Newsletter #80 The Convergence Dream

Created on 21/08/03

A special hello to all new subscribers. This article is on the Web at this address.

The last newsletter (17th July, 2003) was "Email - The Dying App". Thanks for all the feedback; it's great to hear from you.

Make sure you check out our New Articles section below - it has a fascinating piece exposing how big companies are profiting from spam.

Whenever a new technology or medium is introduced one of the first questions is "What is this going to converge with?". In their book "The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding" Al and Laura Ries came up with "The Law of Divergence" contending that just the opposite happens.

They point out that for example:

• Radio used to be just radio, now we have AM/FM, portable, car, clock, cable, satellite and Internet radio.
• Television is divided up into broadcast, cable, satellite and pay-per-view.
• The computer can now be a mainframe, mini, personal, laptop, notebook or a handheld.

These technologies didn't converge they actually diverged into sub-categories.

For about a decade pundits have predicted that the PC will soon be dead, but the reverse is true, the computer has morphed into a range of variant types as noted above. As Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research points out: "Today my PC is also my repository for everything I have ever written, all the photos I have taken in the last eight years, my entire music collection and where I store recorded TV content. I don’t think my cell phone is even remotely up to the task."

The Ries also tell the story about after World War II when the two biggest industries in America were the automobile industry and the airplane industry. Many commentators thought the car was going to converge with the plane and several were built late in the 1940s to public acclaim and the attendant hype about how "Roads soon would be obsolete, traffic jams a thing of the past". It seems silly now.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

IS YOUR WEBSITE SHOWING ITS AGE? If it's more than two or three years old, Website design has moved on significantly and your site may be looking a bit tired. NetInsites have the skills to overhaul your site so it looks professional, all for a very cost-effective price. Click here to read more or just reply to this email.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As Paul Liao, Chief Technology Officer at Matsushita Electric Corp. of America has said, "There isn't a single engineer who wouldn't love to design a product that does everything." It may be an engineer's dream but is a consumer's nightmare. To appeal to the biggest audience, companies want more features that often lead to more complexity and higher prices. Consumers want simplicity and lower prices.

Customers don't ever say "I want convergence!", they're more likely to say "Can you make that simpler/easier to use/faster/cheaper." The trouble also with products that are multifunctional is that they can do lots of things but often none of them very well. "Drives like a boat, floats like a car" was the verdict on the 1961 Amphicar, an automobile/boat.

A major problem with convergence is that it normally requires a change in consumer behaviour. There is always a "chasm" in customer demand that is difficult to cross. After techies buy their new toys and visionaries dream of great associated new businesses, reality kicks in and mainstream customers never connect with the product.

We don't have to look very far for examples of failed convergence. Microsoft's WebTV, combination TV/VCRs, washing machine/dryers and so on.

I like Lydia Loizides' (Jupiter Research) idea of confluence rather than convergence - see here for the article. She suggests that rather than meld each product artificially together developers and marketers should be taking the best functions and ideas from each medium and formatting them for the medium that will display it. We're probably never going to surf the Web, as we know it on our TVs, but interactive TV using the Internet infrastructure will undoubtedly happen.

So next time you hear about convergence - particularly in your own industry, have a little chuckle then start thinking how confluence might work instead.

Alex Garden

Newbies

Did you know that you can copy Webpages and their associated images onto your hard drive? In your browser click on "File" on the top menu then "Save As" or "Save Page As", amend the page description if necessary then click "Save". The page will be saved as an HTML file with the images being stored in a separate folder. Just be real careful of copyright issues here of course.

For previous tips visit the Newbie Hot Tips page.

Power Users

If you're a techie power user you may already being receiving RSS feeds from news aggregators within your email client or browser. These aggregators allow you to subscribe to news feeds and blogs from around the world and are a great way to keep on top of information overload. The aggregators present the latest headlines and a direct link to the article. If you're not doing this you might want to check these out:

• Newsgator (Outlook 2000 or later, Win 98 or later)
• Amphetadesk (Cross platform)
• NewsMonster (Mozilla 1.0, Netscape 7.0 or later)
• NetNewsWire (Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) or greater)
• SharpReader (.NET 1.1, or with .NET 1.0 with service pack 2)
  
  For previous tips visit the Power Hot Tips page.

RedPaper is testing the market for information, ordered and paid for over the Web using a micropayment system, long touted as the missing component of online publishing. RedPaper allows anyone to publish and sell their writing, be it recipes for muffins, car maintenance instructions or hard-to-get court documents. The site has about 600 registered users as at early August, who have published several hundred articles on the site. Come on give it a go! http://www.redpaper.com/

If you're interested in some really weird photos check out HumanDescent. It's amazing what you can do with software these days as this guy creates a range of animals that you won't have seen before! http://www.humandescent.com/index2.shtml

Ever wondered why you get so many mortgage-related spam emails? This article will explain why and how the spam trail leads to big-name companies who are profiting from spammers' work: http://www.msnbc.com/news/940490.asp?0si=-

To search through all the articles in our online database use the search function on any page of our Website.

Another great quote, guaranteed to get you thinking!
"The future is invisible because our expectations are based on the intuitive linear view, rather than the historical exponential view." Peter J. Denning, author.

You can see our other Quick Quotes on the front page of www.netinsites.com; just refresh the page to see another one randomly selected from our database. Great for presentations or times when you want to appear to be a techno-dude(ss)!

To access previous newsletters visit our newsletter archive.

If you want to subscribe to this newsletter just visit www.netinsites.com and use the box at the top right.

Best wishes

Alex Garden

Internet Strategy | Website Design | Website Promotion | Web Text Messaging | Email Newsletters | Online Sports Games | Content Management