Why Convergence Will Fail; Why It Won’t

(sub. req.) The Economist continues in its scathing review of the current digital home and convergence efforts…the naysayers says this: “Because convergence usually goes against the grain of human nature. A converged device is invariably complex, and people like simplicity. A converged device represents a single point of failure, and people like to know that they can still look at baby photos even if the TV breaks down.”

But the optimists says this..not all parts of the convergence vision are ridiculous: “Downloading entertainment (as opposed to buying it on physical discs) is convenient, and if consumers were confident that such “content” could play on any sort of device, they might do a lot more of it. But this is not the case, because each company is also aiming to recreate the sort of dominance that Microsoft achieved in the PC era by anointing its own technology as the universal standard, reducing other firms to royalty-paying serfs. Thus each is refusing to bring its own standards into harmony with those of rivals.”

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