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Cellular and Computing Industries Finally Collide
magarity writes "For years now cell phones have become increasing complex as computers become ever smaller. The two industries now directly collide. Of special interest is the change in mission statement by Microsoft from 'a computer on every desk and in every home' to 'empowering people through great software, any time, any place and on any device.' With mobile phone saturation in the industrialized world from +80% (Italy) to 45% (USA), this is the next battleground for information technology dominance. Both industries have giant sized players; the shakeouts, as well as implications for consumers, will be huge."
"With mobile phone saturation in the industrialized world from +80% (Italy) to 45% (USA),"
Am I the only one who thinks this indicates that EU countries will be the major players in the future, with MS going by the wayside?
is part of microsofts mission statement? hmm, i guess "great" is a relative term.
I guess this means they'll stop selling Windows.
How the porn industry will exploit these changes. Whole new meaning to "phone sex".
But I thought only NetBSD would run on my toaster...
-Charles
Now if they only produced better screens we could get some work done. The only working thing you can consider "computing" and "cellular" is the Treo.
That WAP is shit. I can tell you as I have some experience (Nokia, Siemens, Sony, Ericsson, Alcatel, everyone plays his own game, with large differences in the ways things are shown). We have to go directly for web or for Java. I've tested some Nokias and Alcatels. For instance, Alcatel 525 WAP browser, in forms, it doesn't show you the next input till you've filled it!!
What gets lost in this discussion is why cellphone usage so much greater (in terms of percentage) in Europe and Japan is a comparison of the alternatives. How many European and Pacific Rim countries have unmeetered local phone service? That is, talk all you want next door or across town for a very low flat monthly fee?
Not sure if you are trying to be funny, but Italy is roughly 301,000 sq km, and New Jersey is rougly 19,215 sq km.
on the same subject is http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory .cfm?Story_ID=1454436
Who needs one when you just stay home and read slashdot?
As phones become more intelligent, it only seems natural that phone manufacturers would have an easier time than microsoft because microsoft has to scale down its product, clean out bugs, adapt the software to be real-time --- all while getting new teams organized that have the ability to do this.
Cell phone companies already have a large number of experienced exployees that have been meeting th ese necessary goals for years.
I just returned from Italy and I can attest to the 80% statistic. What totally blew me away was the fact that even very old people all had cell phones. Perhaps somebody can explain what factors cause people in one of the oldest western countries around to conquer the fear of new technology so well.
There's just no way the average guy is going to geek all day on the phone, for one thing.
For another, people's thumb tendons won't let them....
Only geeks will geek on the phone all day long and the cell doesn't do anything the pc doesn't do better, except walk around. And what kind of geek wants to walk around?
What MIGHT happen is people can be their own rolling data centers with secure VPN to their home box, their own mp3s playing from home in their hifi earphones and a Dragon Ball Z type Scouter visual thingy to keep an eye on the important stuff with.
All with provable open source very good privacy.
However, not only is this not here yet, it might well be illegalized in the very near future....
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
I was actually looking forward to this war. Its been a long time since MS met its match and Nokia is more than a match for MS. Firstly Nokia phones are normally known to be reliable. A fact I cant say about MS software. Secondly Nokia makes these phones so they dont have to convince the phone manufacturers to join the bandwagon. Thirdly, in Europe, anti MS feelings are strong, so I dont think MS can make much of an impact in this market. Fourthly, all the major phone manufacturers have signed up for symbian. And its pretty easy to write applications on that too. Lastly, MS cant arm twist Nokia into carrying their software, mainly because a viable alternative exists. But knowing how MS operates, they may try to pull off something aka Xbox. Don't know how Nokia will counter that.
What's under yellowstone?
I'm no Luddite, I think all this innovation is fine and dandy (although, sorry, I do not salivate at the prospect of MS getting into my phone) ... but can anyone promise that I'll still be able to buy plain, simple, boring phones and basically do telephone calls? And don't need an engineering degree to operate? Please?
