_____________________________
Ian Morrison wrote :
I agree wholeheartedly. When Sony launched their first PlayStation so many
entertainment companies, who ought to have known better, spent a lot of
money on licenses and technology to develop interactive movies - a strange
idea but obvious if you're a narrow "Games + MPEG quality = Interactive
movies" thinker. Technology is the liberator and humans are an imaginitave
bunch - as long as the corporations don't try to package the services too
tightly around their expected service offering then real people will use it
as befits their real lives - not according to the business modeling and hype
of the marketeers. Post card messages and imaginative animations yes -
video as a parallel to every phone call, doubt it mate.
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Seconded here. This is what some refer to as "drinking your own bath water"
and
the wireless industry needs to hold up its guilty hand when accused of this.
Video
will be popular in niche application but most people *dont* actually want
video in
communication.
Here's a very interesting story to illustrate the point :
Silicon Graphics (remember them) could have been a major player in the
gaming market,
but lost their chance because they though the market was going to be
completely high
end CAD applications -
[EXTRACT] "I worked at SGI [Silicon Graphics] during the golden years, on
big monster machines that did amazing stuff," Bharat Sastri told the
conference audience. "But some of us arrived at the conclusion that the
future of 3-D was not in CAD, but in entertainment.
"The popular wisdom around the company was, "'Who's going to play games?'"
he related. "'And why would they need 3-D?' ... Of course, 10 years later,
companies like Sony and Sega and Nintendo have a combined market cap that's
10X of SGI's.
"To me, that's a classic example of drinking your own bath water and not
realizing it. SGI had the technology; they were 10 years ahead of everybody.
But that simple — what I call arrogance, you know — and denial of the
obvious, cost the company just a huge, huge opportunity," Sastri concluded.
Graham
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Sat Jul 21 12:24:31 2001