(excerpted from Lisa Guerney "A chip in every pot." New York Times, 4/13/2000)

Do people need all this automatic information? Do they want technology to be that pervasive?

At a recent Intel conference on product design, some attendees belittled the concept as nothing more than clever marketing by companies trying to sell new products. In NetFuture, an online newsletter about technology and social responsibility, Langdon Winner, a political science professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, described most pervasive-computing devices as "sheer silliness" and criticized researchers for spending more time trying to make appliances talk than attempting to mend society's problems.

"A lot of ubiquitous-computing development is a tool in search of a purpose," Mr. Winner said in an interview.

But predicting whether a technology will be adopted is critical for companies that want to succeed, or even survive, in the marketplace. The ones that can figure out what will be deemed useful, superfluous or downright ridiculous will win. And today, as tiny, wireless computer systems are being perfected and the Internet is allowing the distribution of data in seconds, dozens of appliance manufacturers are betting that some sort of pervasive-computing devices will come to be considered as necessary as a telephone. The trick, for them, is to figure out which ones.

So far, the kitchen is where most pervasive-computing appliances are emerging. Sunbeam, for example, recently announced the creation of a company called Thalia Products (Thalia stands loosely for "thinking and linking intelligent appliances) and is planning to offer items like a smart coffeemaker, a smart mixer and a smart alarm clock this fall. The mixer will weigh ingredients and follow recipes stored on an Internet-connected console, the company's Web site says. The clock will synchronize other clocks in the house and give you information about other appliances, like the fact that your coffeemaker is out of water.

James M. Utterback, a professor at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, has spent several years looking at the life span of technological innovations. If a product is to succeed, price plays a critical role, he said. And timing can be everything: Companies that continue to manufacture a product when a new standard is starting to evolve, for example, will almost inevitably fail, as diskette and typewriter companies have learned too well.

But one of the main reasons that companies with new products stumble, Professor Utterback said, "is that they fail to appreciate or investigate the marketplace." Many companies simply ask, "What can we do with the technology?" And once they determine what they can do, he said, they assume that people will want it.