Whenever a new medium hits town, the cry goes up, “Convergence, convergence. What is this new medium going to converge with?”
When television hit town, there were stories everywhere about the convergence of TV with magazines and newspapers. You weren’t going to get your magazines in the mail anymore. When you wanted an issue, you would hit the button on your TV set and the issue would be printed out in your living room. (We don’t make these things up. We just report the facts.)
When the Internet arrived, the same type of stories appeared. Now you can surf the Net while you watch TV. (Microsoft’s WebTV is the leading supplier of this service.)
Many companies have tried to combine a television set with a personal computer, with a notable lack of success—Apple, Gateway, and others.
Convergence has become an obsession at Microsoft. “Has William H. Gates become the Captain Ahab of the information age?” asked the New York Times recently. “Mr. Gates’ white whale remains an elusive digital set-top cable box that his company, the Microsoft Corporation, is hoping will re-create the personal computer industry by blending the PC, the Internet and the television set into a leviathan living-room entertainment and information machine.”
The PC, the Internet, and the television set will combine? It will never happen. Technologies don’t converge. They diverge.
Many Internet branders are falling into the convergence trap. They look for ways to blend the real world with the Internet world. Their ingenuity knows no bounds.
The media have been fanning the convergence fire for a long time. According to a 1993 article in the Wall Street Journal:
Shock is a common feeling these days among leaders of five of the world’s biggest industries: computing, communications, consumer electronics, entertainment and publishing. Under a common technological lash—the increasing ability to cheaply convey huge chunks of video, sound, graphics and text in digital form—they are transforming and converging.
The New York Times put it this way the same year:
Digital convergence is not a futuristic prospect or a choice to be made among other choices; it is an onrushing train. The digitalization of all forms of information (including the transmission of sensations) has proven itself to be accurate, economical, ecologically wise, universally applicable, easy to use, and fast as light.
Fortune was just as enthusiastic in 1993:
Convergence will be the buzzword for the rest of the decade. This isn’t just about cable and telephone hopping into bed together. It’s about the cultures and corporations of major industries—telecommunications (including the long-distance companies), cable, computers, entertainment, consumer electronics, publishing, and even retailing—combining into one mega-industry that will provide information, entertainment, goods, and services to your home and office.
The media are putting their money where their mouths are. In Europe, the Wall Street Journal publishes a monthly magazine insert called “Convergence.” Business Week runs an annual conference entitled “The Global Convergence Summit.”
With the media running off at the mouth about the convergence concept, is it any wonder that many corporations were all too eager to jump on the convergence bandwagon?
When asked by Fortune magazine what unique opportunities Compaq was looking at, the new CEO, Michael Capellas, said: “You’ll start to see devices converge. Who in the world doesn’t want to have their PalmPilot, their telephone, and their CD player all wrapped into one so they don’t have to carry three things on their belt?”
It will never happen. Technologies don’t converge. They diverge. Yet the hype marches on.
According to famous futurist Faith Popcorn, “Someday in the near future I’ll be watching Ally McBeal. I like the outfit she’s wearing. So I put my hand on the TV screen and she’ll interrupt the program and say, ‘Faith, do you like what I’m wearing?’ ‘Yeah,’ I’ll say. ‘I like your suit.’ And she’ll say, ‘Here are the colors it comes in.’ I’ll tell Ally that I’ll take just navy or black, maybe both. And she’ll say, ‘No you won’t, Faith. You’ve already got too many navy and black outfits in your closet right now. I think you should try red this time.’ And I’ll say okay, and the next day the red suit is delivered, in my size, to my home.”
When asked how soon this would happen, the famous futurist replied, “Within the next five years.”
Don’t hold your breath. Ally McBeal will be lucky if her TV show is still on in five years, never mind her personal shopping advice service.
While television sets and telephones are supposedly becoming computers, computers are supposedly becoming appliances that can receive television and radio programming as well as telephone calls.
Broadcast.com, for example, offers live broadcasts of more than thirty television stations and 370 radio stations. All available on your computer through the magic of the Internet. Meanwhile, rival Real Networks has put together more than 1,100 live stations on their lineup. Competitor InterVU has put together a network focused on business services.
