Английский язык: Аннотирование и реферирование текста

226 bleshoot home-computer networks. "That alone tells you that they're out of touch. I thought: How dumb." Real people do not want to be hounded through their home and their life by some video stream, he argues; they just want help with basic headaches, such as getting the kids' laptop, mom's Apple Macintosh and dad's Windows machine to share the family's printer. Whether or not computer, software, consumer-electronics, tele- coms, cable and internet companies are in fact out of touch with con- sumers may be the biggest question facing these industries today. That is because the "digital home", a concept and category hugely hyped in executive circles but still rarely heard in discussions among consumers, represents their greatest hope for revenue growth. Demand from corpo- rate buyers of technology has barely recovered from the dotcom bust and is widely expected to be unimpressive for years. By contrast, the homes of consumers appear to technology vendors as a barely tamed analogue wilderness. Darcy Travlos, an analyst at CreditSights, a re- search firm, estimates the market opportunity of the digital home at $250 billion in America alone and $1 trillion worldwide in three to seven years. "We view the digital home as critically important," says Craig Mundie, one of three chief technology officers at Microsoft, the world's largest software company. "The home is much more exciting than the workplace." Computers have already led to small revolutions in boost- ing productivity in the office and helping people to communicate and to be creative, he says, so "we're pretty confident" that computers will have a similar effect on the way people consume entertainment. Intel, the world's largest semiconductor maker, recently reorganised itself into new business divisions including, prominently, one called "digital home". Last week it formally launched Viiv, a bundle of chips intended for use in digital-home PCs. Consumer-electronics firms such as Sony, computer-makers such as Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Apple, telecoms giants such as Verizon or SBC, cable companies such as Comcast,