January 29th, 2004
Master and Commander: The PC and the Media Hub
I love how business writers, well most every biz/tech writer actually, fall so easily into the whole “Holy Grail” trap, penning stories touting the search/battle/discovery of the bestest winningest winner of all time.
Ever notice how those prognostications almost never come true? Ever notice how totally wrong they are? It’s like when Wired puts a movie on its cover, you know it’s gonna dog at the box office.
Newsflash people: there’s not going to be a winner in the digital home entertainment category. No one’s gonna care about “hub” or “spoke”, since those are totally 80s network analogies anyway.
Is it impossible for a reporter, the person charged with following an industry segment, to synthesize some of the info they’ve collected over the months into a more holistic point of view? Would it be too much to ask for any of these mongrels to read what they’ve written and perhaps push the story in a more productive direction?
I’ve read a lot of Dean Takahashi stories over the years, and he’s generally good and capable. So maybe he just packed it in on this one. Can’t say I blame him, it’s mostly dumb analyst quotes.
Two major major trends completely destroy the hub/spoke model in this story.
First, hardware is on a cheap, powerful curve, meaning that processing power, storage, etc. will be plentiful within your home network. This trend influences not a consolidation of power, but a distribution of power. This directly contradicts the hub model.
Second, intelligent wireless networks are the future. From 802.11g to Apple’s Rendezvous, the trend is in self-organizing networks. Take the emergence of new devices that allow your run-of-the-mill USB device (HD, scanner, etc.) to access an Ethernet network. Again, the Hub is being disintermediated.
The future is about flexibility, about the ability for a rag-tag set of components to deliver more functionality together than they could ever do apart. It’s P2P, baby.
Think about this: What could you do with a keyboard that had 128MB of flash inside it? What if it was Wifi and you added it to a Wifi Internet connection and a Wifi TV? Could you perhaps do all your email/surfing on a regular keyboard and any enabled display in your house?
The only thing holding us back right now is the non-ubiquity of digital displays in the home. And that’s a hurdle we’re already in the midst of clearing.
From the San Jose Mercury News:
(this is a little old, but i generally don’t read biz sections)