For my inaugural blog with the CTC I thought I'd explain my point of view, which is to mix pragmatic idealism with a positive sense of skepticism.  And I will do what I can to toss in the international perspective, one frustratingly missing from so many technology discussions in the US.

Huh?  What does this mean?  Well, I love hearing all the enthusiastic pronouncements of three-screen convergence (which started in, oh, 1994) but I always love to start musing about all the , well, things that seem to act like magnets repelling each other. 

Sooo, it is not that my skepticism will be negative, reactionary or contrarian, because I love some of the things either heading down the proverbial pike or already at my offramp (OK, OK, so I couldn't resist extending the metaphor)-like the Amazon Kindle or its soon-to-be competitor(s), among them Plastic Logic.  I love the concept of the netbooks but my experience thus far with three of them (one from ASUS and two from Acer) has been less than stellar (read:  want to throw them out the window).  Still, $200-400 is not bad.

So, speaking of international and therefore travel, let's think about the (non) convergence of what we take on our business trips.  I met a guy in the airport and we started to do an inventory of what he had to carry on his trip.  It is worth repeating:

Laptop; Blackberry; Bluetooth earpiece; Skype headset; iPod, backup drive (My Passport); Kindle; noise-cancelling earphones; backup headset for the Blackberry; European mobile phone; iPhone; digital camera; adapters . . .  And then his plane had to go. 

OK, so add in all of the chargers, extra batteries and the wires (including the USB cables) and you have a real mess there.  Some people also carry a portable DVD player.  And I know some people who carry everything about plus an iTouch or a Palm Pilot.

Of course he could have merged some of the devices (e.g., iPod and mobile phone into the iPhone) but you get the point.  He's a business person not an IT guy.  Who really wants to spend the time to converge the data or hire someone to do it?  All of us like to have reliable devices.  Once one works we do not want to risk moving the data.  Besides, he was from Chicago, not Southern California.

True convergence?  Uh-huh.