The Networked Neighborhood

That was the take-home message from "Digging Into the New-New Digital," a panel at last month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Moderator Tim Bajarin, president of Campbell, Calif.-based research consultancy Creative Strategies, led six speakers through a discussion about what needs to be done before networked homes can be seamlessly operational.

All the panelists agree that a standards push is crucial to the cause, but there were some differences about how they view the role of third-party integrators, such as VARs and solution providers.

On the surface, it seems intuitive that as home-networking devices such as PCs, TVs and other media boxes become more sophisticated, it will be an almost forgone conclusion that vendors will need integration partners who can seamlessly install the technology into people's homes. "We're trying to sell very sophisticated devices to people who are fundamentally uneducated [about them]," says Scott Smyers, vice president of network and systems architecture for Sony.

Brad Kayton, vice president of marketing for home-networking device maker Prismiq, San Mateo, Calif., says retailers are beginning to add installation and consulting divisions, either in-house or outsourced, to perform these tasks. "The average retailer sees a huge opportunity for installation and consulting services, and solution providers are getting interested as well," he says.

But Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of Intel's desktop platforms group, says the involvement of these players isn't necessarily a good thing. "We as an industry have flat-out failed if we can't deliver solutions that consumers can't install themselves," he says.

It is true that a successful standards push will foster the creation of more plug-and-play devices, which in turn will minimize the help users will require to make everything work together. But that hoped-for day is clearly a ways off. To wit: After telling the audience that an additional software layer is needed to make all the existing protocol layers work together, a spokesman from BravoBrava, a software developer in Union City, Calif., was unable to get such a demo to work properly.

All the panelists spoke at length about what the industry still needs to accomplish in the standards arena. The situation right now is reminiscent of the race to develop networking standards in the mid-1990s. "As we move into consumer electronics, we need to solve the interoperability issues once and for all," says David Nagel, CEO of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based PalmSource.

Sony's Smyers adds that consumers want to be able to buy best-of-breed products in all categories, even though, frankly, one of the best ways to ensure that a home network runs correctly right now probably would be to get all the devices from a company like Gateway or Hewlett-Packard and run them across MSN. But Smyers says this situation isn't optimal. "We need consumers to not be faced with the challenge of having to buy an all-Sony or an all-company-X network," he says.