Like many people, I enjoy a good cup of coffee. However, most mornings, in the rush to get myself ready and help prepare my kids for school, I am perfectly content with a quick, reliable, and perfectly portioned cup of coffee, delivered via my Keurig coffee maker. I enjoy coffee, but I am not a coffee snob. The mere mention of Keurig may send many high-end baristas into a frenzy, but I appreciate my Keurig’s simple operation and its variety of coffee offerings. And oh the variety! That is what sets Keurig apart from my other grind-and-brew coffee maker and even my french press, each of which arguably deliver a better product. It is the large selection of K-Cup coffee pods (over 200 varieties with 50 different brands) that are available not only from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, the company that owns Keurig, but from Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, and others, that make the Keurig shine. Variety has made Keurig brewers ubiquitous in offices and homes across the country. Undoubtedly, your local specialty coffee shop may brew a better cup of coffee, but for the price, convenience, ease-of-use, and selection, the Keurig does its job well and it shows – Green Mountain has sold more than 20 billion coffee pods, and 35 million Keurig brewers to date.

Despite its brisk business, Green Mountain remains concerned that the K-Cups being produced by its competitors will cut into its market dominance. Green Mountain’s fear stems from the fact that certain of its key patents for the Keurig K-Cups expired in late 2012, enabling unlicensed, generic, Keurig-compatible coffee pods to enter the market. These unlicensed third-party coffee pod refills are generally cheaper than Green Mountain’s products, often by as much as 25%. Because Green Mountain operates on a Pez dispenser/candy model (the printer/printer cartridge and razor/razor blade analogies were already taken), whereby it earns most of its money from the sale of K-Cups rather than Keurig coffee machines, the rise of unlicensed generics is a direct threat to its bottom line.

It is no wonder then that Green Mountain’s announcement that its future Keurig machines will only accept Green Mountain proprietary K­-Cups has caused such a hyper-caffeinated uproar. Some have argued that Green Mountain is implementing a form of digital rights management (DRM) by preventing competitors from accessing its Keurig machines, much like the means record companies and movie studios have employed to dissuade consumers from sharing music and movies online. Others have even suggested that this approach is a step backwards and away from the “Internet-of-Things” ideal whereby your home appliances and digital devices can freely communicate with each other across a network to anticipate and respond to your needs and desires before you even know you have them. In the Internet-of­-Things world, your washing machine knows when you are running low on detergent, your refrigerator can tell when you need to buy more orange juice, your coffee machine can anticipate when you are running low on coffee pods, and all of these devices can communicate through a shared network to automatically place a refill order with a grocery store or retailer without you having to lift a finger. Green Mountain, by going “closed source”such that future Keurig machines will only accept proprietary Green Mountain K-­Cups, has arguably erected a barrier to interoperability ­- the ability of your home appliances and electronic devices to freely communicate with each other.

Another, albeit related, question is whether Green Mountain’s action will ramp up a format-war with its competitors. Green Mountain’s Keurig continues to face challenges from Tassimo, Nespresso, Flavia, and others. A savy competitor may, in time, develop a platform which can effectively rival Keurig (much like Google achieved when it created its Android mobile operating system as an alternative to Apple’s iOS). A format-war may not necessarily be bad for consumers, who could benefit from increased choice for coffee products and better technology to aid in their consumption. What is interesting in Green Mountain’s case is that it was already winning (perhaps even won) the format-war, yet it has nevertheless decided to implement a proprietary model to fend off the unlicensed masses. Although Green Mountain’s market dominance is not likely to diminish anytime soon, format-wars are unpredictable. One need look no further than to Sony to see the varying degrees of success it has experienced in pushing propriety models on consumers (MiniDiscs, UMDs, and ATRAC anyone?)

Proprietary models and DRM-­like approaches need not doom or cripple the Internet­-of­-Things, provided that manufactures like Green Mountain display a willingness to adopt common standards for communicating information between networked devices. Interoperability does not need to suffer if there is an agreement on a common protocol for sending and receiving signals to/from appliances and electronic devices. It is possible (in fact, probable) that a Nest-like device (maybe even the Nest itself, in future iterations) will be able to not only control your thermostat, but also your lights, appliances, and electronic devices seamlessly over a network; an intelligent operating system for the home. Perhaps, if we are lucky, it will even know how to brew a good cup of coffee.