This is from someone who misses corded dial telephones that never broke, or if they did the phone company swapped you for a new one. There were a lot of problems with that era, but some nice things, too. I still have a classic ugly-beige tabletop phone with a hard-to-turn dial and a REAL BELL. And even Alexander Graham Bell could probably use it in minutes.
I've recently spent some time with Nokia engineers, and they all had the hip-top communicators. Certainly they seemed very functional, but these engineers all still carried laptops-- the hiptop stuff was really suped-up text messenging and maybe some email.
The flipside were the belt-cases they wore to carry the things around. Definite geek-factor there, both good and bad.
Don't get me wrong-- I think the correct approach is to keep adding things to phones rather than stripping things off computers. Open Source taught us that lesson. But the ergonomics and design 'cool' factor needs some work.
davejenkins.com |
I think it was pretty inevitable as MS realised:
Unfortunately for them, they're entering markets with some extremely focused competitors who already dominate the space. In competing against Sony, Nokia and Ericsson (none of whom are likely to miss tricks the way IBM did in the 1980s), Microsoft are discovering what it's like to be on the receiving end.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
Italy population: 57.3 mil
Italy size:113,536 sq. mi
US population: 278.4 mil
US size: 5,539,224 sq. mi
people per square mile:
Italy:504
US:50
cellphones per person per square mile:
Italy:403.2
US:22.5
# of cellphones:
Italy: 45.84 mil
US: 125.28
In other words, phase one (a computer on every desk and in every home) has been completed +/- 10%. Now it's time to go out and achieve 100% (+/- 10%) proliferation on portable devices.
What's next, owning my brain?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So now I'll have to CTRL-ALT-DEL to access my phone book.
Will it ask me for an administrators password when I want to change the ring tone?
And what will I do when I get an 'Ignore/Cancel' error message?
I can see it now: mid conversation, and all of a sudden a message pops up 'There is a new security patch for your phone. Would you like to install it now?'
Here's a partial list of my priorities when it comes to having a cellphone:
.
.
.
1) Geographic range
2) Sound quality
3) Dropped calls
75) Playing tetris
76) Browsing the web
77) Checking e-mail
It's a phone, for God's sake.
It's not that. Penetration measures against population. That is, 80% of the Italians (some 80 million, not so small) own a cell phone. Italy, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Spain, Netherlands, ... have more users than the USA per inhabitant.
With such differences, it's not a matter of infrastructure. You can take only those regions with coverage and the difference would still be there. The problem is in the offer.
The fight for digital (as in finger) dominance
Nov 21st 1952
From The Historiconomist BS edition
The convergence of slide rules and notepads is bringing the giants of the plastic and paper industries into direct conflict
IT MAY look like a notepad, but the Orange PenNPaper, launched last month, is much more than that. With its lined pages, multicolored ink and spiral ring spine, it resembles other notepads on the market. But it has one far more significant feature: the lookup tables and conversion formulas on the inside front cover, indicated by the familiar-looking quadratic equation on the upper left side. For the PNP is the first "quick-reference notepad"--in other words, it does things a slide rule does. It is the paper industry's attempt to stake its claim in the new academic community of engineers and scientists created by the convergence of notepads and slide rules. It is no less than a declaration of war.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They should've realized from the tough time they had against Palm in the PDA market that they should just not even bother with embedded devices.
In the PDA market, size, reliability, and battery life are major factors, and those three have held WinCE devices back constantly - PalmOS devices have been able to do more with far less. (A 33 MHz Palm is far more responsive UI-wise than a 200 MHz WinCE device, and lasts far longer on battery.)
Now they're not only up against PalmOS (There are some great PalmOS smarphones out there, such as the Kyocera 6035 and 7135, Treos, and the upcoming Samsung I500 - I don't consider the I300 to be great since it's a PDA first and not a very good phone.) and Symbian (All of the Symbian devices I've seen performed their phone functions very well and had excellent integration.
