Perhaps during the Christmas shopping season you stopped to drool over one of the many flat-panel TVs that seemed to be ubiquitous this shopping season. Of course the reason that you were drooling instead of buying is quite simple. Who wants to pay $10,000 for a TV? The question becomes especially relevant when it seems more than ever that TVs are becoming more like computers: the technology changes so fast that in less than a year you will be left with an obsolete model.
It used to be that a TV was the one piece of consumer electronics that was the inverse opposite of computers. They were relatively cheap and that small investment could last five or ten years (sometimes even longer). Since the 1960’s when Japanese manufacturers dominated the TV manufacturing industry, TVs needing service has become something of the past. You turned it on and it just worked. Now wouldn’t it be nice if your computer worked like that?
Then came the 90’s and Convergence was the buzzword. Since everything was having microprocessors emedded in them anyways, why not make them full-blown PCs? Even to this day convergence is a holy grail for many different kind of companies despite the fact that with only a paltry number of exceptions, convergence devices are complete failures. If you make your device do more than one thing you introduce a lot of complexity and if anything even minor goes wrong, the device stops working. Take one of those printer/fax/scanner/photocopier machines that are so popular. If one day your printer stops working (and who hasn’t had a printer problem?) you have not only lost your printer, but your fax machine/scanner/photocopier is out of order as well.
The biggest beneficiaries of all this convergence are traditional computer firms since they can get their high-tech tentacles snaking into all sorts of devices that normally would be the domain of the consumer electronics firms. Apple’s iPod is a good example of a traditional computer company invading and completely overtaking a category dominated by Sony’s walkman. What we don’t hear about very often is the failure of convergence which is why [url="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&e=1&u;=/nm/20041227/tc_nm/bizdisplay_dc" title="this article"]
this article[/url] today on the myriad failures by silicon chip manufacturers to break into the TV biz was interesting.
It reads like a VIP list of failures—Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Intel, and Philips. Each of these technology powerhouses tried to conquer a promising technology for making thin, big-screen televisions—called LCoS, or liquid crystal on silicon—only to back out in defeat.
