Reading all the 2006 recaps and 2007 predictions (and writing my own) has put me in something of a big-picture frame of mind lately. It’s far easier to focus on the things the mobile industry tosses up each day, like a new device or service, rather than keep the bigger picture in mind. This all sort of started back at the Nokia World event in Amsterdam in October. Sitting around for a couple of days listening to Nokia and many of its partners describe their vision for the future of the industry, followed by a few days of hanging out in the city, got me thinking about some things, or one big thing in particular: innovation.
On the face of it, there’s no shortage of innovation in the mobile industry. That’s one of the reason it’s held my interest for so long — it’s exciting to be surrounded by smart, creative people doing all sorts of cool things. The problem, though, is that too often they’re doing these cool things in spite of the industry, not because of it. Probably the biggest thing I took away from Nokia World was a sense that the company’s realized that mobile can’t be isolated from the internet, and that its biggest challenge will be in melding the two together, and doing so will give it the chance to deliver all sorts of new and innovative devices and services.
For some of the company’s thoughts on this, check out the videos that were part of design chief Alastair Curtis’ closing presentations. They’re certainly just pipe dreams, but reveal some of the boundless imagination this industry’s capable of at the best of times. Of course, despite the optimism watching these videos (and indeed, Curtis’ whole presentation) evoked, I couldn’t help some feelings of cynicism (surprise, surprise) as well. “Oh, pssh, like we’ll ever see that” — that sort of thing. I’ve always felt that having a good bullshit detector is a valuable asset in the mobile industry, but at the same time, my cynicism isn’t purely a facet of my personality. I’ve seen too many good ideas and cool things submarined because they undermine some entrenched, although flawed, business model. Too many good ideas fail because of the obtuseness of some unrelated player in the industry. Too many good people’s projects ruined because of the hoops they’ve had to jump through to bring them to market. Too many companies fail because they couldn’t find a market for their services, not because of poor focus or execution, but because established players simply wouldn’t let them.
There are so many people, so many companies, that are capable of great things with mobile devices, applications and services. It’s too bad that the obstacles they must surmount are so great as well. That’s the biggest problem facing the mobile industry. It’s not technological issues like slow networks or small screens on handsets; it’s the ridiculous obstacles to innovation faced by both tiny developers and behemoths like Nokia. It’s the obstacles that keep great ideas out of the market, that keep small companies from making a big impact.
So consider this a call to arms (albeit one from a pretty small platform). The first step towards eliminating these obstacles is calling them out. What do you see — as a developer, content provider, marketer, vendor, even as a consumer — as the obstacles to innovation in the mobile industry? What’s really holding things back?
Data plans that charge by the megabyte; unlimited data for $60 a month.
I’m tired of content providers making mobile versions of their site. The entire point of RSS is to make information available on any platform. This of course is problematic since you can’t insert ads into rss feeds too well.
The network IS slow. I wanted to live blog CES but gave up after trying to upload a simple 1 MB photo. EDGE is balls.
Mobile phone makers are finally starting to get standard connectors. The Nokia N76 finally has USB, 3.5mm headphone jack, sadly it can’t charge via USB. That would be asking for too much innovation. Hell wouldn’t it be grand if in 5 years we could all charge our cell phones via USB? No more having to have various chargers.
I feel I’m limited by a small screen. Even on something as grand as my Nokia E61 I still want a larger screen.
I wrote an entire piece on “naked sim cards.” Basically I want to be able to shove a sim card in a camera, in an ebook reader, in my car. The network is only being used by mobile phones really. It’s such a waste. http://www.ringnokia.com/2006/12/why_isnt_anyone.html
Spot on Carlo. Nokia Wolrd was interesting because its the first sign I’ve seen of a corporate direction from Nokia that embraces the Internet as the core of their future strategy. There’s been some cool projects and committed individuals over the last 5 years or so mainly out of Nokia Innovation / Investment Incubator, but nothing on the big level. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next and to what degree it happens (and how successfully). As you say it is about innovation and this does tie in with the rest of the industry too.
I think its hard to point fingers at what is stifling innovation. Of course it is easy to point a finger at operators (who generally are the most entrenched), but I think it can be more deep seated than that. Mobile is a big and profitable industry, but also one that has many players and one where standardisation is more important than most. I think this makes it hard for innovation to go mainstream and therefore be successful. People often talk about how fast the industry moves, but at the same time it can be glacial. A good example of this is that (open) software platforms have not taken off as rapidly as some predicted (yes they have found success and been responsible for innovation). So I think they very nature of the mobile industry stifles make up.
