I was going through The Business Standard Motoring March 2001 condensed version, which is supplied to subscribers of the daily publication, and an article there concerning the Honda Monkey made me realize what was wrong with convergence.

For those who aren’t bike fans, a word portrait of the Monkey. The Monkey is a motorbike with the wheels of a scooter. This vehicle looks cute, but has some problems. In attempting to ensure a convergence between the scooter and the motorbike, the vendor has thrust upon us a vehicle, which lacks the best of both vehicles, and includes their worst features.

Please note that I have nothing against Honda. I wish that I can own the mean 140 bhp Honda X-11, and zoom around, scaring the daylights out of everybody. This bike will have two rear-view mirrors, but not for the purpose of ensuring safe turns. I shall use them to view the Ferraris and the Jaguars receding into the background... but here, I’m dreaming. Let’s get back to the story.

The Monkey, thanks to the small wheels, lacks the stability of a real motorbike. Also, the design of the bike ensures that you can’t carry luggage with the ease possible in a standard scooter. What I mean to say is that while one looks at convergence, one loses out on features. And yes, while all of us love to hate creeping featurism, here, the features lost are the ones we need and enjoy.

Earlier, thanks to limited options, the convergence mania was restricted. When TV came, some spoke of reading newspapers on TV, which, thankfully, did not materialize. But with the Internet, chaos broke free. In technical terms, the Net is a network of networks. But insofaras the layman is concerned, the Net is the media of media. And suddenly, everything started moving to the Net.

This has ensured that the Net, the best media so far, has never been seen as a true, pure media in its own light. People have felt that convergence—of video, audio, text, and the kitchen sink thrown in for good measure—is the way to go.

And so, there you have it. Portal sites which mimic magazines and offer some rudimentary video, while lacking the portability and convenience of a real magazine, and the high quality of a real TV. Radio music fed through the Net, which requires that you sit in front of the big clunky PC which is bigger than the old valve radios, which proliferated before the transistor was invented. And people from the office visiting cricket sites, while earlier one listened to live commentary from a small transistor radio, which costs a paltry hundred bucks.

This madness must end. True, convergence works great with a Swiss knife, but in the field of infotech and consumer electronics as a whole it has been a let-down. Instead of adding to the experience and usability, convergence has usually minimized these things.

And the mania has had people talk about microwave ovens, which download recipes from the web, which is foolish and hilarious when one thinks about it deeply. I mean, it is as silly as wishing a convergence between a car and a plane! (Actually, it has been done. A gentleman called Paul Moller has spent 35 years making the Skycar. And well, as for the marketing success—how many have you seen lately?)

Parthian shot

Convergence is largely built around marketing hype, and reminds us of the dot-com mania. The logic here is that if everybody is doing it, it can’t be wrong. Also, it is much like how companies behaved when the web started growing. Everybody who was anybody was trying to outdo somebody on the web. The issue of convergence has been covered quite well by Al Ries and Laura Ries in The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding. In this book, the authors have shown how divergence is consistent with the laws of nature, and convergence is not. Or, as Sherlock Holmes puts it so finely in A Study in Scarlet, "One’s ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature."

BALAJI N The views expressed here are those of the author