The Battle For Your Pocket

from the bigger-pockets,-please dept

Now that more and more "converged" devices are hitting the market, some are wondering if it really makes sense. This isn't particularly new. For years, people have made the claim that converged devices tend to do everything badly. That's not exactly true. Most converged devices really start out as a specialty device, and the maker simply tries to tack on some other feature to make it more appealing. That type of convergence rarely works. Truly converged devices need to be designed from scratch with the converged features in mind, which is a difficult, but not impossible process. So, while it's easy to make fun of badly converged devices, that's no reason to write off the concept entirely. In fact, in the battle for customer ownership, it's likely that convergence is only going to continue. Companies realize that the "pocket" is a scarce resource, and the battle is on to take over that space from other devices. A much more interesting question is how convergence impacts business models. If you look at many converged devices, business models are going to get squeezed out. People who will pay for two separate service fees on two separate devices, will expect to pay a much smaller service fee on a combined device.