I was at UIQ back when the iPhone "happened". It really was as pivotal for the industry as he says. I quipped that the iPhone made us irrelevant and Android made us redundant.
I was surrounded by people with strong ambition and vision, at UIQ, Symbian, at our owners Motorola and Sony Ericsson, who wanted to build the iPhone and knew how to build the iPhone long before the iPhone was announced and before they knew anyone else was doing it.
We knew all about capacitive displays, finger-touch and so on. To be honest my own vision was tainted by Flash-based UIs and the mechanics of that, but the Flash demos I was trying to enable were fancy iPhone-like UIs. The artists had the design ascetic that was the iPhone to a tee.
But the phone manufacturer upper management were essentially very traditional hardware manufacturers with traditional channel relationships and techie vision was never given much attention.
Not taking away from Apple, not saying actually I could imagine it having turned out any different. Its simply that Apple didn't have the management constraints. Apple created new teams to make new products. The entrenched phone makers made existing teams punch out variants and incremental refreshes of the same tired formulae.
I imagine it was much the same in Finland too.
The big question is, without Jobs, will Apple settle into defending what they have - and punching out variants and incremental refreshes of it - or will they have fresh ambitious restarts?
I really thought phone manufacturers at the time where aiming for better Windows Mobile phone, and had nothing like the iPhone in mind or at least nothing more than a napkin corner with a 'moon' tag attached to it because some R&D/Designer broke someone's b*lls enough to get a little attention.
This guy is missing the fact that in a lot of European countries, and elsewhere in the world, carriers mean squat. The carrier is often simply the provider of the SIM card you put in the phone, so carrier support is in no way needed for a phone to succeed. You don't need to be successful in the US to be successful.
As much as we're loathe to admit it, the USA represents the largest single market of wealthy (in global terms) customers. That means the USA is the place high-end consumer tech lives or dies. Other markets are more fragmented (so they're more expensive to sell in) or less affluent. There's lots of exciting things happening in Brazil and India, but those are lower-end spin-offs.
I'm a Canadian. Our entire consumer market is based on getting America's sloppy seconds. I have no illusions.
They still mean something in those countries, because carriers there still have agendas, marketing budgets, partnerships and retail stores even though they may not dictate cell phone features.
Carriers don't mean squat. They are the king makers.
They control a section of the market that every smartphone mnnufacturer relied on. The Radio frequencies. This gives them power via their marketing subsidies, and it was this power they leveraged before they screwed up and ceded control to the platform. It used to be the case that the carriers controlled your wallet. Every single thing you did on the phone, the money went to the carrier, they held your credit details. AT&T screwed up and gave up consumer power.
Appstores did exist, Docomo created the first appstore and any phones that were released by the carrier had to comply to Docomo's requirements. Nokia created an appstore with N-Gage, it didn't work and created a carrier backlash.
What Apple did was to stealth in their app store. It was all due to a strategic mistake by AT&T. Sure the Apple was a great device, but remember, the first version was 2G with a crappy camera and an amazing UI/UX and already seen as obsolete in developed 3G markets like Japan (I was working at Nokia in Japan at the time).
AT&T's mistake? Unlike any previous carrier or vendor relationship, AT&T ceded control of software updates to Apple. Apple could update the phone any way they wanted. They already had enough market power in the US that would prevent carrier boycott. At the time, all the carriers were trying to copy Docomo and push out their own appstores, and this decision by AT&T killed it.
In terms of smartphones being a commodity, it already is, anything that sells int he hundreds of millions is effectively commoditized, that doesn't prevent new players from coming in to try and disrupt the market. This is probably the third disruption in mobile phones, from dumbphones -> feature/early smartphones -> current smartphones, however it may be 'too soon' as each cycle has been around for about 10 years each.
Curious that the article doesn't mention the word "patents" once. That's what stops you from even starting to build a Smartphone of your own - you'd violate dozens of patents and be sued into oblivion. The only reason manufacturers are able to do it now is because they all have portfolios of their own and are in a state of cold war with everyone else.
Most things needed to make a smartphone is covered by FRAND patents. Software patents are of course a problem for anyone working in the software industry, so that's not limited to smartphones.
I was about to say the same thing -- glad to see I'm not the only one who recognizes the real reason why there will be no more competition in this space.
There's a very strong argument here but the claim appears to rely on the author's expansive definition of "smartphone", in which he encompasses app stores, cloud servers and networks. Perhaps he has a point about the difficulty of investment in taking on these well established players in the field, but I don't feel it's entirely accurate to claim that smartphones themselves cannot be successful.
