In a Las Vegas auditorium a quarter-century ago, Bill Gates and his right-hand man, Chris Capossela, stood before a rapt crowd to unveil Windows 98’s revolutionary ‘Plug and Play’ feature. 

Gates’ promise was simple: plug any device into your PC, and it will “just work.” 

But as Capossela plugged in a scanner to demonstrate, the computer displayed the infamous ‘blue screen of death’ and crashed.

The audience erupted in applause – not in mockery, but in a knowing nod to the erratic nature of technology.

Even in 1998, only a decade after computers became common in the average home, people were already used to technology having a mind of its own. The internet was the new frontier; tech, our untamed stallion; and we were the world-weary cowboys daily tasked with getting it to work correctly.

Fast forward to today, and tech is still promising that it will “just work” – and somehow still not delivering.

Check any forum, and you’ll find it’s filled with complaints like:

• My headphones are advertised as able to connect with Bluetooth to two devices simultaneously – but they completely shut off when I do that. 
• For some reason, the remote for my Wi-Fi-powered lights turn on my neighbour’s aircon.
• My HDMI cable can handle any FPS, but videos keep skipping when I connect to a monitor. Both the monitor and the cable are cutting-edge.
• Why does my phone play ‘A-team’ by Ed Sheeran every time I connect to the car radio?
• My smartwatch is supposed to pair with my phone automatically, but I have to connect them every time manually. 
• I asked my voice assistant to play relaxing music, and it blasted heavy metal. 
• My projector is supposed to auto-focus, but it’s always slightly blurry.
• My home security camera decided to update its firmware while I was on holiday, leaving my house unmonitored. 
• My smart doorbell rings every time someone uses the microwave.

And, undoubtedly, the most common of all:

• Why is my internet not working? 

It begs the question – why can’t technology just work? 

In the world of audiovisual technology, where advancements in hardware have outpaced software, this is particularly pressing.

AV has become our window to the world, and that window is fogged up with bugs, glitches, and uncertainties.

Dave Barry once joked, “Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the ‘most reliable Windows ever.‘ To me, this is like saying that asparagus is ‘the most articulate vegetable ever.”

One of the culprits behind technology’s failure to deliver on its promise is its inherent complexity. As tech evolves, it becomes more intricate – increasing the likelihood of errors. 

A small oversight in coding can lead to significant disruptions, turning what should be straightforward tasks into Herculean challenges. Tiny updates can ripple through the coding foundations and create issues no one could have predicted.

The average person finds this technological maze too hard to navigate. 

They don’t want to know why it doesn’t work; they just want it to work.

They don’t want a lesson in coding or hardware design; they just want their devices to function as advertised. 

That’s exactly why Steve Jobs famously introduced each new Apple product by saying: “It just works.”

The domain of tech has become almost mystical and understood only by those with specialised training – people with certifications, lab coats and matrix glasses to check why your phone won’t charge and why your laptop is heating through the stratosphere. 

For most people, how tech works is just as mysterious as how we made an iPhone out of rocks, dirt and twigs in the first place. 

Interoperability is the ability of different systems, devices, and applications to work together seamlessly. In an ideal world, all your gadgets and software would communicate with each other without any hiccups.

However, the competitive nature of late-stage capitalism means that different devices and platforms don’t play well together. Every competition needs a winner. Chrome doesn’t want you using Firefox; Alexa doesn’t want you to use Google Home devices.

Fundamentally, this is why your headphones decide to connect to your laptop instead of your phone at the most annoying time. 

In the beginning, most systems were proprietary – they were designed to work within a closed environment. Think of early Apple computers that only worked with Apple software and peripherals.

But as tech evolved, the need for open standards became apparent. This led to the development of universal protocols like HTTP for web browsing and SMTP for email. Nowadays, companies often provide Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Software Development Kits (SDKs) to allow third-party developers to create compatible software.

But open standards never ended up becoming a cornerstone of tech – companies prefer to do the bare minimum in terms of compatibility.

These days, no one questions why you can email from any domain to any other domain – Gmail to Yahoo, Outlook to Protonmail – but you can’t message from any app to any other app. WhatsApp won’t send your message to Facebook Messenger.

Even Android and iPhones absolutely refuse to allow their users to have shared group texts. That intentional green text box has swayed many a person to stay with an iPhone for fear of being left out of group chats. 

You may have even been a casualty of Apple vs. Adobe Flash – for years, Apple refused to support Adobe Flash on iOS devices, citing performance and security concerns. This created a fragmented (and, frankly, irritating) web experience for users.

This problem is at its worst in the audiovisual industry. At least you can run Windows on Mac if you really try – but AV hardware doesn’t come with any way to speak to other devices outside of their ecosystem. Here at Innomate, we solve this issue by opening up the bones of the device itself and changing the code to speak to other devices.

How did Bill Gates respond to a failure in front of the world?

“That must be why we’re not shipping Windows 98 yet.” 

The crowd laughed, the world moved on, and Windows 98 was shipped months later. 

But with the breakneck speed of the market, it’s becoming more and more common to ship products before they’re ready. 

Harry McCracken has reviewed new tech products for twenty years, and says there’s never been a time when new products are “so very far from being ready for mass consumption”.

“Sometimes it’s a tad quirky; sometimes I can’t get it to work at all. And when I call the manufacturers for help, they’re often well aware of the problems I encountered,” says Harry. 

“RIM, for instance, shipped its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in April, then immediately began flooding the airwaves with ads that touted it as the first “professional grade” tablet and boasted of its support for Adobe Flash. Which would have been dandy … except that the tablet was thoroughly glitchy and sported a version of Flash that barely worked. The PlayBook’s marketing campaign was ready; the PlayBook wasn’t.”

Marketing can set users up for failure when products don’t deliver. 

Here at Innomate, we decided not to wait around for the tech market to slow down and cooperate. We designed our platform Innomesh to meet these exact challenges. We solve interoperability with an API-first mindset. Powered by an AWS-native event-driven architecture, we can easily extend the platform and integrate it with third-party platforms.

Put simply, our platform can make all the audiovisual devices in a room – projectors, screens, microphones, speakers – speak to each other and play nice. 

And if something goes wrong, there’s a human being on the other end of the phone, ready to solve your issue in five minutes flat.

Here’s how drastically tickets for problems drop when devices can speak to each other as recorded by our partner company UXT:

Technology is a work in progress. 

With companies stepping up to create the bridge between disparate tech, perhaps we won’t have to wait another 25 years for technology to finally “just work.”

Do you want to make your AV environment easy to manage?