happy chaos freedom machine

It will be very interesting to watch Google’s Android play out in the market. The basic challenge faced by all those who want to eventually see useful, reliable, trustworthy mobile computing devices is a rewiring of the basic competitive landscape that delivers the services, the devices, and the connectitivity into our hands.

The wireless carriers are an extension of the telecommunications incumbents, the most intransigent, anti-competitive, obstructionist industry in history, to my way of thinking. They were handed a natural monopoly by government a hundred years ago and got very comfortable price discriminating along three distinct axes: duration, time of day and distance. In recent years us whippersnapper customers and pesky technologists have been asking them to step down their game a bit. A lot. Be dumb pipes carrying commodity bits indiscriminately using some lame protocol called TCP-what??? I don’t think so. 

When I worked for IBM, as part of the Pervasive Computing effort, I helped Nokia set up the Open Mobile Alliance. It was extremely instructional watching the roomful of delegates split into three camps of handset manufacturers, carriers, and IT companies. We, the IT companies, were clearly the pariahs. Some, like Cisco and Sun, had learned how to deliver functionality that met their bizarre requirements without over-stepping their charter, and were acceptable. Some were trying deperately to learn that dance so they could tap into the vast riches of the telco IT budget. Some had starry-eyed delusions about a mobile Internet where standards would allow any device to connect to any carrier and consume services from anywhere. Their rants seemed to amuse the handset manufacturers, who humored them because they could use the votes, but knew better, and annoy the carriers, who still needed them to write code. 

Then along came the iPod, the iTunes store, and finally the iPhone, with which Apple struck the first effective blow against the carrier hegemony. Only a market force as large as Steve Jobs’ effective monopoly of the MP3 market could force the hand of the weakest wireless carrier in the US, AT&T, to bend to Apple’s will. The phone is locked to AT&T’s network, but Apple controls the “services” delivered to the phone through the iPhone App Store. BTW, yet another sign that carriers exist on a different plane of reality from you or I — we call them applications, they call them services. The simple reason is that, to a carrier, an “application” is call waiting, *69, or Caller ID. When someone calls something like Monkey Ball on the iPhone an app the carrier feels funny inside.

In any event, the iPhone was a real crack in the wireless carrier’s armor. It put an IT company in control of the things people did on a mobile device. Now, here comes Android. With T-Mobile there is a clear desire to replicate the App Store model and allow ISVs direct access to the market created by their Android phones. However, every carrier will create its own business model around Android. How many will go the “app store” route, and how many will reinstate their ridiculous walled gardens on this new, potentially open mobile platform? For that matter, how long will T-Mobile’s magnanimity last? The early signs are very positive, and given T-Mobile’s last-place position in the North American mobile market, that’s not too surprising. However, if they see significant revenues being generated by those apps that circumvent their coffers, or even worse, if some type of VoIP or messaging app gets popular on Android phones, will they be able to resist the instinct to rein it in, brand it and put in the carriers’ familiar harness?