Why the wireless ecosystem won’t open up much soon

AT&T Mobility President Ralph De la Vega opined the benefits of an open wireless ecosystem at last week’s Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Spain, noting that wireless customers want it.
And he’s right. Wireless consumers likely would be better off with a common set of applications. (Think how nice it would be not to have to re-learn every application just because you changed devices or churned to a new provider.) But even as I try to imagine such a world, I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon.
De la Vega compared today’s wide-ranging spectrum of applications and operating systems to the SMS market before U.S. wireless operators agreed to allow their messages to operate on each other’s networks. And while that comparison makes some sense, the difference is that SMS was a failure in the States before interoperability.
There has to be pretty strong incentive for carriers to open their networks – and in the case of SMS, failure was a pretty strong incentive.
And while accessing the mobile Web in the U.S. has been pretty slow to take off, there are enough success stories around to stymie cooperation throughout the mobile ecosystem. Apple Inc.’s tightly controlled operations are a huge success; BlackBerry business applications are widely used; and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS continues to grow, despite the fact that it hasn’t gotten a major upgrade in a few years.
Meanwhile, the U.S. handset market is all about exclusivity: AT&T Mobility with Apple’s iPhone; Sprint Nextel with the Palm Pre; T-Mobile USA with the HTC G1; and Verizon Wireless with the Blackberry Storm. Exclusivity is partly how carriers differentiate their offerings.
Perhaps Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer was a little more realistic when he said OS developers probably wouldn’t share common APIs when introducing new features to their platforms.
Openness is a lofty goal, but innovation and competition play pretty important roles in driving wireless adoption too.