The technology industry is annoying me suddenly. I read of technologies that could be made now that no one will bother to put into anything for ages; IBM have a super-computer that has a “lead-time” of seven years. Surely if people hear of the technology now, they're ready to buy it soon. Wringing the last pennies out of some old idea isn't working for these companies, and they wonder why they're struggling. It's because they're all competing at the same level.

Here's a hypothesis - if they all flog DVRs this year, next year they'll try to flog them with solid drives, but people could already have bought an unofficial external solid drive for their PVR from some cheeky little company. The market has gone almost before the technology is even stable. As an example; SDHC or other solid memories, they're not fantastically reliable, they're good enough, but they will be even better, so the better ones will inadvertently compete with something cooler that hasn't even been invented yet. Having competition before you even start designing technology can never be a good thing. Anyone in a big corporation wanting to stay around should already be thinking beyond making a 3D OLED projector smartphone. Too many are re-trying 'branding', just like the 80's ad men tried with hi-fi, so people are meant to buy their Apple 3G to work with their Powerbook to work with their Apple TV. Some are doing this because they like Apple simplicity, and in America, Apple is affordable, but more will only ever want one of Apple's range. Other big electronics companies are trying the same, but starting with the TV end-of-things, probably because there's very little money in PCs, which is why Dell are moving away from them.

The real mid- to long-term money seems to be in selling your own technology, not the gadgets themselves. Japanese companies are brilliant at this, e.g. Sony (Trinitron/Bravia), and they keep their creative employees for decades, they realised they need them because they really understood their long-term concept in the first place. The trick seems to be to make new stuff, but to sell the concepts behind them instead, and definitely not promote your companies. Most people don't know NewsCorp owns MySpace, and even more don't even care who runs Facebook. The only big software companies selling their stuff using their names are Adobe, Apple and Micro$oft, but they always have to struggle to convince everyone to stick with them, which is exactly what IBM tried to do. Most people can't name any other software companies, but they can name the products. Grisoft recently changed their name to AVG, making it really clear who they are. Nod32 is very popular now, but I'd forgotten the company is called Eset. To get people to have warm fuzzy feelings for companies, advertising has to be focussed on the products, TV advertising proved that, company names were often missing completely. To me, that also means the company should be focussed on the product, instead of worrying about how to make their range of stuff the best (unnecessary), they need to be working on who their customers are and what they want from that product. Start-ups are doing this, and they will soon compete with big companies. NVidia were nobody until they made sure their chip was ubiquitous, the market was gamers and everyone else, easy, make two chips, then get others to worry about how to get them to run. They did the techie bit, then got others to not just make a card for it, but also sell it. They still do and they're still growing fast, with ATI trying to catch up (started off the same way, but with worse tech), and no new company is likely to come into the graphics chip business for decades unless they're extremely innovative. So, for NVidia, there's almost no competition left, or to come, nice.