A number of scientific and technological advancements enabled turning the Internet of Things vision into reality. However, there is still a bottleneck in designing and developing IoT applications and services: each device has to be programmed individually, and services are deployed to specific devices. The Fluidware approach advocates that to truly scale and raise the level of abstraction a novel perspective is needed, focussing on device ensembles and dynamic allocation of resources. In this paper, we motivate the need for such a paradigm shift through three case studies emphasising a mismatch between state of art solutions and desired properties to achieve