Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
The mobile ecosystem is expanding. We are quickly moving from an era of proprietary development confined to the “walled gardens” of particular services and devices being developed for the networks of particular mobile operators, to one where a variety of companies are shaping the next-generation mobile consumer experience with rollout of innovative applications that operate across a spectrum of devices and networks.
However, the mobile operator is not willing to be relegated to being a “dumb pipe” or just a carrier. In fact we are seeing mobile operators take an increasingly proactive approach in influencing mobile innovation in order to provide their end users with customized and easily accessible services.
Opening the gardens
A host of compelling applications are surfacing on mobile handsets: international 3G/High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) roaming capabilities, Global Positioning System (GPS), mobile TV and advanced video streaming, secure payment, advanced mail functionalities, etc. But this is only the beginning of the profound wave of innovation that is set to revolutionize the mobile consumer experience.
We are moving into an era when a device that is extremely comfortable for the mass consumer to use will deliver a variety of more relevant and personal services that are precisely tailored to what users are doing at the moment and how they organize their lives. This vision anticipates more intuitive interfaces and location- and user-aware services all coming together in a fabulous way to bring the real mobile Internet to life for the mainstream – not just tech aficionados.
Some say this innovation is long overdue in mobile and that it has taken too long for the industry to get moving. In fact, mobile has progressed through a period of proprietary, closed development that has proven to be a common early stage for many industries; just as naturally, it has now entered a new stage of growth, with openness serving as the engine for innovation.
Closest to the consumer
Today, an expanding array of companies – device manufacturers, chipset manufacturers, system integrators and independent software vendors, as well as mobile operators – is unifying around a narrowing field of core Operating Systems (OSs) to improve the mobile consumer proposition. This is a good development for the industry as a whole, including mobile operators. While the mobile consumer experience is no longer being defined by operators alone, they remain a very strong and indispensable link within the mobile value chain.
In this new era of openness – in which a variety of companies come together in co-existent cooperation and competition – it is the mobile operator who remains most intimately linked with the consumers themselves and are in the best position to understand consumer trends and requirements. This has been brilliantly demonstrated by the success of mobile payment services in Africa, where traditional banking and credit systems are scarce. Mobile operators can leverage this type of real-world market understanding to ensure that service and device innovation is aligned with actual consumer needs.
Consequently, we are seeing mobile operators assuming key roles in the various collaborative efforts that are driving development in the industry. For example, eight tier-one mobile operators are taking part in LiMo Foundation, the global consortium of mobile leaders delivering an open handset platform for the whole mobile industry, ensuring that the LiMo Platform will reflect the real-world market requirements from mobile consumers from all corners of the globe.
Ultimately, the fact of the matter is that mobile operators have too much at stake to sit on the sidelines for the heart-of-the-handset debate that is waging today in the mobile industry. Their customers’ experience and their brands’ reputation depend on the variety, quality and accessibility of value-added services that are built on top of the handset OS.
Conclusion
Openness is yielding a greatly improved mobile consumer proposition. The real mobile Internet experience is set to envelop the professional and personal lives of mass consumers – not just technology devotees – with the availability of more compelling and relevant services through more intuitive and useful devices.
A broader ecosystem of players than ever before is influencing the direction of the industry. But because no one is closer to the consumer or better understands the consumer’s needs, mobile operators have the real-world market intelligence that is a prerequisite for meaningful and successful innovations.
Morgan Gillis is executive director of LiMo Foundation (http://www.limofoundation.org), the non-profit industry consortium dedicated to creating the first truly open, hardware-independent, Linux-based operating system for mobile devices. Write to Morgan at execdirector@limofoundation.org. Write to RCR Wireless News at rcrwebhelp@crain.com.
