Still Waiting for Mobile

In 1999, I went to a conference held at San Francisco's Moscone Center where a few thousand practitioners in the new Internet channel, just over five years old at the time, gathered to share information and learn from the cutting-edge gurus. I went to a session on "mobile computing" and left with the distinct impression that the speaker was out of his mind.

He was cartoonishly enthusiastic about the mobile channel, at a time when display capabilities were limited to two rows of text, sixteen characters wide, and the input was limited to twelve buttons. Even so, he insisted that within two or three years, the computer would no longer be the device through which people accessed information: it would be the cell phone.

Fast forward to the present day, and such a claim seems quite a bit more credible: the "smart phone" and wireless data networks have transformed the cell phone into a viable computing device. It's still limited in its capabilities, but it's gained considerable ground and is continuing to evolve. Even so, I'd say that "two or three years" is aggressive, and there are a lot of obstacles that need to be overcome.

The device remains primitive, but my sense is that will be addressed soon. There are no reliable standards for mobile device development - so development is costly because a separate application for each platform (iPhone, Android, and Windows) must be built, and I don't sense that will change in the near term. And the cost to users is still high (it can cost $1,500 per year for a phone with a reasonable data plan) while the benefit is too low to justify the occasional and frivolous benefits of ownership - and the cost is not decreasing at the same rate as previous technologies (in fact, it doesn't seem to be decreasing at all), so it will be a while before it's worthwhile to the mainstream.

All things considered, the mobile channel has come a long way over the past decade - but I maintain that there remain a number of challenges to widespread adoption that will take several more years to overcome.