CES: Giving us what they want

Among my assigned supersessions this year at the Consumer Electronics Show-an event I am required by marriage to attend-was a panel cryptically called "Digging Into the New-New Digital." The panelists stayed on message with Bush-like doggedness, each hawking his company's position while feigning interest in "the consumer." Their latest idea for helping out the consumer is "home networking," or "any content on any device in the home."

So I could watch porn on the microwave? Well, no. According to my wife, that would be "home automation," a discredited technology. Home networking would simply (well, not simply at all) link every form of electronic communications now native to the typical middle-class household: TVs, set-tops, PCs, printers, land-line and cellular phones, Internet, stereos, radios, VCRs and DVDs, Palm Pilots and pagers, digital still cameras, wireless camcorders, video-on-demand, the baby monitor and the surveillance chip in your brain.

The "demand" driving home networking is the perception, among us consumers, that we have too many remote controls around the house. And don't talk to us about "universal" remotes, which can't be programmed by anyone dumber than Stephen Hawking.

The problem is that devices operate on a Babel of "platforms" that are inherently immune to a universal remote. The panelists insisted that this difficulty will be resolved-in precisely three years. But the response has been to add more devices to the remote, under the home-networking rubric.

Adding more stuff to an already dauntingly complicated (not to mention nonexistent) universal remote would render it instantly obsolete-a fact noted by the panel. Thus "home networking" must go beyond a one-size-fits-all remote to embrace a "more sophisticated user interface."

By this, the panel meant a display that would appear on a TV or PC screen. The interface would come to the consumer by way of a chip or a set-top box, or it would be interoperable through a "third device," with its own user interface, which would feature dozens of menus and submenus (like Windows 98, or a phone call to a company that has fired all its customer service people). This third device would be accessed by . . . a remote.

The silly (consumer) question I couldn't ask-because the panel took no questions-was, Why interoperability at all? Why not a noninterconnected solution in which people continue to use one well-crafted tool for one purpose?

The unspoken admission of my panel was that companies can't sustain their enormity on coherent and durable products that do one thing well. "Networking" is the Willie Sutton answer to why a TV can no longer be just a TV.

Networking isn't where consumers are. But that's where the money is.

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