This is the second part of a talk I gave last year. It’s still relevant. I’ve written this from my notes.
I’m preaching to the choir here – we all know that we’re experiencing a burst in the creation of new services that run over the internet. But, what can we, in the mobile space, learn from what’s happening on other, more creative, networks?
A big contrast between the internet ecosystem and the mobile network ecosystem as it has come to be is that the internet is democratic, there is no lock on traffic or development.
On mobile networks, the operators control the access and the network and practically own the terminals. This is similar to AOL controlling what PC you use. This might have worked in the early days of telecom, but not today. How do we help the operators learn how to extract value from a layer other than transport?
To be fair, the internet regularly experiences threats by the telcos that run the big wires that carry internet traffic. Caught with an open network, they are trying to impose their control on the internet as well.
Openness, and all it entails, feels like it crashes into the standard telco business models, but it opens (no pun intended) up whole new worlds that we never thought of, a number of new ways of doing business that hunkering down and closing up would never reveal.
And, due to the openness of the internet, we have large service companies blurring the boundaries of network and service. Large companies are reaching, learning how to be big and strong yet sensitive and nimble, owning the network and owning the service, yet allowing for growth and democracy for innovation to flourish.
And internet companies, bred on open innovation, are making lurches into mobile. That is cause for concern, but they seem too busy with their internet properties. To maintain ones position in the internet, one needs to realize that competition can come out of unexpected places. In the internet world, the small can be nimble and burst out of nowhere.
Semi-closed and operator-dominated, the mobile world has left itself out of all this creativity. It seems a whole lot easier to build for web than mobile. Yet, with more folks accessing internet service from mobile devices than from desktop computers, the opportunities are big. All we have in the mobile world is a lack-luster market of ring-tones, wallpaper, and java game downloads.
How will this play out?
