iTechNote

The Digital Decade, as addressed by Bill Gates on October 2001 is a vision of making PC the platform to supersede TV. In the Digital Decade, you’ll no longer think of the PC as a tool you use only to carry out specific tasks, it will become something you come to rely on all the time.

How true is the above statement in the beginning of 2007? As Bill Gates addressed the crowds in CES 2007 in Las Vegas, “Over 40 percent of U.S. homes now have multiple personal computers. And if you look at young people, the new generation, they actually spend more time on their Windows PC than they spend watching TV. Now that’s a pretty dramatic change.” In other words, the market is ready for Digital Decade.

The hurdles of realizing Digital Decade had always been PC was not the focal point of a family - it was television. PC was first for scientific calculations and later business spreadsheets. When multimedia finally arrived with the launch of Intel Pentium processor, there was not much to play except encyclopedia contents.

The actual turning point was the Internet. As always, the evolution started with scientific applications. When few individuals started to build web sites, the first Internet boom took off. People started to exploit the potentials of Internet up to the point of hard crash landing. There were insignificant amount of useful contents and readers never had a chance to interact.

The next evolution is brought about by Google with its innovative ads products. Contents are everywhere overnight with millions of amateur publisher willing to write to earn cash. These amateurs setup very competitive web sites aka blogs sharing information about anything that could attract readers. These blogs are like millions of TV channel, each attracting a handful of readers.

With the success of Flickr and YouTube, people suddenly find out they can watch video previously only available from the box in the living room. There is absolutely no more reason to leave your PC to watch TV again. The more they watch the more are converted to publishers themselves. The Digital Decade has silently arrived.

With proliferation of portable devices, new needs start to arise. There are so much contents and so little time for each of us. We want to watch, publish and share whenever and wherever we are. The challenge is simply how to achieve the vision.

The era of building up a platform will come to an end and only few vendors are going to survive in the next stage. All the survivors must collaborate to bring seamless Connected Experience to the end users. No user will only use one platform. Microsoft, Nokia, Sony and other platform builders must learn to work together.

The Connected Experience has far more impact than Digital Convergence, which serves only as the first step in Digital Decade.