Re: Interesting outsiders perspective on the future of the shop floor.
With Siemens, they are the biggest player in industrial automation and their approach is to have a closed ecosystem where you buy everything from them and they only allow a few selected partners to sell kit that works with their stuff. They're like how IBM used to be in the mainframe days. They will develop and sell their own system for this market if it looks useful. At one time they even had their own Linux distro for industrial systems, although I think they discontinued it years ago.
As for your description of the typical factory floor, it's spot on. A typical factory is a hodge podge of technologies spanning decades. When equipment even offers any networking ability at all, it's usually through proprietary protocols and even proprietary electrical standards and cables. An attempt was made at standardization some years ago, but it's a joke as the "standard" ended up being just declaring all the major vendors' proprietary kit to be "standard".
There are a number of companies whose business is just making kit to connect incompatible systems together. The results are generally both expensive and unsatisfactory.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
