Erasing the Boundaries
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Technology used to be so simple.
In the old days, you listened to music on your iPod while exercising. During an idle moment at the office you might use Google on your Microsoft Windows PC to search for the latest celebrity implosion. Maybe you would post an update on Facebook. After dinner, you could watch a DVD from Netflix or sink into a new page-turner that had arrived that day from Amazon.
That vision, where every company and every device had its separate role, is so 2011.
The biggest tech companies are no longer content simply to enhance part of your day. They want to erase the boundaries, do what the other big tech companies are doing and own every waking moment. The new strategy is to build a device, sell it to consumers and then sell them the content to play on it. And maybe some ads, too.
Last week's news that Google is preparing its first Google-branded home entertainment device -- a system for streaming music in the house -- might seem far afield for an Internet search and advertising company, but fits solidly into an industrywide goal in which each tech company would like to be all things to all people all day long.
"It's not about brands or devices or platforms anymore," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner. "It's about the ecosystem. The idea is to get consumers tied into that ecosystem as tightly as possible so they and their content are locked into one system."
So Facebook, which has half of its users accessing it from mobile devices, has dabbled in phones and is said to be moving even more firmly in that direction. Apple, once just a computer maker, already gets most of its profit from mobile devices and is eyeing televisions, which would play content from iTunes.
Amazon created the Kindle Fire tablet, and there is intense speculation it is developing a Kindle Phone -- a prospect that became more believable two weeks ago when Microsoft's senior director of Windows Phone development, Brandon Watson, joined the retailer. He said the opportunity, which he did not specify, was "too big to pass up." Microsoft, which has tightened its relationship with Nokia to again be a major player in phone software, has placed its Xbox in millions of living rooms as a home entertainment portal.
First Published February 13, 2012 12:00 am
