The vision of convergence -- anytime, anywhere communications -- has been the holy grail of the telecom industry for almost 20 years in one form or another. Converged services combine voice, data and video and deliver them across a span of public, private, wired and wireless networks in a way that is seamless and consistent to the end user.  The problem with holy grails is not so much that they're so hard to find, but what we might miss out on while we're looking for them.

During his keynote speech last month at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona John Chambers spoke of a shift Cisco is seeing from personalized communication to social networking.  As Chambers put it, "it's no longer about you, it's about us.".