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What we want is a home equivalent of Biztalk...

Suppose your home to be a computer. How would you program it? To quote Deep Thought: "Trrrrrricky!"

The problem is that there isn't a home integration system.

You can see what you'd want. You'd want to be able to write commands like "open front door" and "show securicam and validate face for gas meter" or "move audio output from TV room to upstairs loo" or even "lock bedroom door, dim lights, play Dire Straits."

And even more to the point, you'd want to be able to link the bedroom door to the security camera, or allow the rice cooker (yes, there are such things!) to send messages to the oven rotisserie or the TV to negotiate bandwidth with the cable modem. And if you bought a new fridge, you wouldn't want to have to re-write all the code.

Today's domestic environment doesn't obey commands like those. Instead, you have to deal with each device separately. If you have an e-fridge, it can indeed be programmed to read barcodes off products, and note display-by dates. If you have a PC online, you can get onto nibblous.com and type in the contents of the fridge and get suggestions about cooking.
Perhaps. But the fridge can't communicate with the Internet and your online Ocado account and find out how quickly they can deliver orange pimentos.

You can get an idea of what this system would look like, if you study Microsoft's Biztalk Server.

The product is almost impossible to get a sensible description of. Ask the experts, and they retreat into gobbledegook. "Business Process Management" they say, as if these three words actually conveyed meaning to anybody who didn't already know what they meant.

But actually, the idea is as sim ple as the "home operating system" and as complex to create. It's the idea of turning the whole business into a programmable entity.

In your home office, for example, you don't have to re-write your word processor if you sell the monochrome laser printer. You merely install the new drivers for the new colour inkjet - and suddenly, all the printouts are in colour.

The personnel department, of course, doesn't have drivers. If you sign a contract with a new building contractor, the contractor doesn't come with a standard interface to the purchasing office; instead, humans start printing out bits of paper, and transferring data from one system to another... and "automation" isn't possible.

What Biztalk does is to create the interface into which all business functions can be plugged, and through which they can exchange data. Inevitably, it's huge, unwieldy, and takes rather more time to explain than a ten minute demo could achieve - but that's it, in a nutshell.

Now, the question is: when will we have Hometalk Server?

I was invited out to see Home 2.0 at BT's research facility last month - out near Ipswich - and it had all the good things that you'd want if you read Engadget every day; a stereo TV, Ethernet on the mains cables, wireless webcams looking at the door. None of it was "house of the future" rubbish; it's all stuff on the market today.

And none of it worked together. Microsoft has been looking the wrong way; it's been working on what it calls a "media center" computer concept. In fact, the media centre is little more than a big flat-screen TV with Microsoft's copyright-enforcement software inside it.

I think copyright enforcement in the age of the Internet is, ultimately, doomed. You can, of course, make life difficult for people who use one medium; all that achieves, is to make tthem useanother medium instead. And copyright owners connive at this: we provide things free, because we know that's the only way newcomers will discover our material, and end up loving it and being prepared to pay for it.

What isn't doomed, at all, is rational integration: the creation of a shared background intelligence. It has to know where you store your data - but you don't! It has to know where to find things, and which of them are compatible - and you don't. That's what automation is.

As to whether automation is good for us, is another question entirely. You can (someone will!) argue that it is making us culturally incapable of risk management and risk assessment in our private lives. In a world where it is seriously proposed that hot water should be impossible to get out of a hot tap because someone might fall into it, risk management is hard to learn.

But automation is what we're trying to achieve. And as long as the output from a webcam is unintelligible to the mobile phone, we aren't succeeding.

When a URL appears at the bottom of a television news item, and I can click on it, I'll know someone has cracked it. But if the only fruits of integration continue to be stupidities like Google media player which “downloads” a video of 1K size and which you can’t play when you’re offline because it needs to talk to the Google copyright server to play, then I’ll know they don’t see any profit in true automation.

The sad thing is: I’ll bet they don’t make any money out of their copyright management stuff, either.