Reinventing the Wheel !!!

Consumer Electronic Show 2006 has seen some of the great presentations during this week. Starting with Bill Gates (no need to introduce), we saw some other great CEOs coming forward and presenting their innovations. Among these were Paul Otellini (Intel President and CEO), Terry Semel (Yahoo CEO), Larry Page (Google CEO) etc.

Bill G started with the word ENTERTAINMENT and that is what all the other’s followed. See the announcements and you will find a lot of them e.g. mobile phones with enhanced multimedia capabilities, collaborations with TV channels, audios/videos on sale etc.

Windows Vista is one attraction, Yahoo Go and Google Pack are yet some others (Not exactly the discussion of this topic but I did wonder why Norton agreed to give a reduced Antivirus with Google Pack).

And listening all this, I was wondering who is going to INTEGRATE all this? Larry did talk about simplifying things. However Google is introducing yet another media player for its Video Sales service when they could have Licensed Windows Media Player which is a de-facto standard for almost all the Window users (more than 90% computer users in the world). I already have three media players, Windows media player, Real Player and Quick Time as none of these can play all the formats.

Right now, I need at least three accounts, one for Hotmail, one for Yahoo, One for Google (three passwords, three profiles etc). Yahoo Groups won’t let me get the files and photos even if I am subscribed to that group from my GMail account. I cannot sign in to ORKUT using hotmail or yahoo. This sort of incompatibility list is long rather very long. If just my phone numbers change, I would have to update at so many places that I’m sure to forget some of these.

Companies should work together. MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger are joining hands, which is a good sign.

I still remember my course in Object Oriented Programming. In the very beginning, we were told that reinventing the wheel is a bad idea. Probably someone forgot to tell me that this “reinventing the wheel” phrase should only be used get an A+ in OOP course - Afterwards forget it!

P.S. These are some random thoughts at entering my passwords ten times, installing software that will do the partial work etc etc.