Signal to Noise

In an article today at the Register, Andrew Orlowski posts (my comments interspersed):

The smartphone wars once devoured a great deal of attention and energy, particularly during the long PR war that took place in the first four barren years – from the birth of the venture exactly ten years ago, to the first mass market consumer handset appearing in 2002. Today, apart from a few gadget fans, nobody really cares any more.

(In my best Luke Skywalker voice: “I care”.)  Seriously, anybody in business today is using a smartphone.  And people who aren’t in business don’t use them, almost without deviation.  The reason the first four years sucked was because smartphones sucked during the first four years.  Today, we’ve got better ones (though doing personal info management on a 2-inch screen still blows).

[...]

Even five years ago, it was apparent this was a war in which there would be no winner.

The winner is clearly Apple, as Andrew later points out.  Nokia’s lack of consistency and scattershot approach to applications and platforms is what kills Symbian devices.  Microsoft is better about this with Windows Mobile, and Blackerry and Apple are better than both Nokia and Microsoft.  Plus, where Blackberry has ‘quiet librarian’ excited, Apple has sex appeal and sheen. So I think, for now, it’s pretty obvious who the winner of this war is.

How did “smart” phones lose their luster? While they were bigger, slower and harder to use than phones based on older closed platforms, they didn’t offer the value that persuaded most people to put up with the pain and use the extra “smartness”. For example, Google Maps runs on any midrange phone today very capably – and like Google itself, it does the job well enough.

Disagree. Who do you know that actually runs Google maps on a non-smartphone?  Right, I didn’t think so. Just because a device CAN do a thing does not mean a device SHOULD do that thing.

But even then it’s doubtful that Nokia and Symbian executives would have opted for Exile in Freetard Street, had it not been for two competitive factors. One is the diminishing cost of smartphone OS licenses, which reflects their market value. Google is giving away its smartphone OS, Android. As Bill Ray correctly pointed out today, that makes Android utterly pointless.

Disagreed. Google is trying to carve out a platform ecosystem by becoming a technology provider as opposed to an application provider.  It’s the next logical step for any serious software company to become a tech licensor instead of an appmaker, which is what they’ve traditionally always been.  Android gives Google a vehicle to accelerate its control into areas where the competition is either stagnant or too wet to know what hit it: like the wireless industry.

Lack of 2.0-style innovation and consumer accessibility has pissed on the explosive growth we all want in this sector, and Android seeks to address this. Really, aren’t consumers sick and tired of being nickeled and dimed by Bell for every little feature they want to use? No wonder people don’t adopt new stuff. The cost and claustrophobia of the licensing experience shun people from adopting.   So, it’s not pointless to Google to give away seat licenses for free (it may’ve been for old school Symbian).  It eliminates one barrier to access: cost, while working on the solution to the other barrier: outdated telco business models. Increased demand for the open platform, Android, puts pressure on the network operators to stop banging consumers over the head with micro-fees and contract hoops.

There’s another factor, too. Symbian’s founding CEO, Colly Myers, the father of the OS formerly known as Epoc, used to talk of the “enchantment” factor. Tech wizardry wasn’t enough, he said, but the devices had to charm.

It’s largely Nokia that must be blamed for failing to make Symbian phones remotely “enchanting”. Nokia’s UI is cumbersome (Symbian doesn’t do UIs); the hardware was for years underclocked, making it slow. And Nokia’s legendary marketing has appealed to nerds, outcasts and social freaks – and been guaranteed to confuse everyone.

Today it’s the iPhone which has the enchantment factor. How could it not – it comes straight from the Dream Factory. And Apple must now see a clear road ahead for world dominance.

Symbian has done everything its original designers asked of it – a twenty year lifespan is not bad at all. But it’s now Apple’s business to lose

Absolutely agreed.  Apple is driving now.  The problem is, they’ve got to get out of the creepy deal they have with AT&T. That’s their #1 barrier to entry for business adoption in the United States. Solve that problem, and I think Apple may just run away with the business Android was designed to capture.