No you cannot. A brick is also a physical product. But it doesn't communicate. There needs to be software and technology involved, and more than one object needs to talk via a network.
That's true, but a brick still requires a sophisticated set of knowledge which we accept to be public domain by this point, after a few thousand years.
You need to know how to make and fire clay, what sorts of additives can help, how to package and ship them en masse...
There are a lot of problems involved in bricks. OSHA once categorized bricks as hazardous materials (don't breathe the dust when grinding them). We've just gotten really good at dealing with those problems because of how useful bricks are and how easy it is to teach people about making them.
Anecdotally, I once took an archaeology course in college, and we had a guest speaker come in who knew how to do flint-knapping[1]. Like, prehistoric toolmaking out of volcanic rocks. I'll bet you'd run into some real hurtles trying to market an obsidian knife today, if you didn't have experience in that area.
Well who means what is really hard to discuss at this point.
The article's author wants to point out that the hardware part must be so cheap that you can't make any profit in that area any more. But you still need to get it right, otherwise you can't sell anything.
Komali doesn't disagree with that point, but adds another. That most of IoT is actually not in the consumer area but in the industry area where people don't see it but the scale in terms of item numbers might be much bigger. Also a good point.
Then leggomylibro points out that you could replace "IoT" with "physical product", which may or may not imply that hardware is the hard part in IoT.
In the literally interpretation I disagree with the equal sign there, because a brick is not "IoT". There shouldn't be much to say about htis. IoT _is_ about the communication, right?
Considering your interpretation of his statement, that the hardware is the hard part in IoT, makes me wonder how you define hard part. The physical important parts like chips are quite well understood I believe (not an expert though) and we churn these out in the millions each year and they mostly do their job. The point where these chips actually need to be connected to physical I/O and software, these are horribly underdeveloped areas. There is low amount of skilled people, low amount of debugging, low amount of standards. If that's the area you are talking about I agree.
However if we talk business, we also need to talk money. And while you have one or two suicidal hardware architect on such a project, you probably have 50-100 software developers, who will use open-source plugins, libraries, operating systems, which again are each developed by 50-100 developers. So the whole cost of software is margins higher than the costs of developing the hardware. And that factor is growing towards the software side on a daily basis. The hardware will grow more and more to standardized processing units (GPUs, SoCs, touchdisplays for I/O) and the main activity will happen in more and more in software.
So considering that part I have to say nope, software is the harder part (to finance, to develop, to finish) here.
What I mean by physical part being the harder here is that it's much slower and more expensive to iterate on.
You can make a lot of changes to software within a single day, for free (sans programmer time), and deploy them to all your customers. With physical items, you usually need to fab a new version for each significant change to test it, which is a time-consuming and expensive process. This is not something electronics-specific, this applies just as much to a new brick design.
This is a qualitative difference that makes physical product design an expensive process - you need to get all the things right before you start shipping; you can't just patch things after you deploy. But, as the article correctly points out, ultimately the manufacturing of a correctly designed batch of a physical item is cheap. Which means it's hard to make profit, especially if you spent all that money iterating in your lab, and then someone just reverse-engineers your final design and starts pumping out copies.
In case of IoT - common processing and communication chips are cheap and easy to get. Electrical engineering is hard and expensive, product design is hard and expensive, and - compared to that - software is cheap, because all IoT companies are doing is bog standard cloud-based CRUD.
(If they make the software part needlessly complicated for themselves, that's another problem, but it's endemic to this industry anyway.)
I see and agree that an equal sized hardware and software component compared, the hardware will be harder to develop and more expensive. I don't think from a project perspective this holds true though, since the amounts are often something like 1 hardware to 10 software or even more.
But your argument still holds true in that iterations are quicker and easier to achieve, which is also why this factor will only increase.
Sounds like the author has been living in the land of hand-waved 9-figure growth estimates for a bit too long.