The home server will not be so marvelous as manufacturers have imagined.
[+] Mistake an industrial demand for the consumer demand.
Marketing staff in high-tech industry often have this headache: when a new product is introduced, it might create user experience which consumers never had before. How do you know that consumers will accept and buy it?
Because of that, however, the development of high-tech products is full of fun (of course, for manufacturers involved, it might be a tormenting life-and-death bet). Whatever it might be, the least a manufacturer should not do is to mistake a demand of the industry itself for the demand of consumers.
One example is the WAP Mobile Internet in 2000. In the midst of the dotcom tide, telecom equipment and handset manufacturers, in an effort to stop their sales from further declining, successfully persuaded telecom operators to enter the mobile Internet market. Eventually, an industrial demand is disguised into the demand of consumers, who won't come to pay the bill.
Today, another industry-hyped high-tech sector is about to move. The sector is called digital home, whose mobilization has extended to the hardware/software manufacturing, as well as the media sector, and caused the opposition and alliance of the traditional consumer electronics industry and the IT industry.
While manufacturers involved believe firmly that the vision is eventually going to become true, there are arguments about how it looks like. Here I would like to warn once again: it is dangerous for businesses to mistake their own demands for the demands of consumers. It is impossible to get a look at the real picture of the future development without knowing the difference of the two first.
[+] Now, the demand for the digital home is just from manufacturers.
The origin of the digital home sector is very simple: the slowdown in the market growth of the IT hardware and software industry. The practice of driving the market performance with product functions, which was effective in the past, is at a standstill, at least for now.
Consumers are no longer desperate about the CPU speed or upgrading software. A desktop with Windows XP would be good enough for at least two or three years, so long as it could enable Internet access and offer Office software.
Manufacturers, however, are trying to create space for consumers to buy their second computer, for example, a desktop at home and a notebook for use on the move. Essentially, the digital home is an attempt to create a market segment of a second computer in the sitting room.
For traditional consumer electronics manufacturers who have been tied to sitting rooms and kitchens so far, the market has been saturated for a long time. If, in this new digital home tide, they could booster their sales, or even introduce new changes to the long-stagnant sales rank list, that would be a good opportunity, wouldn't it?
For every additional computer installed in the sitting room, Intel will be able to sell one more CPU and Microsoft one more Windows system, not to mention all the other suppliers—the graphic card, sound card, hard drive, and memory manufacturers can all benefit from a share.
[+] Does the digital sitting room need a control center?
Hence the concept of the home server is proposed, holding that, in the future, all digital appliances will need a host computer, which can not only access the Internet, but also connect all the appliances (through wired or wireless links), store and deliver digital contents. The home server, of course, will allow remote control.
Obviously, this seemingly inevitable vision is a demand of manufacturers. The question is: is it a demand of consumers too? So far, there has been such user experience of connecting all other appliances into one, which is the TV set (it connects the audio system, the DVD player and the game player).
Is the home server going to take the place of the TV set, or becomes a peripheral product of the latter, or to turn the TV set into just a display panel? If it is the first case, the home server must have a built-in TV. So far many products have been introduced with the aim of integrating the TV with the computer, but none is successful because of the problem of the operating interface.
For the second and third cases, the home server is nothing but a network hub plus a keyboard. It doesn't matter at all whether it is placed at the sitting room or not. Let's take another viewpoint. It is better to connect the computer in the study with the TV in the sitting room through wireless links, isn't it? If so, there's no reason for consumers to buy a home server.
In addition, we all believe that digital appliances should be networked. Yet there is another scenario: the digital appliances are networked, but not through a host. In other words, if there's a standard that enables the networking and data exchanging among the digital appliances, there's no need for a host.
[+] The imagination of a digital home
IT manufacturers have made a lot of efforts to make the computer an essential part of the sitting room. In the first place, the interface is reduced to contain only icons. And then the keyboard and mouse are replaced by the remote controller, in an assumption that this would be easier to use and fit better with the habits in the sitting room.
Yet underneath this mindset is a fundamental contradiction: to become the control center of the household, the home server should have powerful function, far more powerful than what a remote controller could handle. Too simple to enable the complicated functions, remote controllers have become a big trouble for digital appliance users.
One crucial challenge is the fact that the user will have to handle the computer two meters away, which makes it difficult to read things on the screen. I tried such a product before and was very eager to throw away the remote controller and grab a keyboard. But I found soon that I had to look down at the remote controller and up at the screen two meters away again and again. That is enough to drive the user mad.
There are two possible solutions. The first is to move the host back into the study, give it the keyboard and mouse back, keep it at an appropriate distance from the screen and get it wirelessly connected with other appliances. The second is to make a full-functional remote controller with a keyboard, a wheel (to replace the mouse and be handled with a finger), and a LCD display, as a mini-sized PDA.
In other words, consumers may control other digital appliances by looking at the display of the remote controller. As a matter of fact, we have seen such remote controller interface on air conditioners, and they fit perfectly with consumers' experience of using the appliance. The key of the digital home is the remote controller in consumers' hands, not a host at a remote end.
The home server will not be so marvelous as manufacturers have described. They will be nothing but a carrier capable of storing digital contents. It does not matter where they are placed. If digital appliances could be networked without a host, what consumers hold in their hands would be the real control center with preliminary computing powers.
2005/10/16 - By Digitalwall.com - Way to
China Internet/Telecom )
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The Web 2.0 Revolution (7) Death of the Intermediaries - 2006/10/15
Another Picture of Digital Home Market - 2005/10/16
Corporate Website a Handful (3) Strategic Alliance Why? - 2003/10/12
What the mass market needs is not "household appliances", which is a frightening term. Mass market consumers still need a little more time to forget the terrible feeling of being a "computer idiot". What they need are "digital furniture" that is easier to use. From the standpoint of hardware, "digital furniture" means "to put the digital gene into the furniture". Furniture? They are chairs, tables, lamps and kitchenware, aren't? That's crazy. What do those things need the digital gene for? To have "computing ability"? Let's look at an example. Imagine a "digital photo frame" that displays images files downloaded from 
If we dig a little bit deeper, we could see that one of the challenges for digital appliances is the fact that distributors don't know how to sell the product. Appliance stores don't know how to sell TVs with the functions of the computer. Vice versa, computer stores might be at loss to sell appliances. In the future, when furniture is digitalized too, a new business mode will emerge: "digital furniture stores". The staff at such stores will be aware of consumers' requirements for furniture and the features of IT products. One day, when there are enough digital furniture and digital appliances, they will be put into a special store to improve the cost-effectiveness. The question is: when will that day come? For me, I am hopeful. 
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