Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Reading Michael Mace’s commentary about Android reminded me that I keep forgetting to point out the Clayton Christensen talk from the Open Source Business Convention way back from 2004. Some of the examples from the talk are actually particularly about mobile if I remember correctly (I can’t find the transcript though, and don’t have enough time to even skip through the audio however). Here’s a quick summary though:

Several speakers discussed the “law of conservation of attractive profits.” That is, when a market becomes commoditized, the level above it becomes the attractive market and the level below it “bounces back” a little. Open source driven commoditization of software could lead to several markets becoming significantly more attractive, including those requiring a critical mass of data, users or connections.

There was discussion around what would happen to the handset market when the technology was “good enough” and assembling a handset meant just pulling in some prebuilt pieces and slapping them in. I think the N95 has shown that that’s really the way things have gone, there’s little value now in cramming in additional stuff. The value should be in integrating and making it work, and in letting consumers choose the right tradeoffs between features and constraints.

The direction that Google seems to be taking with respect to developing a common shared platform for mobile devices seems to be headed in that direction. Commoditize the base platform and the value should migrate a level up to mobile services, where they seem to be doing a great job with their mobile search, mobile GMaps, mobile GMail, etc. If that’s the case it’s also pretty interesting that they got their maps application onto the iPhone, cause the theory says that even with the iPhone the value should be in the apps on there and not the base platform itself.

Interestingly enough it’s a direction that also makes a lot of sense out of Nokia Ovi. What if Nokia were secretly worried that their handset business could get undercut by exactly the kind of thing that Google is doing? It would make sense to flip around and concentrate on the services those devices hook up to. Nokia isn’t in the Open Handset Alliance because they want to occupy the same position in that value chain that Google has taken for itself. Which assuming that all goes to plan, should be the real position of power. Give away the operating system for others to build into their products, own the services it hooks into. Everyone furrows their brows when I say this, but the business moguls where talking about it in 2004. This isn’t some insane ranting of an open source bigot here, I’m just repeating what actual respectable business commentators have said.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Open Source, ThisIsMobility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.