We're about to find out. Scott Rosenberg S ometime soon, somebody out there is going to try to sell you on the virtues of the Microwave Bank. This startlingly innovative breakthrough endows your microwave oven with online banking and Internet access. But the effort to crossbreed TV and the Net is likely to prove as ludicrous and pointless as the notion that you might want to surf the Web from your microwave oven.
Some new technologies take off effortlessly, as if self-propelled.
Users grab them, find dozens of new uses for them and weave them into daily life and work. A lot of technologies, though, are born amid hoopla but fail to catch on with the public. It's also a colossal illustration of Microsoft's hypocrisy. That doesn't bode well for CE's future, to put it mildly. In the long run, though, as John Maynard Keynes said, we're all dead.