The Next Digital Decade

Last week, as I settled down at work after a two-week’s vacation, my Google Reader subscriptions were loaded with the news, blogs, gadgets marketing ads, videos and podcasts from the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show . Bill Gates’ last CES speech, including a funny video of his last day at Microsoft, was quite impressive. In the speech, he discussed the digital media industry past, present and the ever-changing future. He made a comment that the next decade of the digital media will be more connected than ever before and will be mostly driven through the software innovations.

Personally, when I think about the next decade of digital media, I am unable to make a decision due to so many choices. The contemporary digital media gadgets market is very fragmented. On top of that, the applications are mostly locked to the specific devices and sometimes to the service providers. We have multiple competing hardware architectures and operating systems. I wonder when will all the mobile applications be available on all devices? Why a digital device cannot be as general purpose as a PC? Why can’t I access the mobile applications without buying specific devices?

I believe that if we want to realize Bill Gates’ dream, the industry must move from custom hardware gadgets and proprietary operating systems to fewer more standard hardware client gadgets and operating systems. If we want ubiquitous connectivity and choice, we need fewer hardware architectures to be used in our TVs, Setup boxes, DVD/DVR players, Stereo systems, Video systems, Personal productivity gadgets, and gadgets that we cannot imagine as of now. Once we have fewer hardware architectures, we would naturally have fewer operating systems. I would be living a perfect world if I said that there would be a single architecture and one OS running on it. In reality, we will have fewer in the same way as the PC industry that has x86 as the dominant hardware architecture, and Linux, Windows and Mac OS as the main operating systems using the x86 architecture. Unfortunately, what I saw in the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show was the proliferation of more custom hardware gadgets and operating systems. Yes, devices were cool we had multiple different hardware architectures and different operating systems. This is bad for the application services developers because they would need to develop and test on more gadgets and operating systems to increase the market penetration. Pragmatically, there will be no way for any single application services developer to keep-up with the never ending combinations. Therefore, the more vendors enter the market, the more fragmented market will become. Consequently, the next era of the digital media may actually become less connected due to the proliferation of the non-compatible devices.

It would be presumptuous of me to give an advice to any digital media provider. However, it is quite clear that unless industry leaders join forces to agree on a fewer set of digital media hardware architectures and operating systems; I do not see a ubiquitous connected digital media decade. A recent research has concluded that there is at least 30 realistic combinations mobile handset, carrier, and operating systems in the North America market alone. This makes application providers’ lives very difficult as they have to develop and test on every single combination to reach everyone. Imagine, if the contemporary websites had to do the same? Or the Internet Browser concept never existed? Remember, those fat client days?

Good or bad, as of now, the contemporary digital media vendors such as Apple, Palm, Microsoft, Sony, Panasonic among hundreds of others, have mostly their own operating systems and hardware architectures. Google’s Android is one step in the right direction but its success is also argued. No body can predict what will happen in the next 5-10 years but I sure hope that digital media hardware architectures become as common as x86 and hopefully, we can have operating systems such as Android, Windows Mobile, and Mac OS among others using those common architectures.