My house needs an operating system. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, then the OS is the core software that allows a device to operate, providing an accessible interface between applications and the hardware. It allows applications to communicate with each other and share access to all of the hardware.

I have a lot of hardware at home. Of course there’s the techie stuff (home cinema, games consoles, PCs, tablets, phones) but there’s also the more basic bits (fridge/freezer, washing machine, dishwasher, cooker, boiler, thermostat, blinds, lights, burglar and smoke alarms, gas, electricity and water meters). In time I plan to add more hardware such as CCTV and cleaning robots.

The logo for Microsoft's 'HomeOS' project

None of this stuff talks to each other at the moment. My home cinema system can’t close the blinds and dim the lights. But more importantly my boiler can’t tell my phone when the pilot light is out or the pressure has dropped, indicating a leak. My cooker can’t tell me that I left the gas on, or allow me to turn it off remotely.

Clearly there are hardware issues to address here: each device would need sensors, actuators, and some form of network connection to be able to share information and allow remote access. But more than that the problem is one of standardisation: some platform in the middle that can provide a single interface for us to all the hardware, and allow the hardware to talk to each other.

Currently companies are tackling these problems individually: I can check my electricity usage on my phone thanks to AlertMe. There are the famous internet fridges. There are lots of ways to make my home cinema system dim the lights and close the blinds. But today there’s no holistic approach to the whole system.

People are trying – mostly in the open source community. I’ve just started playing with LinuxMCE again, a product for which I have high hopes. There are other projects like MisterHouse and Minerva, though I’ve yet to try these. And there are projects like xPL trying to create some glue to stick it all together. Some people at Microsoft clearly recognise the opportunity, as shown by this white paper.

But none of these things are a consumer-ready single solution to the problem. And I think that this could be – and will be – an enormous market. What it needs is a standard: a standard way for devices to communicate back and forth, and a standard set of interfaces in the middle. It could be a commercially defined standard, as the PC was thirty years ago. Or it could be an open standard, like the internet.

Either way, this is a market that won’t truly flourish until it is in place. Until then it will just be hobbyists like me, playing around.