Digital Convergence

Digital convergence is the buzzword "they" coined to describe how the TV stations are competing with the Cable company, how the electric company wants to be your telephone company, in other words how the evolving development of digital products is blurring the distinctions that are really important in the legacy structure (economy).

For instance: people are doing without landline phones in their houses, people are getting their phone service using internet telephony (Vonage), my mother-in-law gets her phone service from the cable company.

Now, palm pilots are pagers, pagers are cell phones, and cell phones are cameras. Just in the world of work, what does it mean when 25% of your employees are walking around with digital audio recorders and cameras? What does it mean when 5% of your employees have audio recorders, cameras, and blogs to share with the world?

How many employers have policies regarding employee use of digital photography in the workplace? Or recording the manager's pep talk and posting it online?

Here's an interesting/tragic story of a Microsoft employee who saw a truck on the loading dock unloading a shipment of Apples, through that was pretty cool, took a quick Palm photo, blogged it , and now he's shopping his resume online.

Increasingly the name of the device you're using doesn't mean anything, and policies based on device names will cause frustration. The world is changing, and change has winners and losers, profits and loss, stress and fun.