Will people watch television programming on their computers? Sure, some people will, but most television viewing is likely to continue to be done on TV sets.
The truth is, technologies diverge. They don’t converge. A quick look at history validates the division theory.
People often confuse what’s possible with what’s practical. After Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969, the media were filled with stories about future colonists in space. Where they would live. What they would eat. How they would work.
(The moon is a great place to visit, but how many people would want to live there?)
What’s possible won’t happen just because it’s possible. It also has to be practical. A computer and TV combination would seem like a natural, but Apple, Toshiba, Gateway, and others have launched combination products that failed.
Recently Philips went one step further. In addition to a computer and a television tuner, the Philips DVX8000 features an FM/AM radio and a CD/DVD player. What more could you want?
Simplicity, ease of use, reliability, light weight, protection against early obsolescence, and low cost, for example.
Instead of accessing the Internet from your home television set, it is much more likely that you will someday have an Internet appliance. An electronic machine devoted to Internet connections only, especially for e-mail use.
Actually, there are a number of such products on the market, ranging in price from $100 to $200 plus the service fee. They include the MailStation by Cidco, TelMail by Sharp Electronic, the MailBug by Landel Telecom, and the PostBox from VTech Industries. (The BlackBerry is another divergence device that has quite a few enthusiastic users.)
Why are divergence products generally winners and convergence products generally losers? One reason is that convergence products are always a compromise. The Intel microprocessor inside the Philips DVX8000 should be good for three years or so. The home-theater half of the machine should last twenty years.
Before televisions combine with computers, you would think TV sets would combine with videocassette recorders. You can buy combination TV/VCRs, of course, but most people don’t. Recently we visited a consumer electronics store that had a wall full of such products.
“How are sales of your combination television/VCRs?” we asked the clerk. “Infinitesimal,” he replied.
Nor are many combination washer/dryers sold. Or microwave/stoves. Or telephone/telephone answering machines. Or copier/printer/fax machines.
The one glimmer of hope for the convergence concept is the clock radio. Enthusiasts are fond of citing the clock radio as a brilliant example of the power of convergence thinking. But in some ways, a clock radio is not a dual function device at all. Rather, it’s a single-function music alarm clock, a way of getting you out of bed in the morning without the shock of an earth-shattering noise. Not many people use their clock radios as a way to play the radio.
Other than the clock radio, the history of convergence products has been rather dismal. After World War II, the two biggest industries in America were the automotive industry and the airplane industry. Sure enough, pundits thought that the car was going to converge with the plane.
In 1946, Ted Hall introduced his Flying Car, which was received by a wildly enthusiastic public. Roads soon would become obsolete, traffic jams a thing of the past. You could go anywhere, anytime, with complete freedom of movement. Every major aircraft manufacturer in America hoped to cash in on Hall’s invention. The lucky buyer was Convair.
In July of that year, Convair introduced Hall’s flight of fancy as the Convair Model 118 ConvAirCar. Company management confidently predicted minimum sales of 160,000 units a year. The price was $1,500 plus an extra charge for the wings, which would also be available for rental at any airport.
In spite of the hype, only two ConvAirCars were ever built. Both are now said to rest in a warehouse in El Cajon, California.
Three years later, Moulton Taylor introduced the Aerocar, a sporty runabout with detachable wings and tail. The Aerocar received a tremendous amount of publicity at the time. The Ford Motor Company considered mass-producing it. But Taylor’s Aerocar met with the same predictable fate as Hall’s Flying Car.
It’s divergence that almost always triumphs, not convergence. Today we have many types of airplanes (jet planes, prop planes, helicopters) and many types of automobiles (sedans, convertibles, station wagons, sport utility vehicles), but almost no flying cars.
Would-be convergenists should also study the combination automobile/boat introduced with great fanfare by Amphicar, a German company. Like all convergence products, the Amphicar performed neither function very well. “Drives like a boat, floats like a car,” was the buyers’ verdict.
Bad ideas never really die. Paul Moller has spent thirty-five years developing the Skycar, a personal flying machine that is as easy to use as a car. Today, $50 million, forty-three patents, and three wives later, his dream is ready for liftoff.
