Glen Bayer's recent editorial on convergence has stirred some thoughts in my head, dealing with just how likely it is that a fully convergent entertainment device (sporting video-on-demand, instant messaging, and the like) is on the horizon.
Spoiler: I don't think we'll be seeing anything of the kind any time soon.
Oh, it's true that we do in fact have consoles and portables in the gaming sector that are dipping their toes outside their traditional purview. You can browse the Web in a limited fashion from a number of devices. Microsoft and Sony are both offering video content. But it's all just that—toe-dipping. These companies may indeed want to see the scenario where you sit in front of a single device and do everything, but unfortunately, they're too fixated on one key thing to make that fantasy a reality.
Every word that I've put down on N-Sider has come to you via a laptop running Linux. Most of our writers, of course, run Microsoft Windows; it's the market leader. But any of our staff could switch at any time, even multiple times a day, and they'd be able to do their writing no matter what platform they were on. This is possible because the Web isn't controlled by any one company in totality. It runs on a set of standards, contributed-to and agreed-upon (for the most part) by all the interested players. It becomes possible for the Web to pop up in new places; places that, had it been under the control of one company with its own vested interest in a captive audience, it would have never seen.
But when you start talking about content distribution, instant messaging, and game networking, the waters become far murkier. There are multiple players in each space, each running their own game, none talking to the others.
It's all good and well that Microsoft's Xbox LIVE lets players message each other and pop up notifications no matter what game they're playing, but what if that person is playing Wii? Forget for a moment any concerns with how low-featured the Wi-Fi Connection service is: if both services were equal, you'd still be effectively invisible if you were playing Wii and your friend his 360. Market segmentation eases this somewhat today as the hardcore tend to gravitate toward one platform with their friends in tow, but with the increasing focus on penetrating other markets, this could present a real problem.
Instant messaging is similarly an issue. We already have AOL's IM, Microsoft's, Yahoo's, Google's, and others. You can't actually cross-message between them without running clients that sign you in to all at once, with different accounts. They all have mostly the same features, but each company maintains their own walled garden that keeps you captive. On top of all that, the more mature game networking implementations also have their own instant messaging.
Why aren't these linked together? Because these companies insist on keeping separate in the vain hope that they will someday control the universe. In the meantime, innovation happens outside their space, and we have yet another walling-off to contend with—and are we seriously going to have to build entertainment devices that have to sign in to four or more messaging services just to be useful to everyone? What happens when a new player arrives on the scene and gains momentum?
Content distribution is yet another problem. For games, since you actually are distributing different products for different gaming platforms, this isn't such a big deal; but for music and movies, we're distributing the same things to everyone—just across several needlessly incompatible platforms. Consumers feel the pain of this already; they can't move their purchased music from an iPod to another player, for example. (The amusing bit is that the music sector does have a widely-usable solution: MP3. Content owners hate it because it grants them no copy protection, but many have been forced to sell it anyway because consumers demand portability and choice.) Consumer pain like this will be a significant inhibition to the adoption of content purchases and will seriously stifle any attempts to absorb content-on-demand into any entertainment device.
Before we see widespread fully-network-convergent devices in the entertainment space, the mature functions—such as those I listed above—need to become open. This doesn't necessarily mean that they have to go whole-hog and throw their code on SourceForge, but the industry players need to cooperate in these mature spaces. The lowest-hanging fruit would be a unified messaging and networking system that would cross gaming systems and computers, providing status information and messaging functionality to your friends, no matter where they were—even if that "where" was mobile on their phone, or some other unforeseen future possibility.
It doesn't necessarily follow that this is a "one-console future"; though if a scenario like I posited above were to come to pass, Sony and Microsoft might well find themselves in an excellent position to share a common platform since their differentiation would be reduced to fanboy fire and maybe a few developer relationships. Nintendo, keen on their own divergent gaming strategy, would find it hard to integrate, though. I don't think it would be productive to try to knit together the actual gaming platform, lest we stifle future innovation. It will probably never be a mature space that demands openness.
But if any of these convergence fantasies are to come to pass, I think the industry players need to take a serious step back and consider what it's going to take to make it happen. If they insist on maintaining their own great walls to keep their customers from talking to the customers of their competitors, they're going to keep issuing half-baked solutions that nobody will accept en masse, no matter how many features they have.
