The digital home of the future will look completely different depending on who wins the war.
MS is pushing forward a digital home that revolves around the use of a central hub (Media Center) that is accessible by all the other digital equipment in the home, most notably the XBox 36o. As I wrote earlier, especially since MS will have a time advantage, this is an approach that is likely to take off. What would be a real differentiator would be the ability to license one game, and play it on multiple 360s on the same LAN. Read more on MSs approach on the previous post.
SONY, IBM, and Toshiba team up to create the new chip that is at the heart of the next generation PS3, the Cell. A great article on the chip and their business approach can be read in Business 2.0. Sony and IBM are banking on the propagating itself to everything from PCs, PS3s to TVs and media equipment. The philosophy here is that with an independent networking processor, the Cell enabled equipment will recognize each other on the network and be able to swarm to accomplish tasks, think grid computing, with a little P2P thrown in.
So which approach will win the day? Hard to say, MS will have a head start, and there is something to said for running cable to one spot, then CAT to the individual tvs, etc. But the approach SONY and IBM are taking open up lots and lots of possibilities through self realization and self allocation.
Needless to say, which ever way it goes, we will all benefit.
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