People will buy a $1,200 HDTV but will not buy a $.99 song. People will line up around the block to droll over a marginally superior cell phone, but will not bat an eye when a new VOIP protocol hits the scene. Real human beings will always buy tangibles over data.

Why is the Build-A-Bear Workshop so popular?

Because Timmy O’Toule and Sarah Johnson want to walk home with a cuddly new friend not a laser-etched DVD. We’re extraordinarily proficient at rolling out applications that live out their brief lives in our computers, but we are so bad at using those applications as drivers for the next generation of hardware.

Why is the software in the average set-top box a generation behind our newest social networks? Why are social communication tools relegated to the web and high-end video game consoles? At what point do we start moving the Social Web from our monitors into utilities we can buy at Ikea?

The iPhone and similar next-generation cell phones are helping to bridge this gap, but what we aren’t seeing is a strong push by hardware manufacturers to turn their devices (which are often piled high with processing power) into software platforms.

What type of courtship still needs to happen before we see a marriage between hardware and software? When do we start pushing the Sony’s of the world to start building applications that are alive and interactive to us as something like Twitter?

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Other Sites: Really Great Stories | All The Little Things (Book) | Twitter