Consider: this year, most of the telecom companies that haunted the world’s largest business tech trade show, CeBIT, pulled out. This left the landscape interestingly barren, but I contend it was also a cultural and business model departure. It’s onerous, and there is hope.
The history of personal computing has revolved around both usefulness and entertainment that can be provided by computers. In some ways, life is easier, in other ways, personal computing introduces problems into our lives. Cell/mobile phones were initially designed to take the place of landline telephony, a market that was at that time, a mess. The mess was created by divestiture by AT&T of its operating unit, the emergence of digital voice capabilities, and much flux in services associated with telephony.
While various initiatives and consumer demand evolved lots of applications on personal computer platforms, the form factor of the mobile phone didn’t bring about dramatic applications for mobiles until the early part of the 2000′s. Somehow, there became a jealousy– no a demand for revenue on the part of mobile service providers to cash in on applications. The mentality of carriers is far, even vastly different than those of personal computer and operating systems/applications makers in the PC ‘space’.
The developers of applications for mobiles are often at the mercy of the carriers. Many carriers actually disable phone features because they don’t fit the carrier’s business models or desires. I’ve owned phones like this; the Motorola RAZR line comes to mind. The operating systems behind phones can be prevented from full functionality at the carrier’s whim. Extra charges might enable these features for users of the phones, but some features are simply banned.
These banned features include things like tethering– the ability of a mobile phone to be used as an Internet access device for a personal computer, as an example. If this sort of feature was disabled on a personal computer, there would be hell to raise, and probably instant work around hacks. The telecom culture very much wants to control their playing field– at the cost of functionality.
Google’s Android operating system, an alternative offered for mobile phones and even netbooks, also has the capacity to limit certain features– even though it’s an ‘open source’ operating system, and ostensibly, open environment. Google’s losing mindshare quickly for this operating system on mobiles for numerous reasons, not the least of which is the lack of a product affinity store, such as the online/easy application purchase store originally championed by Apple for their iPhone.
Were I to guess about the relative market convergence between personal computing and mobile use, the biggest gap and problem to surmount is this culture shift. Users uniformly hate mobile providers, who in turn, spend lots of money trying to retain their customers because customer churn is so expensive. The service-focused revenue, monthly income, is a different business model than the one used in the personal computer industry. That mentality on the part of mobiles carriers will stunt their growth, and cause further consternation.