A new phone with a bare-bones linux-like OS designed to piggy-back on existing networks may have a small place in the market, and others like Jolla that seek to grow toward something big may pick up fractions of a percent as well. Even surviving a decade with a low, but consistent, share is a success (e.g., Apple in the 80s).
Finally, there's the novelty and growth of industry to consider. The current big players in the smartphone market are already scrambling to address the emerging wearable revolution. The "internet of things" is right on the horizon as well and there's no telling where the chips may land. To be fair, the author did mention innovation as a key to potential success. We should consider the grander implications of a constantly evolving business model and offering in that sentiment, though. It's not just a matter of making a neat new feature, but of the entire game changing every 5 years.
While the author makes plenty of good and valid points, I don't think the outlook need be so bleak.
Exactly rather than focusing why a smartphone can't succeed, I'd like to see how and why a phone can succeed.
If anyone thinks that the mess in the Play Store and the development environment of Android doesn't leave a bad taste in your mouth they should really re-consider thinking that Android is going to be around forever. I would like to ditch this platform the first moment I get. There are a lot niches that are not addressed by market players today, and the overlap between them can wedge a dent in the market. Google has serious weakness in hardware, and it looks like they will never get over that hump. Can you honestly expect them to optimize performance and battery life, if they can't even make their own devices.
Niches like:
Open-Source/Flexible development environment
Sustainability
Emerging Markets
Actual Innovation
Disruptive technologies and emerging markets shouldn't be counted out either. Nor should finding ways to monetize open-source. People, developers especially are increasingly looking for open platforms/devices, that market is NEVER going to get smaller only bigger.
Imagine actually being able to use Javascript or Python or Clojure for your apps, or scripts. Will you actually discount a platform where you can program without managing a thousand configuration files or worry about the gatekeepers(Google/Apple). See these problems aren't necessarily problems in Linux(not to say there aren't other drawbacks).
The great(maybe not?) thing about innovation is that if your to busy looking at the technology today your going to completely miss out what is coming next. - At least it's great if your competing.
I can't help thinking about what Jobs says, "Experts" are clueless.
>Experts—journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus can’t “do” so they “advise.” They can tell you what is wrong with your product, but they cannot make a great one. [1]
People seriously underestimate the power of a great product. Products that don't rely on massive feature lists that mean nothing a day after buying your device. I regret falling into this trap and wasting precious time instead of thinking about creating a better product experience. But again this is easier said than done.
Sorry, but you don't seem to be offering anything new here. We know there are large capital costs for hardware businesses. We know network effects exist for phone applications. We know UI performance is a key issue in smartphone adoption (currently).
Maybe "It's Hard To Build A Smartphone In 2013" would be a better title. But to suggest people will be using iPhones and Androids in the year 2050...Yikes. I pray that future doesn't come to pass.
The way I read this article, It is less about building new smartphone but more about the next technology shift that is going to change the direction. Basically, as oft repeated Ford statement goes, 'if you asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horse'. So, at this point, smartphone business is settling into a faster horse business.
So, I would really expect the next big thing to be not a be an iPhone but something utterly different. Neural implants, anyone?
They won't be. Smartphones will be disrupted by something else. People aren't using PDAs anymore either; they use smartphones. Eventually, something will come along that will make people stop using smartphones.
His point is that you can't be successful building something that is essentially the same thing as a smartphone. You can build something that disrupts the current smartphone market, but it would likely need to be something more than a smartphone (a la Google Glass.)
The network effects you mention are exactly the point: network effects are especially powerful in things like mobile app stores because they create a tipping point market. That means if an early entrant or set of entrants into the market can capture enough market share, they create extremely high barriers to entry. The more market share they have, the more powerful the network effects are and the less likely a new entrant is to have success.
If you're a smartphone developer, chances are you develop for iOS and Android. It would take tens of millions of users adopting a new platform for you to start developing for this new platform. But you're not likely to get tens of millions of users without a large app library.
Particular areas of software development rapidly change them plateau. I have an issue of Byte magazine from 1993. It was all about how RISC processors and next generation microkernels were about to take over the market. And yet here we are. Every new phone runs either an OS built in the 1980's (iOS), or a 1990's clone of a 1970's OS (Android). A RISC had a nice little run (ARM), but ancient x86 seems poised to wipe it out just like it did with all its previous competitors.
>Maybe "It's Hard To Build A Smartphone In 2013" would be a better title. But to suggest people will be using iPhones and Androids in the year 2050...Yikes.
Don't take any title literally. He is obviously not talking about 2050 or 2525 (if people are still alive, still alive).
He's talking about the market as is -- and an obvious timeline of around 10 years comes naturally from what we know of the tech industry and the pace of change.
> Challenge: you are now competing with the iPod Touch.