I also think part of the problem is the users themselves (although it could be said that its marketing issue, or users not being provided with the right tools). The industry hurt itself (unintentionally) by creating Pavlovian responses from their customers. People expect the phone to do certain things, but do not expect them to act in other ways (arguably this consumer memory is inherited from land lines). Mobile was (to borrow a phrase) about connecting people - however explaining to customers that there is more than just voice and text is hard. People do not have the expectation that their phone is expandable / capable of doing more things. When innovators try to do things outside this traditional areas (phone / SMS) it becomes very hard to get mass market traction. (Not dissimilar to Web 2.0 - tech (leader) adoption but not necessarily mass market).
I do think this will change, but it will take time (both to change awareness and to help get the right sort of handsets into people’s hand - at the end of the day some handsets are just more open to innovation than others). So time is a barrier to innovation. It you keep hitting the wall it will eventually crack (perhaps the trick is finding a big sledge hammer).
It is about changing consumers perceptions about what is possible. To do that you need to sell the idea as well as making it a compelling experience. I think for a lot of the great ideas and innovation already out there these twin user education / experience issues are areas which cause a lot of trouble and are innovation obstacles. Too many innovators fail to sell the idea (although perhaps this is inherently difficult in mobile - see above) or make a product that misses in the experience area.
What I think is happening is the classic gap between techies thinking up gadgets, the early adopters loving the same gadgets and the general public not seeing the point of using the very same gadgets. Or, to speak with Geoffrey A. Moore, the “chasm” is not being “crossed”.
What would help a lot is for developers talking to users (both consumers and businesses) about the things they would like to see on a smartphone, and whether they were interested enough to pay for it. Business in particular has always been a driver for new technology as soon as the business case was clear, but in the Symbian part of the mobile space, there appears to be no interest at all in doing business with businesses. Apart from selling them handsets, that is.
Then consumers. It has always been hard selling software and services to regular consumers. Most PC software is sold to businesses, and a quite a bit is sold to professionals. Then there’s the game market.
In the Smartphone market things are very similar. Software is sold for devices that are bought by professionals (UIQ, Series 80 and now Nokia’s Eseries). These people are also interested in certain services (push-email).
There are of course a few exceptions. Route planning is one of them, and it appears that a lot of people buy this kind of software, one way or another. Route-planning software has crossed the chasm, because regular folk know they want it, and don’t mind paying for it.
In short, having cool idea’s isn’t enough. You must connect to the general user on the other side of the chasm to make it.
Users don’t buy as many smartphones as the industry might like because they aren’t useful. If a particular phone was extremely useful then awareness would build by word of mouth.
Internet access is too expensive on phones. This lowers the chances of success of any speculatively developed service by introducing a barrier that discourages phone users from even trying.
In the boom days of the internet many services were created and the useful ones survived - such a phase is not possible in the phone market because it can’t tempt people online with large amounts of free content. It’s in a similar state to the online services market before the internet arrived.
We are slowly moving out of this situation but it is a process which requires actions from all sorts of players who have interests to protect. Gradually each one moves a step in turn (e.g. flat rate net access) and we progress but it will continue to be agonising until the cost of internet access decreases very significantly. This might be the result of a vicious battle between operators - which cannot be appealing to them.
From a US perspective, the biggest obstacles are two-fold:
1) The fragmentation of networks and back-ends. It is really hard to innovate in this space because the most compelling mobile services are about connecting people, and people here are on many different kinds of networks. It is not a pretty experience to try to roll out a service and have to deal with 5 operators, 7 back-end providers, and 12 consolidators, all experts at passing the buck to each-other. And you have to in this large country. You can’t roll out in one area very well here, you don’t have the advantage that many people live in the same space under the same technological umbrella, like say in the UK or NL, allowing you to concentrate on one distinct set of technologies. No, here you deal with large swaths of spread out cities over a large landmass. Some innopvators try to create a space that will allow them to grow slowly without having to take on the whole country by constraining themselves to, say, a college campus for location-based safety services or issues like that. Other innovators choose to instead say ’screw it’ and cobble together their own network by becoming an MVNO and take on the network effect that way, like Helio is trying for their GPS friends stuff. But nobody knows if this will work. It’s 2006 and I know for a fact that some networks still have problems sending MMS to each-other’s subscribers. Try rolling out a new service as an upstart in that. You can’t, you end up trying to cobble together your idea from known technologies like SMS and voice and you end up with the state of mobile payment there is today — call an 800 number to authorize while I am stanting in a cashier’s line? Yeah sure — or buddy-services as akward as Dodgeball.