Spoiler: I don't think we'll be seeing anything of the kind any time soon.
Oh, it's true that we do in fact have consoles and portables in the gaming sector that are dipping their toes outside their traditional purview. You can browse the Web in a limited fashion from a number of devices. Microsoft and Sony are both offering video content. But it's all just that—toe-dipping. These companies may indeed want to see the scenario where you sit in front of a single device and do everything, but unfortunately, they're too fixated on one key thing to make that fantasy a reality.
Every word that I've put down on N-Sider has come to you via a laptop running Linux. Most of our writers, of course, run Microsoft Windows; it's the market leader. But any of our staff could switch at any time, even multiple times a day, and they'd be able to do their writing no matter what platform they were on. This is possible because the Web isn't controlled by any one company in totality. It runs on a set of standards, contributed-to and agreed-upon (for the most part) by all the interested players. It becomes possible for the Web to pop up in new places; places that, had it been under the control of one company with its own vested interest in a captive audience, it would have never seen.
But when you start talking about content distribution, instant messaging, and game networking, the waters become far murkier. There are multiple players in each space, each running their own game, none talking to the others.
It's all good and well that Microsoft's Xbox LIVE lets players message each other and pop up notifications no matter what game they're playing, but what if that person is playing Wii? Forget for a moment any concerns with how low-featured the Wi-Fi Connection service is: if both services were equal, you'd still be effectively invisible if you were playing Wii and your friend his 360. Market segmentation eases this somewhat today as the hardcore tend to gravitate toward one platform with their friends in tow, but with the increasing focus on penetrating other markets, this could present a real problem.
Instant messaging is similarly an issue. We already have AOL's IM, Microsoft's, Yahoo's, Google's, and others. You can't actually cross-message between them without running clients that sign you in to all at once, with different accounts. They all have mostly the same features, but each company maintains their own walled garden that keeps you captive. On top of all that, the more mature game networking implementations also have their own instant messaging.
Why aren't these linked together? Because these companies insist on keeping separate in the vain hope that they will someday control the universe. In the meantime, innovation happens outside their space, and we have yet another walling-off to contend with—and are we seriously going to have to build entertainment devices that have to sign in to four or more messaging services just to be useful to everyone? What happens when a new player arrives on the scene and gains momentum?
Content distribution is yet another problem. For games, since you actually are distributing different products for different gaming platforms, this isn't such a big deal; but for music and movies, we're distributing the same things to everyone—just across several needlessly incompatible platforms. Consumers feel the pain of this already; they can't move their purchased music from an iPod to another player, for example. (The amusing bit is that the music sector does have a widely-usable solution: MP3. Content owners hate it because it grants them no copy protection, but many have been forced to sell it anyway because consumers demand portability and choice.) Consumer pain like this will be a significant inhibition to the adoption of content purchases and will seriously stifle any attempts to absorb content-on-demand into any entertainment device.
Before we see widespread fully-network-convergent devices in the entertainment space, the mature functions—such as those I listed above—need to become open. This doesn't necessarily mean that they have to go whole-hog and throw their code on SourceForge, but the industry players need to cooperate in these mature spaces. The lowest-hanging fruit would be a unified messaging and networking system that would cross gaming systems and computers, providing status information and messaging functionality to your friends, no matter where they were—even if that "where" was mobile on their phone, or some other unforeseen future possibility.
It doesn't necessarily follow that this is a "one-console future"; though if a scenario like I posited above were to come to pass, Sony and Microsoft might well find themselves in an excellent position to share a common platform since their differentiation would be reduced to fanboy fire and maybe a few developer relationships. Nintendo, keen on their own divergent gaming strategy, would find it hard to integrate, though. I don't think it would be productive to try to knit together the actual gaming platform, lest we stifle future innovation. It will probably never be a mature space that demands openness.
But if any of these convergence fantasies are to come to pass, I think the industry players need to take a serious step back and consider what it's going to take to make it happen. If they insist on maintaining their own great walls to keep their customers from talking to the customers of their competitors, they're going to keep issuing half-baked solutions that nobody will accept en masse, no matter how many features they have.