Ken Belson writes in the Times from Tokyo:

The lesson in the latest round of quarterly earnings seems clear: If you want to succeed, work your way into the living room, not the boardroom.

Remember all that talk about the battle for the living room? Hot plastic on plastic action as Sony's PlayStation2 and Microsoft's Xbox entered the race to be the box at the heart of home entertainment. The PS2/Xbox struggle was just a foreshadowing of what was likely to be a paradigm shift in consumer electronics and personal computers.

It's a long term trend evident in the size of computers. Starting with the room sized ENIAC and now today with PDAs, devices for human mental augmentation have shunk rapidly. (see Tools for Thought). If you don't need to be at the tech lab to time-share on the computer, then you can work from your office desk. Or you could work from home! Or anywhere you carry a small bag full of technology.

Anyone who has edited PowerPoint slides from the first row seconds before giving a speech can speak to the white-knuckle thrill of modern business technology. As exciting as the business applications have proven though, the world is filled with people who are not as likely to file a report as they are likely to take and distribute a picture of their baby or their children.

So it makes sense that the living room is the medium term destination for technology growth. It's where people gather. Humanity at large seizes military inventions for casual use! Hurrah!

But living in Japan, and watching the Xbox launch in South Korea, I realized that "living room" is a silly assumption. Many homes or hotels featured only a nice floor to sit on, and precious little space for gathering in private.

You could argue that all countries are headed in the living room direction, converging on a vision of couch-borne plenty where the fruits of capitalism elevate tired legs in front of giant televisions.

Or you could argue that the longer-term destination for technology is the human body (see Steve Mann). If technology augments us, we don't want to have to choose when to be augmented - we want the choice all the time. We don't take pictures of our girlfriends and boyfriends sitting at their desks at work, or sitting on their couch in front of their television. Why should we expect that all technology pleasure is best experienced in the living room? Some day, that will seem as absurd as imagining that computers belong only in an office.

Either way, it seems clearer by the day that extensive immersion in video games is the best way to understand the future of the technology business, the future of human augmentation, and the future of our shared reality.