Michael Greeson of The Diffusion Group writes "The 'Digital Home' is 10 Years Away" Who Knows, But Isn't This Comment Refreshing?" He pokes fun at the optimistic projections of many in the industry.

In a sense the digital home already is here with 20% of US households now having a broadband home network. But most people consider the digital home a digital media home music and video broadcast throughout the house. That isn't here and won't be for several years. There have been plenty of servers and devices, including media servers, home broadcasting, and P2P appliances, that simply have not seen widespread adoption.

Why the delay? Greeson says it's a "naïve understanding of consumer behavior". I agree that's part of it. The other part is the business ecology. Markets are complex stories with a coherent narrative. You can't skip from page 1 to page 100 through extrapolation.

Markets are shaped by a cauldron of consumer wants, expectations, and behaviors, existing and installed technologies and products, social forces and memes, and company brands. Every company considers itself the focus of the universe. Uh, no. You're just one tiny thread in the tapestry of your customer's life.

As a result, companies can't force change. They can only reliably plan for incrementalism as Greeson notes:

Today's 'digital home' visions seem more muted, more pragmatic, perhaps due to the failure of prior 'digital home' initiatives. For example, Intel's latest 'digital home' initiative, Viiv: while ambitious, Viiv is grounded in a deeper understanding of consumer 'experiences' that transcend the PC and include a wide variety of digital electronics devices and services. Intel (finally) realizes that it cannot invoke its 'digital home' vision overnight but must instead be satisfied with incremental opportunities that are finely tuned to real-world usage behavior. Intel's Digital Home Group realizes that the 'digital home' is a long-term project within which specific opportunities will incrementally present themselves and at a pace guided more by specific usage scenarios than grand visions. As former Digital Home GM Don macdonald noted in a recent interview, it will take many yeas to build a Viiv brand because it will take many years for the larger vision of the 'digital home' (the MacFarlane vision, if you will) to become real. But MacDonald also understands that companies which are tuned in to this incremental process will be best positioned to identify real opportunities and design products and services to exploit them.

Disclosure - Author Marc Freedman consults with The Diffusion Group