IoT is now embedded in the vocabulary of corporate spin

The British satirical magazine Private Eye has a column called "warballs" which collects fatuous, tendentious links to the events of 9/11 and the War on Terror. It might time for an "IoT-balls" column, if this article in The Guardian is anything to go by. It's under an "Internet of Things" banner headline, but the link is really, really weak.

A corporate tie-up between British high street retailers Dixons and Carphone Warehouse is presented as if it had something to do with IoT - was this in the original PR spin, or a desperate attempt by a flummoxed analyst to make this story sound interesting? The connection seems to be: Dixons sells lots of consumer appliances, of the sort that could be connected to applications on the Internet of Things; many of those applications will be accessed via smartphones, and Carphone Warehouse sells a lot of those. Ergo, this is an IoT alliance. There really isn't any more to it than that. The rest of the piece is about the relentless logic of corporate merger cost-cutting.