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September 20, 2005
Delaying the future
We're just back from three days in the Hunter Valley at the Face the IT media event, in which various companies tell journalists what they're doing, what they're selling, and expose themselves to questions. It's a great opportunity for the IT media to catch up with various trends.
Among the things we picked up was the fact that companies like Intel and Dell are practically beside themselves with joy at the prospects offered by the so-called "digital home".
According to the analysts, we will all be sharing our new electronic abodes with fast broadband which will provide us with music and video entertainment, and VoIP telephone service, and a new generation of devices that connect automatically over wireless networks and are child's play to set up.
Various industries are fighting over the unimaginably huge spoils that will make the PC business look tiny. The analysts and speakers at this event suggest that PC companies like Dell are likely to triumph over the traditional consumer electronics companies.
We'll be shopping online using avatars and virtual reality rooms, dictating what camera angles we want when we watch TV, and establishing communities around things like multi-player games, neighbourhood play centres and cooking clubs.
Because we'll soon start fretting over losing all our digital images, music and video, or facing a blank TV screen, we'll be happy to pay people to back up our hard drives - and we'll have an awful lot of them - and keep everything running.
Now all this sounds like the sort of thing the industry wants to hear. Can you see it happening? It probably will, although possibly not with quite the speed that the industry is hoping for, particularly in Australia, where the Murdochs and Packers are used to getting what they want out of governments, and Telstra isn't going to be in any tearing hurry to introduce technologies that will erode its profits.
Posted by cw at September 20, 2005 06:10 PM
Comments
There are many reasons to be skeptical about the digital home. How many people actually program their VCR, let alone want to configure the devices needed in a digital home? The Economist has a detailed article on the topic.
"Technology firms are pushing a futuristic vision of home entertainment not because consumers are desperate for it but because they themselves are
RECENTLY, at one of the fast-proliferating conferences devoted to the “digital home”, John Burke, an executive at Motorola, a maker of mobile phones and digital gadgets, showed a video that presented his company's version of this vision. In the clip, a youngish man wakes up to a rock video that automatically starts playing on a screen next to his bed. He gets up to have breakfast and the rock video follows him to a screen in the kitchen. He moves into the living room and up pops the rock video on yet another screen. When he leaves his flat and gets into his car, the video starts playing on a screen in the steering wheel.
To ordinary humans this sort of thing must seem like silly—or downright frightening—marketing claptrap. In fact, even Mr Burke's audience of self-selected technophiles seemed sceptical. “Did you notice that the guy was a bachelor,” said Tim Dowling, the boss of Pure Networks, a software firm in Seattle that helps users to set up and troubleshoot home-computer networks. “That alone tells you that they're out of touch. I thought: How dumb.” Real people do not want to be hounded through their home and their life by some video stream, he argues; they just want help with basic headaches, such as getting the kids' laptop, mom's Apple Macintosh and dad's Windows machine to share the family's printer."
Posted by: Derek Holder at September 21, 2005 11:52 PM