The Future of Mobile Web 2.0 - Part I

On Wednesday I was on two panels at the Informa Mobile Web 2.0 event, those being the the ones on standards in the mobile industry, and the wrap up one on what comes next in mobile. The latter was on the future of mobile overall, but so was the former, in that unless Planet Mobile (today's operators and device makers) can sort out a better level of standards integration, they may not have a future.

This post is the first of two on the Future of Mobile Web 2.0 (needs a TLA - FoM 2.0 ?), and deals with the Standards issue.

To explain this issue, its best to give an example - several years ago we were asked to closely examine a piece of technology in BT labs that was built to allow a piece of application software to be written once, and it would then adapt it for the multiplicity of variations to allow it to work on the plethora of standards and adaptations which was the mobile delivery chain then. Quite often the same software would not work on the same phone in different operators' systems.

Roll forward 5 years, and that piece of software is now rolled out as a company (iO), and in the interim we have undertaken a number of studies for mobile companies - in mobile advertising, mobile music, and mobile TV (we gave part of the Web 2.0 Monday workshop on Mobile TV - see a short writeup here) - and guess what - not much has changed! People still tell us it's near impossible (or at least economically not feasible) to write a piece of software that will work with any phone on any one operators' network, or that will work on the same phone on different networks. In fact its become worse - for mobile rich media (Music, video, TV) there has been an explosion of (non) standards from how to store the media, through its distribution, to rendering and on-board operation - so for eg you can't even guarantee that DRM will work the same way - if it works at all - on any two phones.

(probably as good a reason as any to drop DRM actually....)

So why does this matter so much - why is the FoM 2.0 at stake? There are 3 main reasons.

(i) Strategic economics today - we are continually told that there are twice as many mobiles on the planet as PC's and that it will be the "internet device of choice". This statement is disingenuous (aka bollocks), because it is not a homogenous market - as far as making them all interwork its a digital Tower of Babel. With the exception of Far Eastern countries where an end to end standard has either been decided by an industry body (eg Japan) or government (eg Korea), this much vaunted market - from a service providers point of view - is actually a very large number of subscale markets with high entry costs, that no-one can afford to build value for.

(ii) Strategic economics tomorrow - players we talk to for mobile TV tell us its just too damned hard and expensive to make mobile TV work reliably, and they will run with Web / IP TV approaches for now. The risk for planet mobile is that these players stick with Web TV, or - even more threatening - the Web TV goes mobile via WiFi, WiMax et al.

(iii) The lack of a Future for todays' Mobile players - it can't have escaped anyone's notice that people like Google and Apple have looked at the failings of the existing players, and the size of the potential market, and have started to make their own plays - the iPhone bei ng just the latest in quite a long line of ventures into the space.

The history of technology standards is interesting by the way - traditionally standards were defined "de jure" - by industry groups or by some form of edict (as happened with 2G in Europe, in Japan with DoCoMo, and in Korea with mobile TV), or - more typically - de Facto - in that a specific player's approach was used by the majority of consumers and it won. At the moment nearly all the players seem still to be trying to get "their" stuff to be de facto standards, rather than collaborating in any meaningful (ie shape changing / material / useful) way, and the customers are just ignoring them and doing mobile multimedia internet "stuff" in all sorts of other (bypass) ways.

Mobile today (to me) looks exactly the same as PC networking did in about 1983 - multiple types of PC, a variety of operating systems, multiple different network topologies (anyone recall token passing, cambridge ring etc), virtually no interoperation of peripherals etc etc. Back then it took Apple to define what a PC should look like, and then IBM/Microsoft to set a de facto standard. (And the open DARPANet eventually beat all the closed OSP models)

In fact, when one looks at the major innovations over the last few years in mobile from players traditionally outside of Planet Mobile, its easy to come to the conclusion that Planet Mobile is not really capable of reforming itself*, and probably needs an Apple type play (from Apple no less) - and a Microsoft/IBM play- to sort it out.

It will probably take something like this today to save Planet Mobile. In fact, this could be deja vu as Apple now seems to be doing for mobile multimedia what it did for microcomputers 25 years ago....

Of course, pricing and closed systems don't help either....and nor do attempts to de-standardise the Mobile Web like this.

(*As an aside, some friends inside certain handset manufacturers tell me they are delighted with the Apple iPhone, as it allows them to go back up their management chain and say "See - I told you we needed to build stuff like that)

Addendum - a post on mobile monday London wondered why I hadn't talked about the industry standards bodies - my post was aimed at a high level but its an oversight, I accept. Here is our take:

There are a number of mobile standards bodies - Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) , World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and also .mobi. The question asked of them all though, is do they have the influence to "knock heads" together sufficiently to allow the industry to standardise itself - or will it take outside pressure? Evidence to date from other industries (some with the same players) is that there is often a prolonged attempt to run with proprietary or conflicting standards until either competition declares a winner, or it becomes economically better to collaborate. Evidence in the mobile multimedia space would tend to suggest this scenario will play out. The problem is also that a whole raft of standards need to be interworked across the end to end delivery channel at once for rich mobile services to work easily.

Or one could just leave it to Apple to define a standard-set and let its approach become the de facto approach

Postscript - Scott Karp has noted 5 reason he hates the mobile internet - in fact they all derive from the above - in countries like Japan and Korea which ave end to end standards, his problems do not occur.