Many people think of the electronics industry as mature. In areas such as desktop computers and servers, it may well be. But in other market segments, innovation is booming and the growth potential is staggering. The intersection of the consumer electronics market and the PC industry is particularly dynamic, and it offers many exciting opportunities to developers and consumers alike.
Among other trends, the convergence of several formerly separate spheres is reshaping the electronics industry. The traditional computer ecosystem is converging with the mobile telephony world. At the same time, the consumer electronics world is converging with the PC world. The result of all this convergence is a new “mobile computing” ecosystem.
When Nokia, a behemoth in the mobile phone industry, launched its first netbook late in 2009, it crossed the line into a territory normally dominated by PC makers. This blurring of traditional product lines will continue and products themselves will evolve as the merger between cell phones and netbooks accelerates.
We’ll all be carrying small computers that we can use to make phone calls and access the Web continuously no matter where we are. Wi-Fi hotspots will no longer be necessary. The “mobile computer” will include plenty of memory for our tasks, a camera, and most likely GPS functionality.
But the mobile computer itself is just one example of a device spawned by the convergence of technologies. While in Japan a few months ago, I saw a demonstration of an intelligent but easy to use mobile computing device. This small device had an LCD screen and one push-button on one side and a camera lens on the opposite side.
Capturing an image of a street sign written in Kanji characters yielded an image of that same street sign translated into English. This was achieved by searching the Internet by submitting an image and displaying the answer as an image. Emerging mobile computing technologies make these capabilities possible.
The convergence of the consumer electronics industry and the PC world is already well underway. Today, consumers can use either a laptop computer or a television as the foundation of their home theater systems, as both devices already incorporate all the relevant multimedia interfaces, most notably HDMI.
Many homes have their entire systems connected via HDMI—game consoles, Blu-ray players, HD video players, and many other devices—through an HDMI receiver to their HD televisions. With new developments in mobile HDMI, we’ll soon be able to watch HD movies on our mobile phones.
Both traditional computer companies and cell-phone companies want to be leaders in this new mobile computing ecosystem. Billions of people will be clamoring for the latest devices, so the competition will be intense. I expect to see big changes in the constellations of technology companies that provide consumer electronics. We will see new winners and losers—new partnerships and new sets of leading companies—in this new world.
Obviously, you need very fast links, connections, and protocols to enable these applications. As companies develop faster, smaller devices that cost less, they will need to use new technologies and face huge technical challenges. The largest fundamental technology issue besides speed is power management.