(carrying on directly from my previous post)

Stuff that didn’t even occur to me:

• Tablets. This isn’t a great shock; forecasts and models are all based on evolutionary change to existing ecosystems and technology. Apple’s iPad success was a revolutionary change that no analyst could have predicted. Interestingly, the iPad is a sort of half-way house between the old PC-based home and the potential digital home, offering an easy-to-use, flexible consumption device that hides all that techie stuff. It helps that in iTunes, Apple has delivered the equivalent of another concept in the report: the third-party media/content aggregator.
• Social networks. Like tablets, the rise and rise of the likes of Facebook, and Twitter has fundamentally changed consumers’ relationship with their home technology. A PC, TV, or mobile phone in the home is now merely a gateway to accessing friends and the wider community rather than a solution in itself. Arguably, this is a far healthier relationship, aside from the desperate need to communicate absolutely everything, obviously.
• The move to web-based services and then back to apps. This is an interesting one to consider; as a consumer technology analyst, I naturally expected digital home experiences to be delivered via installed software — software that was perhaps even installed at the factory for devices like TVs. The growth of Flash, HTML5, Ruby on Rails, etc. meant that many services and experiences were delivered via a browser. This makes sense in retrospect: once a compatible browser is available on a device, a service becomes available with very little (if any) tweaking — much better than having to rewrite for every architecture or operating system. More interesting still is the reversal of this trend as app stores and downloadable apps for phones, tablets, and PCs aim to “monetize” consumer service delivery; you lose some of that web browser compatibility if you code directly for iOS, Android, or Windows, but you gain consumer engagement (and, potentially, direct revenue).

(I’ll finish off this series of posts with a look to the future — is the digital home a redundant concept?)