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.
A race is underway, and the whole world is watching – even though the winners have already been determined.
Major, mainstream media – BusinessWeek, Forbes, The New York Times, USA Today, etc. – are suddenly all geeked up to talk about mobile-phone software code: With so many large companies and industry consortia seeking to claim a role, which operating systems will ultimately capture the heart of the next-generation handset?
There would not be so much attention and conjecture if the stakes weren’t so high. The inevitable ramification of the business-model shakeup and operating-system jockeying that are taking place in the mobile ecosystem is no less than a second cellular revolution. Something dramatic is about to happen in the lives of mobile consumers and enterprise users everywhere – the rollout of the “real” mobile Internet experience – and the mobile industry’s coalescence around two or three broadly accepted operating systems is the critical, triggering event that will throw it into motion. This has set off a fierce race among high-profile players – LiMo Foundation, Google, Microsoft, Nokia/Symbian and others – to deliver one of the entrenched operating systems.
The outcome of the race? That’s a tough question that will be answered in terms of which operating systems yield the most inventive, important new mobile Internet application development; even many of the mobile industry’s leaders are covering their bets by investing in multiple efforts. But who will be the winners? That one’s easier. It’s the consumers and business users who are about to see their lives transformed.
The real thing
The first cellular revolution successfully brought us mobile voice and messaging, and, recently, a rudimentary Web-browsing capability has emerged. But, marred by low-grade, non-optimized features and underwhelming content (except in the world’s most advanced markets such as Japan and Korea), this contemporary mobile Internet experience has proven to be of limited appeal – almost strictly to technology aficionados.
Today’s handsets utilize very advanced hardware, with very fast processors and substantial storage capacity, and high-speed cellular networks are already in place. So what’s the holdup with the real mobile Internet?
Industry fragmentation among so many proprietary, incompatible operating systems has discouraged innovation in next-generation, optimized services. Application code must be customized for each of the disparate operating systems in use across the mobile industry, making it too costly for third-party application developers and content providers to roll out business and entertainment services tailored for the peculiarities of the mobile handset.
Conversely, industry unification around a reduced number of operating systems would allow for innovative, network-independent services to flow through to consumers. This is happening now. The number has come down from 30 or 40 to 5 or 6 front-running operating systems, and there will be more convergence – though not down to only one. The mobile industry will not allow it.
Openness is in
The mobile industry is deeply reluctant to follow the lead of the PC world and cede the heart of the device to one proprietary platform controlled by a single large party dedicated to its own business agenda.
In order to ignite the real mobile Internet, the handset operating system must mediate interoperation of diverse technologies, content and business models seeking to converge on the handset, and this cannot happen under traditional, commercial governance, which typically produces only silo-ed solutions. This realization has led to a gathering consensus within the mobile industry that closed, proprietary, in-house platforms must be replaced with industry solutions.
Even within this context, significant challenges must be overcome. Open environments have historically lacked industrial-strength governance, and two historical characteristics of the mobile industry have been significant fragmentation and a brutally tough intellectual property (IP) landscape. If a mobile operating system is to be broadly accepted, it must elegantly draw on both open-source principles and this industry’s unique, real-world requirements.
Against this backdrop of complex factors has formed today’s race to deliver the winning next-generation handset operating systems.
Conclusion
Business as usual has prevented the mobile industry from bringing the mobile Internet to life for mass consumer and business users, and this is why value-system restructuring within the mobile ecosystem is not optional. Indeed, the industry’s tectonic plates are shifting. Companies are coming together in a revolutionary manner in which they simultaneously collaborate and compete, in order to spur innovation and bring about the next-generation mobile Internet experience.
Today, the mobile industry’s global followers are asking, with which two or three operating systems will the real mobile Internet be enabled? That question is premised on an answer – coalescence on a few handset operating systems, triggering a second cellular revolution – that mass common business users and consumers have been waiting for.
Morgan Gillis is executive director of LiMo Foundation (http://www.limofoundation.org), a 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.
