IN SEARCH OF MAGIC INGREDIENT X

For the past seven or eight years, every conference relating to telecoms or networking has had at least one presentation on convergence. It was the Miracle Ingredient that said, ‘This conference/workshop/seminar/ symposium really understands this hi-tech stuff.’ And usually we all nodded knowingly, took down copious notes off slides displaying astounding projections that convergence would bring many trillion dollars/bytes/ users/connections/market share. And then go back to our day jobs, and continue doing what we had been doing all along – trying to keep the databases working.