The eComm Conference 2008 at the Computer History Museum, Silicone Valley has just been taking place (12 to 14th March) and during the conference a session was run on the future of wireless innovation. There is a video of the session available on Google videos here where a panel of experts discuss the question. The experts are Brough Turner from NMS, Martin Geddes from STL Partners, Stanley Chia from Vodafone, Sumit Agarwal from Google, Jonathan Christensen from Skype, Christopher Allen from iphonewebdev.com and Benoit Schillings from Trolltech/Nokia. The video is 86 minutes long so you may want to make a cuppa and get a comfy chair.
Martin Geddes kicks off by explaining why he believes innovation will be driven by business model evolution rather than technology. He uses the iphone launch and market changing aspect of the business model whereby the handset manufacturer gets a slice of the ongoing revenue - different to any other mobile manufacturer. Despite everyone else attempting to convince the audience that technology or user behaviour will be the driving forces in fact mostly they end up referring to business models.
Stanley Chia talked about the changes caused by flat rate charging in Europe and that it is causing significant momentum behind data usage. Data usage has increased by 10 fold in past 6 months because of the changes made and this is expected to continue. He went on to say that operators are starting to realise that the old walled garden model is not viable on a long term basis - 3 to 5 years changes must be made. However they don’t want to become just a big pipe and this is challenging their business model.
If operators views are changing this is really good news. They are a confused species and trying to be all things to all men has only one outcome - a bad deal for the consumer. They don’t want to be a big pipe is a concern although spinning out infrastructure businesses as they realise they are neither strategic nor major growth opportunities (once the market is fully developed) is the likely outcome.
Jonathan Christensen was lamenting the problems with the platform not allowing for consistent VOIP services. 3phone in the UK is a great example of a mashup - Skype experience, fixed price but deteriorating audio quality due to bandwidth. Lots of discussion about the 700Mhz spectrum and the opportunity for this to be completely open. However there is uncertainty about whether new business models will be tried due to the tried and tested and profitable old.
Interestingly the point was made by Benoit Schillings that he didn’t expect their to be harmonisation in mobile device operating systems. Instead he felt there would be development in the bridge that spans between the native technology and declarative environment (Ajax and HTML). This will remove the constraint on developers to do everything in Java or scripting and will give the 90% commonality which is the browser type environment. This would be a more likely outcome rather than expecting one operating system to go and “dominate the world”.
Coming back to Martin Geddes suggestion about iphone I agree with the business model argument but not with the example. I don’t believe other manufacturers will have the same power that Apple had as first to market and I don’t think they will therefore convince operators to share the revenue. Pretty soon the devices will be the same but there are short term advantages to be gained for first to market brands with innovative and desirable technology.
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