Tuesday, May 13, 2008
How much "convergence" does $5 billion in Microsoft dollars buy? We're about to find out.
May 14, 1999 | Sometime soon, somebody out there is going to try to sell you on the virtues of the Microwave Bank. This startlingly innovative breakthrough endows your microwave oven with online banking and Internet access.
Cool, right?
Well, no. If NCR, which developed the Microwave Bank as a lab prototype, ever tries to sell this bastardized hybrid appliance to actual consumers, it will be met with responses like, "Why in hell would I want that thing?"
I thought of this peculiar technological dead end as I read the news of Microsoft's $5 billion investment in AT&T. As part of the latest baroque corporate merger play, in which AT&T gobbled up the MediaOne cable franchise, Microsoft pumped a significant fraction of its vast cash reserves into AT&T.
With the previously acquired TCI and MediaOne, AT&T will now own the largest single piece of the U.S. cable market -- and it hopes to use that entree into the home to deliver a new array of telephone, TV and Internet services. In exchange for its cash, Microsoft won a guarantee that AT&T would use Microsoft's Windows CE software as the basis for at least 2.5 million of the "set-top boxes" AT&T expects to deploy in consumers' homes to deliver those new services.
So what does the Microsoft bank's latest investment have to do with the Microwave Bank? Simple: Microsoft's investment is only the latest installment in the decade-long quest to marry computers and television in a grand "convergence" scheme. Bill Gates, who touted such a "digital highway" to the home in his "The Road Ahead," is betting his company on such a "converged" future. But the effort to crossbreed TV and the Net is likely to prove as ludicrous and pointless as the notion that you might want to surf the Web from your microwave oven.
Some new technologies take off effortlessly, as if self-propelled. Users grab them, find dozens of new uses for them and weave them into daily life and work. The Web itself is the perfect example: In its earliest days, no one marketed the Web because no one needed to -- people took a look at Mosaic, the Web's ur-browser, and realized they were seeing something wonderful; then they discovered that it took just a little technological know-how to build sites of their own, and there was no stopping the thing.
A lot of technologies, though, are born amid hoopla but fail to catch on with the public. The industry thinks it has found some holy grail, but people take one look and think, "Why bother with that?"
So far, despite all the hype and the billions being spent, TV-computer convergence -- with its set-top boxes and its visions of interactive nirvana -- remains a "why bother?" technology.
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