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  • The Paradox of Consumer Choice
    A few years ago I read a book called The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More by Barry Schwartz. His anecdotes were insightful and pointed to truths about the amount of choice the free market has laid on us as consumers. Of course free markets and consumer choice should be good things, but there are certainly experiences I have had where the overwhelming sense of having too many options made it difficult to actually make a decision. I related to much of what the book was saying, particularly with the experience of picking out a DVD to watch from my massive collection. I recall staring at a wall of DVDs and having the most difficult time deciding what to watch. The decision-making process when faced with so many good choices was simply immobilizing.  
  • The Future of PC and Mobile Processors

    I've spent a lot of time with a number of hardware manufacturers recently, trying to get a glimpse into the next generation of processors and the ways in which they'll impact future gadgets and PCs. In all my meetings, one term has arisen time and again: SOC, or system-on-a-chip.

    Traditionally, chips have been created independently and then coupled together to provide multiple computing features. For example, a manufacturer would create a core processor like an Intel Centrino with a built-in Wi-Fi radio, and then attach that to a systems board, perhaps linking it together with a separate graphics co-processor, in order to deliver enhanced PC graphics. Another might take an ARM core processor and then add on additional features like extended graphics to enhance device functionality.

  • Apple's iPad: Live up the Hype? It Will....
    It was interesting to hear all the chatter after last week's iPad launch. Most reactions I heard from other analysts and media were lukewarm at best...which was what I expected. If you think about it, how can anything live up to the kind of hype leading up to this launch? But there was a lot missed in the media about the event and the product that I hope to share in order to maintain our perspective on not only the iPad but on Apple and their products.  
  • Innovation Abounds - CES 2010 Post Show Analysis

    This year's CES was very interesting. I had felt for the past few years that CES was sorely lacking in the innovation department. But this year it looks like things have changed in the technology industry. Technology companies have realized that to reach the consumer the pace of innovation needs to accelerate, and this year's CES was a start in that direction.  Several things stuck out that I'd like to highlight:  

Where are the Mobile OS Standards?

Written by Tim Bajarin Tuesday, 04 August 2009 22:05

Smartphones like the Apple iPhone, the BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile and Windows Mobile–based devices represent the next major computing platform. But how will that platform cohere?

Nokia bigwig Bob Ianucci recently compared the smartphone phenomenon with the way the mainframe, mini-computer, and PC markets developed—

and what it took for them to succeed. He pointed out that when mainframes first came to market there were a lot of players—Control Data, GE, Honeywell, IBM, RCA, and so on—and all had their own approaches and operating systems with very little commonality between them. He called that era the golden age of mainframes, but it was more like the Wild West. Once standards were in place, people could write software for these various mainframes, which in turn led the market to expand. With that, the value shifted to software and eventually services. But at best, this market amounted to less than 100 computers sold during this time.

Ianucci also examined the mini-computer market. Its golden age was dominated by incompatible systems from Apollo, Data General, DEC, Prime, and Wang. But once they standardized on Digital Equipment's environments, there was a buildup of compatible hardware that the software community was able to support in the way of all types of new mini-computing applications. With this move the software was now where the value resided, followed by a value shift to services. Now the total available market ran in the thousands instead of just a hundred or so.

Not surprisingly, the same pattern can be used to show the development of the PC market. It started out with various incompatible systems from Apple, Atari, DEC, Commodore, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Osborne, Sinclair, Texas Instruments, and even Wang. But once the market standardized on IBM's PC and Microsoft's OS, compatible hardware came out from Compaq, Dell, HP, and others, allowing the software community to drive the next real value propositions. Today services are where the real money is made. Now the market for PCs is in the hundreds of millions annually.

Ianucci posited that we are in the golden age of "the mobile PC"—the multitude of handheld devices offering various levels of complexity, expectation, and opportunity. But when you look at the mobile PC in the context of the evolution of the mainframe, mini-computer, and PC, you can see that incompatibility reigns in the golden age. For this market to really take off it needs standards in hardware and optimized operating systems. This will be followed by strong support from the software development community, which will create software applications and link them to some type of services.

Ianucci's view of the evolution of the mainframe, mini-computer, and PC markets is spot-on, but trying to apply this logic to the mobile PC market may be more difficult. For one, because of the creativity and innovation that drives the designs of the handsets themselves, it's not likely that we will standardize around a hardware platform as in the past. That standardization will have to come from the OS instead. In that sense, we are now in the "Wild West" of mobile PC operating systems. Each platform is vying to become an industry standard, the way that Microsoft's Windows was needed to deliver a consistent computing experience for the PC that software developers could support.

Look at the mobile operating systems available today: Apple's OS X, Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, Nokia's Symbian, Qualcomm's Brew, RIM's BlackBerry, Palm's current OS and its future Linux OS and Limo. 

 

 

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