Revolutionary digital technology is integrated more quickly into our everyday lives, almost as quickly as labs can develop them and manufacturers bring them to market. And no sooner do we adapt to these new technologies than we begin to transition to more powerful, higher quality, more convenient versions.

However, history illuminates the traps in any optimistic view of the consumer electronics future. Often, new technologies are developed and brought to market too quickly and prove too complex for consumers to operate or even understand. Developers often concentrate more on enhanced technology and less on the user experience. Manufacturers often prematurely alert consumers to the wonders ahead. Similar products from multiple manufacturers often lack standardization and uniformity.

Manufacturers develop and introduce products to take advantage of new technologies and not a demonstrable consumer need, and often profit motive forces the introduction of competing and incompatible formats. History has shown us that any or all of these factors have retarded consumer confidence, delayed purchases and, in some spectacular examples, destroyed both the market for that product and the companies involved.

Fortunately, this and future generations are being born into a digital technology universe. Square TVs, analog radio, vinyl records, wired telephones, monochrome screens, sub-one gigahertz processors and hard drives, et al, may as well be bear skins and stone knives to today's teenagers. A world without pocket-sized computers; cell phones that take pictures, connect to the Web and receive TV shows; pocket-sized portable music players; tapeless camcorders; digital cameras; the Internet; instant global satellite communication; and hundreds of high-definition television channels shown on wall-sized flat screens could be considered cretaceous by comparison.

Of course, future historians living in colonies on Mars equipped with faster-than-light travel, transporters and sub-space communications might look back at 2006 and wonder how we managed to get by.