What does WinCE have? It doesn't have battery life or reliability, and its hardware requirements mean that CE devices are almost always larger than their PalmOS and Symbian brethren. All three of these factors held CE back in the PDA market, but are even more critical in the phone market, where the Kyocera 6035 (One of the smaller smartphones) is considered to be monstrous in size.
Every MS-based phone that has hit the market has flopped, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
I see Symbian winning the market for "basic" smartphones, and PalmOS winning the market for "power users" who need mainstream PDA capabilities.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
'empowering people through great software...
What?
Where are they going to get that from?
It's been a long time.
This suggests that all computer users are also phone users, and all phone users are computer users. However I'm a computer user, and I do not own a phone (nor do I have plans to). What do I need one for? My communication skills aren't hindered now.
But I think the other side of the coin is more interesting. Think of all the whiny, screaming. 15 year old high school girls with phones on the oublic bus as they annoyingly try out every ring tone at maximum volume. Think about how they call every single one of their friends over and over again to tell them assanine gossip. Think about their tacky leopard print phone face covers.
Beh. The phone in America has more of a "toy" feel to me than it does a "utility" feel. Does anyone have any insight as to how the folks in Italy feel about their phones? I can't imagine trying to drive there, I'd be yelling at every other bent-necked wheel-clutching gabber I saw.
Actually, while this seems to be a reflection of the technological backwardness of the US - it's really a reflection on the failed socialist policies of European states. I used to work with a guy who had emigrated from Romainia - he's like, "of course everyone in Romania has cell phone - it costs hundreds of dollars and takes months to get a landline" - state telecom monopolies are not known for their quick service. Also, in Europe, people are accustomed to paying per minute for their local landline calls - concepts foreign to Americans who can secure a landline in a couple of days and feel entitled to unlimited free local calls. It's not much of a leap to get someone who is accustomed to paying $0.05/min for their calls to get them to pay $0.10/min for a mobile phone - but people who are accustomed to not paying for their calls at all - it's another matter.
With Microsoft getting involved, it's going to be more than a mere collision... it's going to be a train wreck.
I use a computer at work to code. I use my computer at home to learn (web, email, linux) and to play music. I could use a cell phone, sometimes, but most of the time, it's cheaper to use a normal land line. I got rid of my cell because I hated having to worry about how many minutes I was using, even for local calls.
From a pure function point of view, I'd like a mobile device that lets me schedule apointments, take notes, do some calculator type things, chat on the phone, chat online, and play music from my music collection (by this I mean remotely - the files would be streamed). However, it would have to cost only about US $30 a month (including unlimited local airtime) or else it would raise my expenses and I would realize that I didn't need it.
I really don't have any use for a web pad, but a laptop would be cool (really only to allow me to move around in my own house while computing). I would go for a laptop as my primary computing device (with an external monitor or projector for when I want a big display) and a mobile unit for the above described activities.
When it comes down to it, if these features raised my monthly costs much (over 5%), I would not pay. I'm cheap, and all of that mobile stuff doesn't really improve my life (it would probably hurt it by making me work more)
Can you hear me now...ahhhh shit, another BSOD!
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
While we were living in Italy, we were one of the fortunate people, through military contacts, who could procure a land line quickly and with very little effort. It wasn't an "old world" area, but the group in charge of telephones didn't generally feel pressured to move quickly. I'm not sure how much has changed in the last 10 years, but I would imagine that it's probably much easier to get a mobile phone than a land line, so "acceptance" is probably a sign of convenience, rather than progressive thinking.
As someone who worked for AT&T Wireless for years, I can tell you they are quickly running our of money. The centralized "cellular" paradigm is quickly running our of steam. It is simply not economically scalable to compete with very high speed ad-hoc "bottom up", software definted radio mesh networks that are the wave of the future. My opinion, is not only will telcos fail, but lets help them fail as fast as possible to make room for innovation by opening up more parts of the spectrum.
As for Microsft's involvement, who cares? I can't see them either dominating this space like they managed to do with the desktop. Interoperability will be the key, just like on the net today. Linux alread has a foot hold in this market.
Planet P - Liberation With Technology.
www.enthea.org