Convergence: the Next Big Thing
Who owns the consumer entertainment and information budget? Content, software and services or platforms, peripherals, and networks? Proprietary systems, copyrighted IP and patented devices or standard hardware, open source software and public domain programming? Conglomerates or start-ups? Convergence or specialization?
A panel of industry players fielded by Harvard Business School took on the question of future “form factors” last month. The conclusion: “It’s more important for users to be able to easily move digital information from one device to another than to have a single gizmo that is both a car wax and dessert topping.”
Although the discussion was abbreviated in the article, the concepts are critical to the business of content and technology in the next decade. It seemed to us that the discussion stopped way short of the ultimate questions of convergence: one, is there a common basis for information and entertainment content that leads to a rational convergence of their respective technologies, and two, it’s corollary, is there a technological and/or economic imperative to combine information and entertainment content delivery and processing components that is so compelling as the render the first question moot?
The article focused on handheld convergence, but the issues go to the heart of the debate that the late Gary Kildall framed so well at the fist CD-ROM Conference in 1984, hosted by Microsoft. Kildall responded to the question of convergence of precisely this sort by saying, “The extent to which consumers want to interact with their TV sets is unknown. ” We’ll excerpt some of the HBS discussion of the cell phone as the be all and end all device and take it from there.
Communications
Convergence on the cell phone platform has progressed from instant messaging and address and date book on to Internet browsing and wireless e-mail, then digital camera and GPS client, and soon, music and video player. However, there is a limit to how many devices you can hold in the palm of your hand. The limit is defined by many dimensions.
One limit to convergence in the mobile device segment is the need for an effective user interface. HBS Cyberposium panelist Peter Wakim, director of Corporate Venturing for Nokia, defines this as “iPod simple”. There are many ways to own the consumer, but designing the user interface that allows consumers to navigate complex functionality in a convergence device is certainly one of them.
Another limiting factor is the compromised functionality of each component compared to its stand-alone counterpart. “The architecture of a device needs to represent the function,” contributed Frank Tyneski, director of design integration at Research In Motion. Suggesting an all-in-one design will lead to mediocre features, he says, “There will always be a need for specialized devices.” Display dimensions, I/O devices, processors, storage and the technology required to power it all are barriers to utopia in a cell phone.
Interesting to note the two device manufacturers cited were less enthusiastic about convergence than the software provider, Palm. “The phone is the key device,” declared Mike Kelley, VP Engineering, PalmSource, “the hub of digital life”.
If you are selling hammers, life looks like a bed of nails.
“In our lifetime we will not see a single device that will represent all devices for everything we do,” said Rich Miner, vice president of Advanced Service Delivery for Orange Services, U.S, in the Harvard Business School article. Telecommunications carriers such as UK-based Orange paid dearly for the spectrum to deliver high bandwidth traffic in multiple countries, and are actively pushing both content and specific handsets to receive it and content creation add-ons and specific handsets to transmit it.
Consumer Electronics
The transition to digital processing of digitized content over the past twenty years is now virtually complete. From the era of vacuum tubes giving way to solid state home entertainment equipment in the 1970’s to the current analog displays in the form of CRT monitors and TVs giving way to digital panels, the only thing in the system that remains analog is sound reproduced in loudspeakers.
Stereo systems have traditionally incorporated the spirit of convergence in that the many ways of delivering audio programming, radio, vinyl records, cassette tape, and CDs have shared the central amplifier and speakers. As videodiscs and VCRs were deployed in the living room, they have traditionally had their audio output fed into the stereo system.
This approach was foundation of today’s home theatre systems sold with DVD players. Instead of the video being adjunct to the audio, home theatre is the reverse, allowing CD-audio discs to be played in DVD-Video players and their stereo output to be heard through the 5.1 multi-channel speaker set-up.
Interestingly, although the boom box concept held up well in the various stages of audio delivery from radio to cassette to CD, incorporation of a TV, or even the concept of portable TVs, was not a big deal. It may be that the bulk of a CRT was the hindrance, and now flat screens on mobile phones with highly compressed digital video signals will explode because of the unmet market demand. We’ll just see about that.
Sometimes convergence is merely convenient and results in a kluge. The best example of this is the combi-TV/VCR or combi-TV/DVD. In an era where consumer electronics is cheaper to replace than repair, the welding of two devices with markedly different MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure, or expected useful life) characteristics is not sensible, yet operationally many people find that having the functions designed to work together rather than having to connect and work them separately is an advantage.
Computers
Convergence may be defined several ways, from the standpoint of the user and from the standpoint of the device. The desirability of shared space in a handheld, portable, or desktop computer is in the eye of the beholder, so it is a marketing benefit to bring together many functions in one device. Increasingly, competitive pressures on commodity devices force the design and integration of multi-function processors, multi-function cards, and multi-function peripherals on the economic merits alone.
Convergence in computers and peripherals is evident in the all-in-one printer incorporating fax, scanner and limited copier capability that comes bundled with many consumer computers. Here the shared components in the multi-function printer including the image capture and ink jet image output represent technology convergence, while the user interface and footprint represent convergence of tasks.
Convergence is occurring as well in the DVD-Video/Audio/ROM/-R/-RW/+R/+RW/RAM/CD-R/RW/ROM/Audio drive that is now standard equipment in practically every make and model machine. It may be seen in the combination memory chip reader/writers that allow interoperability between the various types of solid state storage.
Networking itself is a form of convergence today as most computers support multiple ways of connecting to the Internet, from dial-up rates ranging between 14.4 kbps and 56 kbps, fax, and 10/100Mbps Ethernet on one card, to 1394 Firewire and wireless network connections to LANs as bridges.
The Next Big Thing
The integration of information and entertainment is, in our opinion, the real, true crux of the matter in the question of convergence. The ultimate convergence is positioned in different ways depending on what is in your toolbox.
It is not VoIP and wireless Internet over the cellular network. It is not even the unlikely prospect of calling your home security monitor to scan the items in your refrigerator, correlate the fresh ingredients with recipes off the web, and placing a grocery order for the missing items for pick-up on the home commute. These are not fundamental to the cultural and educational convergence that is creating the energy, tension, and sheer force behind the ultimate convergence taking place beginning with CD-ROM multimedia and the WWW in the last decade and the convergence of information and entertainment in the future.
To an extent, it is Telco TV and broadband data over cable networks. Remember when we used a modem to encode a digital signal on an analog carrier and decode it on the other end, and when that flipped to encoding a video signal onto a digital carrier?
True convergence is really indescribable except by example. You know it when you see it. It is using computers to compose music, index songs and videos, and annotate them. It is incorporating microprocessors into consumer electronics to execute recording and playback commands. It is the merger of the family room and the home office. It is the cobbling together of the lean forward of the computer monitor and the sit back of the television. It is the home server-gateway, incorporating everything from documents to docu-dramas on massive fixed and removable storage devices, connected to home LANs and remote content servers via the Internet, employing device-aware codecs translating content encoding up and down the resolution scale. It is nothing short of the winner in the holy war over the holy grail of the entertainment PC versus the Web TV.
When it happens, and as Kildall’s observation still reminds us, if it happens, will be the next big thing.