Don’t laugh. What will look foolish several decades from now is often taken seriously today. As recently as June 24, 1999, the Wall Street Journal ran a major article on Moller’s sky dream on the front page of its Marketplace section. (Professor Moller has taken seventy-two orders, with a $5,000 deposit, for the Skycar.)
What motivates Moller also motivates Microsoft. The company poured millions of dollars into WebTV, a major effort to turn America’s 100 million television-owning households into Internet explorers.
Sure, WebTV is closing in on 1 percent of the market, but does any convergence product have much of a future?
There’s a lot of evidence that mixing “interactivity,” an Internet attribute, with the “passivity” of the television experience just isn’t going to work. Time Warner introduced the Full Service Network, the first digital interactive TV network, in Orlando, Florida, in 1994 and shut it down two years later.
A company called ACTV was founded in 1989 to bring interactive TV to the public. On average the company has lost $7 million a year for the past decade. Finally, ACTV is rolling out its first product in partnership with Fox Sports. For $10 a month, Fox fans will be able to use their remote control to click on to different camera angles, pull up stats, or cut to instant replays at any time during the game.
Will the average couch potato want to put down his Bud Light long enough to change the camera angle? We don’t think so. At least not when it’s third down and goal to go for the home team.
TV directors get paid big bucks to do that for us. Why would the average viewer want to do it for nothing?
Not only that. Spending the time figuring out the best camera angle will cause the watcher to miss the play. Not to mention the frustrations of the other people in the room who do not have the remote control in their hands.
Technology tends to triumph over logic. “If you build it, they will come.” Bill Gates, the manager of the high-technology team, is getting his players involved in convergence in a big way. In addition to his WebTV investment, Gates put $5 billion of Microsoft’s money into AT&T to help the company purchase a cable TV operation. In return, AT&T has agreed to license a minimum of five million copies of Microsoft’s Windows CE operating system.
The two companies hoped that a General Instrument set-top box, the DTC-5000, would be the entry point for all the digital information flowing into the home. In addition to five hundred channels of interactive cable, the DTC-5000 would also handle telephone service, video on demand, stereo audio, video games, and Internet access.
Recently AT&T backed out of its commitment to Microsoft, leaving 240,000 of those advanced set-top boxes gathering dust in a warehouse.
The Skycar, the Amphicar, the set-top box. Billions of dollars have been wasted chasing the convergence dream. But why do we make such a federal case out of the convergence follies?
Because brands cannot be built with convergence thinking. Unless you can clearly see the fallacy behind the convergence concept, you are unlikely to build a successful Internet brand. Most Internet ideas, most Internet brands, most Internet companies are based on convergence concepts. That’s why most Internet brands are likely to fail.
“People used to have to go to three or four different places to get something done” is the premise of many of our clients. “With our new Website, they’ll be able to do one-stop shopping.” (Whoops. Another client that needs to get the convergence speech.)
We get our hair cut and our clothes dry-cleaned at two different places, but we’re quite sure that doesn’t spell “opportunity” for some would-be entrepreneur. (We used to get our hair cut and our nails done at one place. Now we go to two different places. That’s divergence in action.)
Why do things divide? Divergence is consistent with the laws of nature, convergence is not.
In physics, for instance, the law of entropy says the degree of disorder in a closed system always increases. By contrast, a pattern of convergence would make things more orderly.
In biology, the law of evolution holds that new species are created by divergence of a single species. Convergence, instead, suggests that the combining of two species will yield a new one.
Invariably in nature you see things divide and not converge. We have hundreds of varieties of dogs and hundreds of varieties of cats, but very few catdogs, or chickenducks, or horsecows.
A company goes against the laws of nature when it tries to build an Internet brand on the convergence concept. “Are you getting three different kinds of electronic messages—voice-mail, e-mail, and fax? Fine, we can fix that for you.”
These new all-in-one services are called “unified messaging sites.” Instead of having to dial into your voice-mail, open your e-mail, or check your fax machine, you just go to the sponsor’s Web page and get all your messages (Messagesclick.com, Onebox.com, Telebot.com, mReach.com).
What’s wrong with a unified messaging service? Nothing, except it drives like a boat and floats like a car.