What Convergence?

For the past 2-3 years, and perhaps even today we have been hearing that convergence is going to land in a gadget, when everything ends up in the palm of your hand. So you will have a device that is -
a Radio
a TV
a Music Player
a Computer
a Telephone
a Planner
a Clock
a Still Camera
a Voice Recorder
a Video Recorder
a Gaming Console
Perhaps even an Insulin Tracker
And a lot more..
(I am not even talking about ‘petty cash features’ as the calculator, currency converter, etc).

But I do not see that device yet. At best I see some gadgets that click really good pictures and help you transfer them wirelessly, some phones that do e mail really well, some MP 3 players that dock with speakers smoothly, some voice recorders that are very small, some TVs that do a little internet, some computers that do gaming very well, some game consoles that store data very well, some video recorders that take still photographs (somehow) and some mobile phones that do music and radio very well etc.

In other words every product is at best succeeding in doing one or two things well. It is a separate question that the phone that does mail best, only about manages to still look like a phone. In addition to this, you usually end up carrying an additional phone for phone calls! (Let me not ask that embarrassing question to innovators that “What was the laptop doing in that shoulder bag when the mobile phone became the ‘e mail phone?’”).

Consider this; the number of appliances in my living room has only gone up in the last 3 years –
TV (2001)
+
Amplifier (2003)
+
Speakers (2003)
+
DVD Player (2003)
+
Gaming Console (2007)
[I am not counting my two Laptops {official (2007)/personal (2005)} for they do not always sit in my living room!]
There is a separate ‘domination by expansion’ happening in my study room – wires tangling with everything, everywhere – External Hard Drives, MP 3 Player jacks, Digital Camera cord & Mobile Phone cables. But I will not talk about that here.

Fundamentally Convergence of content – ‘there is much more than e mails coming into your PC’ – has not been matched by convergence of format (hardware) – ‘your PC can be your everything’!
And people who still do this (i.e. use a PC to do everything) do it as a compromise, still have a high definition home theatre parked in their heads. They still want to separate ‘their movies from their mail’, ‘their Doom 2 from their word documents’ and wrist watch from their mobile clock (this last one is provocative!)

Why is it that?

Difficult to say but it perhaps could be due to
1. Habit - entertainment is a separate bucket from enterprise?

2. Lack of cost effective products that can deliver the solution – My PC, even with the sub-woofer, still can’t match the home theatre experience, my mobile phone still does not capture the steady shot that I want. At best these are make-do solutions till I can buy the ‘real’ thing?

The only driver for the convergence so far, has been mobility. “I will use this as my camera and my music player and my movie pod because that’s the best I can get on the move.”
In other words when I enter my home, there is a lot of competition for an I Pod but outside – I pod rules. And if future is about increased mobility urban and suburban mobility then there is a great long-term potential for this business. However, if telecommuting becomes much bigger than commuting then things might change. This is one thing that I have had no fix on yet. Will we travel more in the future or travel less?
Because if one were to believe the technology theorists in late 90s then the airline business should have suffered a lot at the hands of video conferencing and the primary traveler today should mainly have been the leisure / holiday traveler, who travels for site seeing and not gets of the airplane to go to a hotel or meeting room and head back to the airport sometimes in less than 24 hours

To come back to my original thought strand – convergence I believe is happening around mobility and user profiles. We have different gadgets that are being loaded with additional features around the location of their use. So there is a role for mobile phone, there is a role of MP 3 player, there is a role for a digital camera and all of these features are loaded into a gadget while looking at the user profile. There are, and perhaps would always be, various kinds of users – those who move around much more and need to carry more features and those who do not and thus want only specific benefits/features. In other words all devices will have their logical role in different physical setting all the way from home to the subway station, to a coffee shop to office and back home.

Before I close I want to share the last ‘if’ on the above conclusion about ‘convergence happens around mobility and user profiles’. This conclusion is based on the assumption that that physical space will be relevant in the future.
(I personally do not believe it would be.)