Remember when convergence was touted as the inevitable end of product of technological advancement? If you were reading Wired magazine about ten years ago, then we bet you do. We were asked to invision a world where our televisions, computers, and telephones would no longer be separate, unconnected boxes, but rather they would coalease into some sort of single fabrica-ultima: the all seeing, all-connecting, final device. A magic box.
It’s hard to tell whether or not the concept of convergence is a legitimate trend, or simply part of the propaganda that Wired was pushing at the time to try to sell everybody on the Internet. But, if we were to look into the future, would we see convergence? Is it likely?
The more we investigate the concept, the more convergence seems like such a technological no-brainer that it seems like it should have occurred more often than is presently the case. This is especially true when one considers the minimum criteria that define various types of devices. Never mind the future — why don’t we have convergence now?
It seems that the big obstacles keeping a wide number of functions from converging into a single device break down into a couple categories.
Legal:
Thanks to the great big mess that constitutes our patent system, and the resultant confusion around software patents, companies are hesitant to sink millions of dollars into research on a product when there’s every possibility that some patent troll (who may never have actually produced anything) could sue the pants off of them.
Closed systems:
A converged media device, by definition if it’s going to be of any use, must be able to play or display lots of different kinds of file formats. Thankfully, there are open standards for almost any kind of media you might want to use; unfortunately, there is every financial insentive for hardware vendors to avoid fully supporting them, and content creators have been reluctant to give up even the tiniest bit of control over how their products can be used. The results are closed systems, proprietary file formats, and broken DRM.
The reasons for these obstacles aren’t likely to go away any time soon is because of the money that’s at stake. Sure, you could create a device that could play any kind of media, you could use open standards, and what not. But the prospect of selling the device, with millions of people locked into your propriety world, giving you their money because there’s no one else available as an option, where you could bleed the consumers dry — that’s a prize to wonderful to not reach out for.
We don’t think that convergence is very likely, though we might be wrong. The obstacles that really stand in the way are not technological, they are psychological. Fundamentally, they arise from human nature, and that’s not likely to change any time soon.
