Technology Big Bang

A tech bubble buzz word is being reheated from the grave - with a vengeance: convergence. What's meant by that of course is the coming together of IT, media (content) and communications, as it has been expected a few years ago. But now, it appears to be for real - broadband access is more & more widespread, everybody has harddisks containing Gigabytes of music and the MP3 player of choice (it's got an apple logo on it), and the revenues of the music industry are crumbling. Here is a good BusinessWeek analysis of what's happening, and The Economist is also publishing The Technology Quarterly in its latest issue. Worth buying, I cannot copy everything!

I am really glad I decided about a year ago not to shell out a great deal of money for this ReVox HiFi system because I expected an important shift in technology. This decision is now vindicated with the advent of inexpensive technologies such as Airport Express, which makes available digital media streams everywhere in the house and beyond.

And similar things are happening in communications with Cablecom offering free telephone over its cable network, and British Telecom deciding to switch its traditional POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) over to IP by 2006. It's a pity that I don't have the research report any more which I wrote about telecom operators before Swisscom went public in 1998, predicting that this change was imminent even when BT was still laughing at Voice over IP ...