As industry spends billions of dollars on spectrum and banks on a future driven by third-generation wireless phones and mobile commerce, there is every reason to believe the serious business of tomorrow is actually child’s play.
While wireless executives with sweaty palms write checks to the federal government for spectrum licenses, they can take comfort in the knowledge the future is one big game. The digital kind.
If you haven’t noticed, kids rule. They’ll design the killer apps and then buy them. By any future standard, Bill Gates, Steve Case, Marc Andressen, George Gilder and their flowery techno ideas will become digital anachronisms in the not too distant future. They’re part of the Old New Economy.
Consider a few things: A big attraction of the NTT DoCoMo i-mode service, which serves about a fifth of Japan’s 25 million, is games. Look at where Bill Gates and his warriors at Microsoft are headed. Xbox. It’s the Next Big Thing.
Digital technology, once the province of button-down businesses, is going casual. It’s migrating to mobile phones, household appliances, cars and even, can you believe it, La-Z-Boy recliners.
It’s all part of the big picture, called digital media. It’s all about ripping out wires and putting content on wheels. It’s about making digital devices that depend less on the human appendages that operate keyboards and more on the human voice that is recognized and carries out commands by mass-produced artificial intelligence. It’s about more than communicating. It’s about The Experience.
Microsoft, when it is not fighting the Justice Department and trying to conquer the world, is probing this digital future.
“People ask me, why are you guys at Microsoft so interested in this area, why, is it so important? And I talked about it earlier as one of the absolutely critical factors in the ongoing development of the information industry. I mean, digital media is really the most natural data type to work with, not text and numbers, but speech and voice, and audio, and video. And so we’ve been investing in this area for a long time,” Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer told a San Jose crowd last month.
Ballmer raved on: “When you travel the globe, and you talk to these wireless operators who’ve spent billions and billions of dollars to buy wireless spectrum, and you ask them, `What are you most excited about doing with this high bandwidth wireless spectrum?’ They all say, `It’s digital media, we’ve got to have video calls, we’ve got to be able to stream people movies and music to telephones, to Pocket PCs, to other handheld devices.'”
The technology turns out to be the easy part. Getting people to integrate into their daily lives and making a profit at is another story. There is also the little problem of how this brave new world will be regulated.
But at least, with all the mobile games coming down the pike, it’ll be a helluva lot of fun.
