I was sitting quietly in the Panasonic Press conference when I discovered that Sprint was releasing the Hero so I ran back to the press room. I’m glad I did. The other ninjas I’m here with Gartenberg and Rubin, are Twittering from the conference and I think this slide shows exactly what you can expect out of CE companies in the next few years.

I present to you the Digital Hearth.

This hot mess of standards and devices shows us just why CE companies are so clueless. Somewhere, someone is proud of that slide. They got everything, including the CEO’s dog, into there with inches to spare.

Essentially CE has always been trying to go the Apple route. They want a closed ecosystem. They want brand loyalty. They’ve wanted this for years, obviously, but now, thanks to the plethora of standards out there, they want it amazingly badly right now. If you want your camera to work with your TV which will work with your Blu-Ray player – and you want to get networked info on all those devices – you’re going to enter a world of slight but glaring incompatibilities and frustration. CE companies want you to buy Sony or buy Panasonic or buy Coby. They don’t want you to add any outliers to this digital hearth. Oh well. I did see a big robot.