Mobile Melting Pot
Posted: June 24th, 2009
This week I was wondering what it was that drives the self-destructive fragmentation endemic in mobile. It struck me that what we call the mobile industry is, forcibly, a land of immigrants - there are no natives, yet.
So where do these mobile imigrants come from? Quite a few places, and that explains many of the tensions and contradictions that plague the market. Here’s my analysis of the characters you’re likely to meet in our mobile melting pot:
The Hardy Boys
Mainly clustering in handset manufacturers, these people perform miracles of miniaturisation and wonders with wireless, but they’re not too sure about that software stuff, and feel uncomfortable about users actually using services in case they incur charges. Capable of reaching the the pinnacles of industrial design, they are strangely tolerant of completely unusable and buggy software that blights their otherwise gorgeous devices.
Bell’s Boys
Spiritually these people are direct descendants of Graham Alexander Bell and still think they run monopoly telephone companies. As you’d expect these people are most often found at mobile operators, although some of them find their way into IT functions. Capable of incredible feats of resilience engineering at vast scale, they tend to render their own prowess less valuable than it might be by a pathological dislike of people actually using the facilities they work so effectively to create. Total control freaks, they really do know what’s best for you, honest.
Txtniks
Nobody knows where this particular tribe emerged from, but they’re one of the oldest settlers in mobile land. They see everything, no matter how complex, in terms of SMS interaction. Unintimidated by arcane codes and mechanisms, they can implement the most unlikely systems by exchange of 160-character messages. Despite having made huge amounts of money out of all sorts of messaging applications they are perplexed by other interaction models.
Gameboys
Being compulsive game players, these people immediately leapt on the games potential of phones, no matter how limited. Coming into mobile from console and PC gaming, this group treats phones as if they were gameboys and don’t take advantage of all the communication facilities that handsets offer.
Internutters
Largely coming from failed internet startups, this group leapt on the availability of data comms on phones and built apps and mobile internet services to take advantage of it. Unfortunately in their enthusiasm they didn’t realise that Hardy and Bell’s Boys have done their best to make that difficult and expensive for the end user. Limitless imagination for new services but too many incapable of not thinking in terms of a large-screen computer or realising that not everybody shares their enthusiasms.
But natives names are coming, but they won’t reach influential roles for a little while yet. Having grown up seeped in startup culture, mobile natives are all struggling to make it big in their own companies. Once they are acquired or fail they will infiltrate the rest of the industry and will, hopefully, inject a much-needed dose of sense and co-operation into the industry. Then we’ll see some really interesting things happen.
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I’m firmly in the Internutter group.
Use of “boy” encompases people of all age and sex. The word boy is used for aliteration and product name compatibility, although the industry does, sadly, reflect this gender bias.

