Are you a windscreen or a fly?

How to stay airborne in these competitive times. Convergence is one of those overloaded words typical of the communications industry which forms the basis of a bandwagon.

It's not the first and it probably won't be the last.

It's the opportunity for this financial shift that creates much of the interest as established businesses with time-honoured business models are keen not to be undermined by a new or different way of working from an upstart company.

One moment you're flying along keeping track of the other flies in your competitive landscape, then - splat - you hit a windscreen, a company outside of your direct competitors whose ideas or products make your sector obsolete.

Think CDs as the windscreen hit by record player stylus suppliers - or low-cost digital cameras and camera phones as windscreens to traditional film camera companies such as Kodak.

It's not about being beaten by a better product, just by a usually better and certainly different idea.

The fundamental technology at the heart of the convergence bandwagon is IP, or internet protocol - low level, basic and not especially new.

Its history dates from the interconnecting of four computers in the US government's Arpa [Advanced Research Projects Agency] network in 1969, through to widespread adoption in the mid-1990s as the open protocol allowing any computer to share data on the internet.