Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Sounds like there’s some interesting discussion going on at GDC. I liked the summary from MocoNews about the end of carrier control in gaming. It’s an excellent example of one of the positive benefits that comes out of having the mobile web look more like a web than a bunch of standalone content silos. I wanted to call attention to this bit in particular:

Who says you have to support 1,000 handsets from the start? How about 10 and see what the uptake is? Suddenly, you have all the options that weren’t available previously.

First of all cause the idea itself is worth pointing out – that distribution through the carrier often came with a required list of porting targets and you had to hit all of them. It was a pretty cumbersome requirement to go along with distribution. The ability of the developer to pick and choose targets as they go along is great news. But it also means that niche use spread across large areas also becomes possible. An application that appeals to 5% of mobile users was something that any single carrier would never go for unless the return per user was astronomical. Even if the worldwide number of users was large (5% of the worldwide mobile using public is a lot), there was no way for the app developer to reach that user base through carrier deals. Unbundling access to mobile users by hitting them via other distribution and discovery mechanisms makes those kinds of applications realistic again. I like it!

However, the flip side to this is thinking about why the carriers put those porting requirements in there in the first place. They didn’t do it to be jerks, they did it cause they wanted to deliver a consistent experience to as many of their users as they could while not bearing high support overhead. I don’t agree that was a great way to handle that problem, but it does point out an interesting area. What’s going to happen to customer support and consistent user experience in a post-carrier-dominated world? Who do I call or what do I do when an application I downloaded yesterday starts behaving badly or I can’t figure out how to configure it?

I think long term the answers to those questions should mimic the way these things are handled for PCs. The attempt to try to control the whole system of mobility from network to handset to user application resulted in the system we have now, and the whole thing needs to be supplanted with something more expansive. There’s a few things that probably go into that. There’s probably some degree of communal mobile user knowledge that needs to evolve. It exists for desktop systems, though for lots of us it’s so ingrained by now that we don’t see it. Users know what an email address is, they understand that when they install an application they should look for it in the start menu if they want to use it, that when they want to save a web page to use it later they add it to favorites, etc. Common user experience, frequency of tasks, shared understanding, and common sense all combine to make the stuff that people do frequently seem simple. And I don’t just mean “user education” here. I mean application provider and handset manufacturer education as well, cause it’s a two way street.

For an example take a look at the way that iPhone usage has pushed mobile to a different level. What happened with the iPhone was that the market potential for the device wasn’t set by how well the carrier could push services out to the end users. Instead, Apple decided what they wanted the phone to do, designed it the way they wanted it to work, and then marketed those functions directly to end users. Compare the iPhone commercials to the kind of stuff that Nokia makes to describe their products. Very different stances. But it’s not just the marketing, it delivers on what it says. Using the web on an iPhone is simple and intuitive, using the maps app is the same. It wasn’t designed by a committee, which is how a lot of the current phones on the market feel. It was designed with a strong and consistent hand guided by the practicality of the end user, not a reduction in support call costs. And the difference is obvious top to bottom.

I’m curious what else is going to come around and what else changes in this version of mobile. Are the rest of the device manufacturers going to follow suit and rethink their devices now that Apple has shown that it can be done different? I think so, which leaves the door wide open to get more open platforms into the mix. When I bring up OpenMoko frequently I hear responses from people that are tied to the “accepted knowledge” from that old environment. But I think it’s been proven that a single vendor with a strong vision, consistent implementation, and messaging to the end user can make a difference. So really all the arguments against a major disruption in the mobile devices market are pretty well voided at this point. And we have so many efforts lowering the bar for getting a new device out in the market. That could get really interesting really soon.