Somewhat skeptical article in NYTimes on "convergence..."
December 27, 1999
INDUSTRY VIEW
Why the Blind Faith in Media Convergence?
By ALICE HILL
In the 1970s, the Popeil Pocket Fisherman spawned numerous mocking parodies as the ultimate all-in-one device. It not only caught fish but through the miracle of its many hidden compartments it could also gut, clean and even weigh your catch.
Today, as the hype surrounding the convergence of PCs, television and the Web continues to dominate headlines, the familiar "but that's not all!" nature of the convergent device begs a question. Is convergence really a good thing?
Consider the facts. The Pocket Fisherman aside, Americans have traditionally shunned devices that combined too many functions or inappropriately matched them in one unit.
The radio made a brief appearance in the early television set, but aside from hotel chains looking to hold down costs, few people found listening to the radio through a tinny monaural television speaker an enjoyable activity. The radio did manage to combine successfully with the clock, but only in the case of a bedside unit; clocks in the rest of a typical home do not contain a radio.
In the more complex world of high-technology devices, combining a host of technical features into a single unit is almost always a theoretical possibility. But there is seldom evidence of actual customer demand.
Television tuner cards in PCs, for example, never took off in the early 1990s. PC users at work typically had no justifiable reason to request such a setup, and at home a television in the PC offered little benefit over the television set that was a room -- or even a few feet -- away.
Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif., said that people who espouse convergence are looking at the puzzle backward. Instead of searching for one big high-tech device that combines the functions of a cell phone, television set and Web-enabled PC, he said, manufacturers should take advantage of the fact that the chips inside each of these units are now largely the same.
In this sense, "Convergence does occur at the very technical or chip level, but it results in a divergence at the product level," Saffo said. "Big devices have exploded outwards into little devices," he said. "It's as if the PC on our desk exploded into laptops and cell phones and PDAs."
That has been especially notable this holiday season, as consumers were snapping up record numbers of specialized electronic devices -- whether they were the latest digital cameras and video-game consoles or even more business-minded fare like cell phones, pagers, digital tape recorders and electronic organizers.
If the chips are largely the same, the key to successful device design seems to lie not in grouping all potential features together simply because the manufacturers can. Instead, the idea seems to be finding an attractive second feature, as with the venerable bedside clock radio. Today, the hot second feature making its way into an array of gadgets is Web connectivity.
"Web connectivity will be a secondary feature found on successful connected appliances," predicted Seamus McAteer, director of Web technology strategies for Jupiter Communications, the new-media research firm. "Stand-alone appliances that tout connectivity as a primary feature will fail to penetrate the mass market."
As an example, McAteer cited the cable television industry's efforts to introduce high-capacity digital set-top boxes that would include Web access. "Consumers will want interactive cable set tops so that they can receive an extra 100 channels of video and more ESPN," he said. "The addition of Web connectivity to these devices will be an additional feature, and services must be congruent with the setting to succeed."
Historically, the hybrid approach has usually failed to produce a device that works as well as a specialized product, said Jack Trout, president of Trout & Partners, a marketing strategy firm based in Greenwich, Conn.
"People want a specific device to function brilliantly -- they want best of breed, not a hybrid," Trout said. "Remember the boat car? It was a lousy boat, and it was a lousy car. That's what you get with convergence."
When people watch television, for example, they want "the best TV experience," Trout said. "Ironically, while everyone has been trying to build these new complicated Web TVs, the hot market this year has been the big-screen television."
But Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot organizer, and now the co-founder and chairman of Handspring, which makes the Visor organizer, sees the issue in less absolute terms. "I find the terms 'convergence' and 'divergence' too simplistic," Hawkins said in an e-mail interview.
Successful execution, according to Hawkins, is the true secret to a good product, not whether it converges or diverges. "The Palm Pilot was arguably a successful case of divergence," he wrote. "Do less and do it well."
And yet, he continued, "I believe you can add a large amount of functionality to a hand-held computer and keep it low cost and easy to use. For example adding cell phone radios to hand-held computers is a case of convergence. Done right it will be successful."
Alice Hill is vice president and editorial director of the technology news service CNET Online. |
