By: Lance Winslow

Not long ago, I was talking to an acquaintance who mentioned the fact that Hewlett-Packard’s all-in-one scanners, fax servers, printers, copiers, telephones, were indeed a brilliant concept. And that we would in the future see much more of these types of things, and that would be good for the environment. In other words, there is no need to have multiple pieces of business equipment in your office if one machine could do it all, without breaking.

In fact, there was no need for redundancy, or the cost to go out and buy each one of those items separately. Interestingly enough, I agree with much of what he was saying and mentioned that this was already happening.

After all, your cell phone is now a smart phone, iPod, GPS device, timepiece, PDA, twitter machine, digital camera, video camera, and Internet surfing, location generating, people finding, personal high-tech tool. And as Moore’s law becomes more prevalent, it makes sense that these things will continue.

Some would say this is problematic because as more and more types of personal tech, and computer equipment manufacturers produce items that have so many features, that they eliminate the need for others, which will put people out of work, and those electronic companies will no longer be needed.

Thus, there will be one giant computer manufacturing company, or a couple working as a monopoly or duopoly in the free market. These are always things that worry regulators who try to regulate monopolies, and cartels.

Still, it make sense to let the consumer decide and for the best company to win. In the future we will see Google, combining all their various technologies, all in to one, just like Microsoft’s bundling strategy did. It will be interesting how all this plays out. I hope you will consider all this and think on this philosophical thought.