Convergence - Out! Fusion - In!
by Gil Rosen

All you convergence enthusiasts out there – hold your horses! We’ve got it all wrong! We’ve been fooled to believe convergence is here… well its not… at least true convergence isn’t. You ask why - I’ll start with an analogy. Imagine there are two parallel universes – ‘the water world’ and ‘land world’. Fast forward four billion years of evolution and imagine two parallel cultures have independently developed. Now fast forward additional 2000 years and we’re getting to the reality TV era. Imagine you are now watching a reality contest between two groups – “land” and “water”. Each group is given a challenge (separately) - to invent a means of travel and (oh’ one more detail…they don’t know the other world exists). When it’s time to take a look at the outcome (I’ll skip the emotional drama, group dynamics and commercial breaks) it would be plausible to believe that the ‘water people’ would have invented boats (or something that resembles them) and land people, cars.  Now let’s move on to the next challenge. Acquaint the groups with the other world, water with land and vice versa and tell them their means of transport should work on land AND water. What would you get? That’s right! You would get boats with wheels and cars with buoys! Is that what we were looking for? 

I know this is a totally far fetched scenario but the ‘made up’ outcome is highly likely. As the old saying goes when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. People, programs, corporations, do not knock down old ways or systems and are afraid to start fresh. Adding a patch, creating a new interface is convenient, fast, politically easy to promote etc. etc. Why rethink? OK…now back to convergence. My argument is simple and blunt - most new services today are NOT true implementation of how convergence is supposed to be. Current solutions – i.e mobile email, IM etc. etc are out right BAD. It’s a case of water people finding out there is land thereby quickly coming out with boats on wheels. 

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and many others are all land people that suddenly discovered their products have to work on mobile (or water). So what do they do?…mediocre changes. They’re sticking buoys to their cars like there is no tomorrow. Excuse me, to their oh so great, we are not worthy, this is how its supposed to be now Mobile email / IM, photo services or what have you “Now its also Mobile”.   

Enough is enough!

Their implementation are outright the opposite of innovative, it’s what I call devolution (like degifting…I know, another Seinfeld fan). Yes…you can now ACCESS it on mobile but the experience…oh the user experience just stinks. It’s a step forward in the wrong direction (them and the brontosaurus will share the same fate soon). So what am I looking for?. Very simple solutions that seem as if they were born into a time that both land and water are a known facts TO BEGIN WITH. This is today. It’s the FUSION ERA. The Mobile, PC and TV are just interfaces; IP is the bearer….create a good vehicle…something like A HOVERCRAFT. Now this is the kind of innovation I have been looking for at Techcrunch, Mobile Crunch, etc.!

So let the quest for Hovercrafts begin. Let’s not give anyone any discounts. From this moment or should I say posting onwards lets grade new companies, products and services with a big “Beware – a Boats on wheels” stamp or Fusion Certified, “it’s a Hovercraft baby” . We shall happily give credit to real innovation - let the FUSION ERA begin. 

Gil Rosen
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