a furnace than a Nest does."
That approach also allows for more consumer choice. Rather than worry about being forced into an ecosystem, you can buy the smart product you happen to like most. If that happens to be the Marathon Laundry machine, you'll have to wait though. While you can pre-order now, it's expected to ship sometime later this year, the type of vague launch schedule that rarely inspires confidence. More than anything, Reid needs a distributor, though he says he's talking with big box names you'd recognize.
For now, though, the smart washer/dryer of the very near future remains a demo. Even the smart home done right, the one with Apple DNA and Tesla on the brain, needs time and infrastructure and innovation before it can deliver on all of its promises, some of which are yet to be made. While presenting the Marathon Laundry machine to a dozen observers at CES this week, Reid opened the floor to questions. He'd already mentioned that the device has many sensors, prompting one woman to ask just what kind of sensors.
"We put a camera in there," Reid replied. "We're just not sure what to do with it yet."
