Editor’s note: This column by Keith Crain, chairman of Crain Communications Inc., which owns RCR Wireless News, first appeared in Automotive News, a Crain publication that covers the automotive industry.
A couple of weeks ago, I was in Orlando, Fla., for the annual CTIA Wireless convention, which covers just about the entire world of wireless telephones from the major carriers to the companies that manufacture the phones.
What makes the show so fascinating is the interest by all the content providers, such as movie houses and TV networks. They all want to be a part of this new wireless world. For them, the combination of wireless equipment, video content, computers and, yes, advertising, is coming together so rapidly that they are calling it convergence. And they are absolutely right.
But they have completely ignored the automobile.
As I walked around the show, I noticed there were next to no products or services that related directly to the vehicle.
The cellular phone industry seems to have given up on the automobile. There was the occasional Bluetooth system or its successor, but I didn’t see any company basing its success or failure on the automobile.
It may be that the cellular industry has driven right by the automobile. I admit that I’ve never quite understood how those two industries got along in the first place.
Cellular phone technology changes so rapidly that it seems to become obsolete every six months. There isn’t a lot of lead time for product development in the cellular business, and that doesn’t even take into account the continual addition of features to what was only a simple cellphone a few years ago.
Meanwhile, the automobile industry is on a much longer product development cycle. It takes months, if not years, to change an instrument panel, even without the added challenge of trying to integrate a phone that didn’t exist when the panel was designed.
Despite efforts to build those devices into vehicles, it still makes the most sense to add 12-volt outlets so whatever system the consumer uses can be switched from car to car.
The cellular phone industry plans to incorporate more features into your handheld device-formerly known as a phone-including the global positioning system and personal assistance, to name a couple.
Everything is converging. And the outcome is anybody’s guess.
