Strategists Focused On Wrong Industry From Cerritos to Denver and on to Orlando, Omaha and Castro Valley, from 3DO to CD-I and beyond, from BroadBand to Raynet, from Sony to NEC, the current and impending disappointments spring from one key mistake. With some notable exceptions, the leading strategists are focusing on the wrong industry. You can't get beyond television by collaborating with TV companies in their long slide to obsolescence. You can't create a new information infrastructure by propping up the old telephone networks with the right to provide tv-type services. The new 3DO and Philips CD-I game machines, for example, both link to interlaced TV screens that display every other line and then fill in the gaps on a second sweep.
Interlaced screens mean cumbersome text and limited graphics.
Interlaced screens doom multimedia to a fringe videotext fuzz. Yet these new game players shun the personal computer and its installed base of 33 million home units in order to build up a new installed base from scratch, connecting to visually inadequate televisions. Interactivity, almost by definition, is a computer function, not a television function. Making the boob tube into an interactive hive of theater, museum, classroom, banking system, shopping center, post office and communicator is contrary to the nature of the box. Millions of Americans, however, are eager to turn their personal computers to these pursuits.