Will Convergence Ever Happen?

Predictions

from the not-the-way-t-hey're-trying dept

After last week’s announcement that Yahoo! and SBC were teaming up to sell DSL, there were rumors that this was the first step in a process where SBC would end up buying Yahoo!. In the back of my head, all that reminded me of was the debacle known as Excite@Home, which was based on the same idea of merging a portal site with high speed acess. Now people are beginning to wonder if Yahoo! is about to make the same mistake. They talk about the weird obsession content and telecom companies have with “convergence” that never seems to play out – and never seems to go away. I think the main problem is that these companies all seem to concentrate only on how they can make money, rather than on what the consumer wants. Once they figure out what the consumer wants, then they should look into how to make money from providing that.