2) So once you want to deal with all operators and back-end providers, you then get into business with operators. Who every single one wants to keep their systems as closed as possible to extract the most money possible from every subscriber. I am waiting for one of them to break and go the ‘3′ route and open up already, and Cingular and T-Mobile are very well underway, but that leaves the two enormous giants, Verizon and Sprint holding on to their decks and screens with their BREW keys and locked Bluetooth and walled gardens, and they are simply not giving them up. Make your new service a 3d party app to install on a phone? Which phones, you’ll have to get certified first to be allowed on. So you end up back with only having SMS and voice-based technologies to be able to cover a good amount of handsets in the US. Consumers hate every last operator, but all they do is go from one operator to another like abused children who know no better, hoping this new stepdaddy won’t be so drunk and beat them so much like the last one. Well, they do.
Having spent most of the last few months listening to varrious executives in the Mobile ecosystem talk about Innovation I think that we have to remember that the biggest drag on innovation is that a number of mobile networks are built on three generations of technology. The regulatory controls that they are managed under have seem the business models change a number of times within the last two generations of technology.
As a business analysts some twenty years ago I was modeling that the total UK market would be smaller in size the the subscriber base of two of the current networks. The last few years have seen a land grab take place which meant that the networks were not looking at now to build the best data solution all they were interested in was replacing the churn. I know a number of long term customers who have discovered that they have problems with data services as the current billing system that they are on cannot deal with anything more than voice and text.
Before real innovation takes place the Networks need to undertake the housekeeping that will allow trusted parties to access their networks and provide the services. How many times do we talk to start-ups who say “if only we can get to the consumer we will have a viable business the BIG question is how do we do that!”?
None of the current CTO’s within the Mobile Networks are going to sign up for IMS in an effort to allow Innovation as the cost and timeframes make if likely that they and there replacement are likely to have been fired before the system goes live. Latter this year I am visiting Turkcell to see how they have implemented a SDP that has a number of people saying that this might just be the innovation engine that we seek. The Consultants are talking about how open API’s mean that Turkcell can launch a service for a few as 3,000 of its 30M customers in a matter of days.
I think that what we have to remember that at the end of the day it’s a phone and as such its about voice. In fact I am talking to a number of people about how Voice 2.0 is the product that increases ARPU at 3GSM this year. Perhaps once we get more than just a few people to use mobile we can start looking at how we can do things with those phones that people are doing on a broadband connection and a PC.
[...] During the last LiPS forum face to face meeting we had in Seoul (thanks again to Mizi Research, great organization), Access/Palmsource presented its Application framework, now Open-Sourced: Hiker, and one point has raised a little debat: it is fixing the way applications can be layered, interacting with each others (One running Application with the User Focus at a time, no multiple instance of the same application): so it is hard to implement some Vodaphone Live! use cases requring multiple launches of a same application like : You are in your Address Book, you recieve an sms, you answer, you look for a contact launching again your address book from the sms, the address book will be on top when you close it you are back to the sms and when you close the sms…you have your first address book below with the same state before the sms reception, at the beginning. It’s not a secret, I’m a big old time palm fan, but now I’ve a better understanding of what is a phone and the industry around it: Hiker seems great and may bring good usability practices, etc BUT it will be difficult to fullfill some Operators or OEM requirements, cause it fixes the way the User Interactions have to be done: it reduces innovation (good discussion about that at MobHappy) Apple has made an Apple phone from A to Z, from Software to Hardware (see this Michael Mace article if you were on another planet, and this nice round-up at TomSoft for the 58# Carnival)…but if you (as a phone manufacturer) want to make a phone you designed, chance you are an hardware company, and you make money with it: [...]
[...] Link: Obstacles To Innovation at MobHappy Reading all the 2006 recaps and 2007 predictions (and writing my own) has put me in something of a big-picture frame of mind lately. It’s far easier to focus on the things the mobile industry tosses up each day, like a new device or service, rather than keep the bigger picture in mind. [...]
Thanks for the great comments, everybody — excellent food for thought, and I’ll have more on this topic later this week.
[...] Obstacles To Innovation at MobHappy Good post explaining why most innovative ideas do not come to reality (tags: innovation) [...]
[...] Carlo Longino writes: Too many good ideas fail because of the obtuseness of some unrelated player in the industry. Too many good people’s projects ruined because of the hoops they’ve had to jump through to bring them to market. Too many companies fail because they couldn’t find a market for their services, not because of poor focus or execution, but because established players simply wouldn’t let them. [...]
[...] Link: Obstacles To Innovation at MobHappy Reading all the 2006 recaps and 2007 predictions (and writing my own) has put me in something of a big-picture frame of mind lately. It’s far easier to focus on the things the mobile industry tosses up each day, like a new device or service, rather than keep the bigger picture in mind. [...]