Messy needs of people defy technological convergence

WIRED:The utopian world in which single solutions perform myriad roles has remained elusive

BACK IN 1997, Microsoft bought a company it hoped would create a new generation of consumer electronics devices. It was called WebTV and its product was pitched as the perfect combination of the 1990s’ two favourite media pursuits: television and the internet.

Microsoft’s acquisition was greeted with stark terror by many of my colleagues in the early new media industry. A television that offered the web? Wouldn’t that be just too perfect? Who would buy computers after such a thing emerged?

Would Microsoft founder Bill Gates successfully migrate the billions just about to join the internet on to a platform exclusively controlled by his company and the old media guard? Would it effectively reverse the charmingly utopian idea many had that the interactive web would absorb and consume the tired, one-way broadcast media?

Could WebTV be the all-engulfing gloop that absorbed the fledgling internet and turned us all back into passive couch potatoes?

At the time, it was by no means clear that WebTV would not devour the rest of the computing pantheon.

Supporting the paranoia was an oft-spouted prophesy: that all information technology would converge. Televisions would merge with stereo systems, which would merge with home computers, which would merge with mobile phones, which would merge with laptops. One platform would rule them all, whether it was called “the digital hub” or “the information appliance”. Any devices we owned would simply be variations on a constant theme.

Now, nearly 15 years later, what is noticeable is just how little truth lay in that prediction of convergence. In the living room, the television still prevails, even as services such as Netflix, iPlayer and Hulu have diverted its output through other venues.

The laptop and the desktop are still around and are now joined by the iPad and other tablets. Mobile smartphones still occupy their own niche, with Apple’s iOS and Android taking a lion’s share but with legacy Nokia and the ever-present Microsoft combining to spread Microsoft’s Windows Phone system.

Rather than merging, handheld devices are generating even more forms. Old ideas fail to die. WebTV may be gone as a brand but its lessons have been absorbed into the digital video recorders and interactive TV, and Apple still sells its iPods.

New ones are still rising.

The Kindle represents the opposite of the idea of convergence. Launched in 2007, it has at its heart a fully-fledged Linux computer with 4GB of memory. But rather than offering everything a digital device could do, the Kindle is constructed largely to do one thing. It enables the user to read books.

Its e-ink screen stutters at any imagery more animated than a static page. Even the obligatory web browser is hidden deep in the menu options and marked “experimental”, as though it may explode in the user’s hands.

The iPad, itself a self-conscious attempt to carve out a fresh niche, has been branded a personal computer killer. But the PC rides on and the iPad itself has been joined by smaller, handheld touch-screen competitors. The market it did most to diminish, the small, cheap netbook sector, took a hit but persists alongside those more expensive tablets.

The community of “information devices” shuffles around when a new entrant turns up but rarely does one of its species vanish.

The group that most bemoans this state of affairs seems to be much the same that was most worried about the homogenising effect of convergence in the 1990s. If you’re a developer or software company, you don’t necessarily want to be beholden to a single giant such as Microsoft or Google. On the other hand, there are advantages to being able to write code for a single, Platonic, information device. Coders who live in the shadow of Apple frequently worry about that company’s direction, or changes to its software that might destroy their revenue overnight. But what’s good for Apple is still good for them. The idea of just being able to code up something for Apple’s dream computer and then be able to sell your code on to everyone in the world? The temptation is overpowering.

As it is, in the modern jungle, one cannot build a single application that works everywhere, from mobile to media centre. That hopeful dream, too, has been just as effectively extinguished by the market’s diversity. Even the web, which holds all these devices together, is only a single commonality among the unique twists each provides.

A web page, well written, will be viewable on them all. But if you want something compelling you’ll need to dive deeper into each niche: animated swirls on the iPad, a complementary app for the Android app store.

The idea of convergence, of consolidating all the messy corners of the digital world into a single “information appliance”, appeals, I think, to two groups: those who would like to make the monopoly profits that such a dominant form would provide and those who lives would be made immeasurably more straightforward by such a radical simplification.

It’s a rare intersection of desires, shared by marketers and engineers, a coincidence which explains its repetition as an inevitable truth over the decades. Thank goodness the real world is unsalvageably messier than that.