Who needs the digital home?

Tags: Intel, Microprocessors, IDF, Microsoft, Marketing, , Digital Home

The Economist has an excellent article calling into question the very basis of the digital home concept being promoted by Intel, Microsoft, and others. When I attended the Intel Development Forum, I found the digital home concept the least credible of all the technology demonstrations, simply because it made three false assumptions:

1. that ordinary people wanted only to consume content,


2. that they wanted a central media PC as the repository for all their digital media, and


3. that central media PCs would have none of the interoperability or security problems current PCs do.

The Economist nicely sums up these points and also notes that the digital home is a solution for which there is little or no problem motivating it:

All this points to a huge problem with the digital-home vision: the lack, among most consumers, of any sense of crisis about the status quo in entertainment. “We don't think many folks are looking for an electronic nerve centre in their homes,” says Pip Coburn, who runs Coburn Ventures, a technology-consulting and investment firm. After all, popping in a DVD, say, is so easy and works so well. By contrast, getting a digital home up and running promises several lost weekends of fiddling with manuals and settings, and hefty expenses in new gear. According to Mr Coburn's formula for evaluating new technologies, whereby adoption is a function of the users' sense of crisis (ie, motivation to change) outweighing their perceived pain of switching, the digital home ranks as a clear “loser”.

The result? I think one of the analysts captures it nicely:

As John Barrett, research director at Parks Associates, says, “it seems that we've concocted a new variant of the ‘paperless' office.” This, you recall, was the consensus a decade or so ago among technophiles (but almost nobody else), that computer technology would save our forests by freeing us from having to read and write on paper. Today's variant, says Mr Barrett, is “no more tapes, CDs, DVDs, discs.” In other words, expect them to be around for a very long time to come.

The bottom line: simplicity and flexibility trumps technology for consumers most days of the week. And with the issues of digital rights management and interoperability problems haunting the digital home reality, marketers of the digital home vision have their work cut out for them.