Andrew has come up with a new approach which all technology companies need to pay attention to, especially if they want to win over the consumers as customers. This is going to be a painful process for SIlicon Valley.

Companies are essentially telling customers: “We have a million products/services.” which in times past would probably have sounded mighty impressive but in the cacophony of messages today it becomes fairly meaningless. Confronted with this message a customer would attempt to ask: “Which one of your million products is right for me?” but unfortunately without any means to convey this message back to the company. So in the ‘product centric’ case, the company pushes products and there is no direct customer communication.

Until many of the players can work together to deliver an end-to-end customer solution there’s little more than zero chance that digital entertainment convergence will ever take off. To deliver the required integration, I predict that we’ll either see an absolutely massive amount of consolidation across industry players or a real entente developing to promote a faster customer adoption.

I think a lot of companies should be using the more recent, and more interactive medium of blogging as a way to communicate with their customers. I am not sure if any of the corporate doyens get it as yet, but there is a nice opportunity here for them. For instance, I think it would be nice for Rio to have a blog, in which they clearly outline that their products are good for folks with more active lifestyles. However if you want a big-phat drive based MP3 player, how about IPOD. It will build a new kind of customer loyalty. But then I tend to dream a lot! Read: Paradigm Shift: From Pushing Products to Delivering Solutions