It's also a colossal illustration of Microsoft's hypocrisy. For years now -- most vocally in its antitrust defense -- Microsoft has touted the technology marketplace's Darwinian efficiency, in which only the best innovations survive and prosper. Windows won its colossal share of the personal computing market not because of monopolistic practices or ruthless business tactics but because it was the best choice, the company argued. Now, though, it seems that Microsoft must offer what might be called, charitably, a subsidy (or uncharitably, a bribe) to get other companies to adopt Windows CE. That doesn't bode well for CE's future, to put it mildly.

But the larger issue here isn't which technology the "convergence platform" of the future will be built upon (CE or Java or anything else). The real question is, what do these companies expect us to do with it?

The logic of "convergence" assumes that the households of the United States want to do something more with the lines into their home than what we do already: watch TV via cable, make telephone calls and use the Internet. No doubt in the longest run the prophets of convergence are right: Once all these media are digital, there's little reason for us to use different wires (or "pipes," as telecommunications types are fond of calling them) to receive the data.

In the long run, though, as John Maynard Keynes said, we're all dead. In the meantime, no one has figured out, in the short run of the next five to 10 years, why one would want to merge TV and the Net -- or to what uses one might put the combined media. "Convergence" remains a technological innovation desperately seeking a practical (or diverting) use -- and so far, the best ideas the industry has concocted are pretty lame.

Do you really want to pay good money each month to put a Web window around a TV show, so that you can look up sports statistics or order the scarf that a character in "Felicity" is wearing? "Movies on demand," long considered the "killer app" of interactive television dreams, is a scheme for which there is no hard evidence of actual consumer demand. Even if there were, it's hardly "interactive" -- it doesn't go much beyond what's available in hotel rooms today.

The fact is that most "convergence" applications chiefly serve the interests of marketers and advertisers and content owners, who dream of "metering" their audience's access to music and movies and TV shows. So corporations spend fortunes developing them in labs -- and are then shocked and horrified to discover that people aren't that excited by the result.

The real problem here is that industry executives imagine that, by sending a "fat pipe" into the home, they are going to tap into a pent-up demand for digital broadcast-style entertainment -- basically, a gussied-up version of today's TV that layers on a few interactive bells and whistles to facilitate e-commerce. Meanwhile, the people who actually want "fat pipes" and are signing up for fast cable-modem service and DSL lines are classic early adopters -- heavy Internet users who want an "always on" Net connection so they can surf the Web faster, download MP3 files and streaming video, send and receive e-mail without dialing up a connection, and even run a Web server from the home.

These users couldn't care less about plugging their TV into the Net -- they're the demographic group whose members have already begun turning their backs on TV because they spend so much time online.

This is the colossal mismatch of industry offering and customer desire into which Microsoft is sinking $5 billion. How much would you like to bet that, if those 2.5 million Windows CE set-top boxes ever get manufactured, the vast majority of them will end up as landfill?
salon.com | May 14, 1999

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