It disappoints me that nobody does this. Every attempted "competitor" I've seen that stands against the iPod Touch either costs more than the touch or is reviewed as unusable garbage.
> Every attempted "competitor" I've seen that stands against the iPod Touch either costs more than the touch or is reviewed as unusable garbage.
Maybe this speaks to Tim Cook's operations wizardry? If no one can get components at the same quality or price as Apple then they're stuck either selling a crappier device for the same price or a good device at a higher price.
If you can't beat Apple in hardware price or hardware quality then you'd have to win on software cost or software quality - sounds like a perfect place for Android. It's likely that the companies with the resources to do this have decided that the market is too small or they don't want to cannibalize their phone sales. Otherwise you'd think HTC or Samsung would be releasing Android-based media players.
I began reading his article hoping to have him talk a little bit more about smartphones in emerging markets, but he barely touched on it. Africa has arguably the fastest growing middle class in the world right now. They're also poised to make a cultural leap far greater than that of China's in the 90s. I read that 60% of Africans will have smartphones in 2019. The continent is already using smart technology in innovative/cost saving ways (i.e. sending funds via sms).
It seems to me that if I am looking to join the smartphone industry, I make myself indispensable to Africa. I think Africans are less likely to care for features like Siri or luxury components. My thought is that developers for devices in that part of the world will have the freedom to think outside the box--what will a smart phone look like on a continent with minimal financial resources, but avid interest in quick data and communication? What do people want from their phone when they don't have necessarily have a computer or strong infrastructure?
This guy is so ex-Nokia, it's sad. He rates the latest Maemo/whatever as a higher chance of market presence than Firefox OS. OK, Nordsman... we understand you are grieving for your lost mobile device business... but you can do it in private.
Linux, via Android, commodified smartphone platforms by giving away the OS and thus commodifying the position of mobile device hardware manufacturers. This was coming anyway, but was a brilliantly timed commercial play by Google to head off Apple's strength in devices. Google's allies were the carriers, who were unhappy with Apple owning (via signup-time credit card) who they perceived as their customers.
FirefoxOS and that new Jolla thing the Nords are working on basically use exactly the same hardware and OS platform (ie. Linux). There's no huge investment there, the investment is in higher layers of the software stack, and in FirefoxOS' case in marketing to different segments (the developing world, which still has 'growth', and necessitates less competitive component acquisition for manufacturing batches).
To say a small team can't do something similar is plain wrong. I'd say the effort required is similar to launching a new Linux distribution. As long as there is a niche you can cater to, there is no reason it won't survive and thrive. CyanogenMod is only the beginning: cross-pollination is a good thing.
To say that any tech market is completely closed to new entrants seems slightly ridiculous. Sure, the barriers to entry have increased - if you're chasing mass-market appeal, a strong app platform is as important as excellent hardware. However there will always be some niche to serve or an opportunity to tackle bloated or less open, established competitors.
I think Josh's option is very biased and colored by operating in a certain type of environment. Not that it's any less valuable or valid than any other, but I disagree with him.
The approach by Jolla and FirefoxOS guys is actually quite brilliant. How to get into markets where it's relatively cheap to make a new android phone but anything else requires very expensive contracts with the manufacturers?
Solution: Just use the android drivers directly. In my Jolla phone there is the good 'ol android /system/lib/. As an example the libGLESv2.so (the OpenGL ES 2.0 library) in /usr/lib/ simply opens the counterpart in /system/lib with android_dlsym and calls the equivalent functions (and in case of floating point arguments moves them to int registers). And what's the overhead of this? 9 instructions and 2 loads (for the function pointer). So it's essentially completely free.
Same approach applies to rest of the system. They just take the core of the android and run on top of that with just the bionic -> glibc layer on top. Brilliant.
That means they can basically just walk to some SOC vendor (like they did to Qualcomm) and say "I want to buy a mid range Android SOC" and they have everything ready.
Fairphone's website says they've sold 25,000, and have another 8200 on the way.
Apple sold over 9 million iPhone 5s and 5c models in the first weekend they were for sale.
While it's impressive that an independent group is putting out a phone, their sales are orders of magnitude away from what Apple puts out in a single weekend. Sure, they're "joining the game", but they're not in the same league.
I once read a lovely article online (which I've never been able to find again, I think it was by a founder of tripod?), recounting the early days of search engines. He was thinking of starting one, but the market was already filled... then came another search engine, and now there really was no room for another one... this iterated over several engines til he finally got to google. And added: now it's really filled...
Of course, today google still rules, yet they act incredibly threatened by facebook; and niche engines like duckduckgo are making inroads.
Is this true for smartphones? All we can really say is that he (and I) can't think of a way to enter... but that doesn't mean there is no way.
Just as I wouldn’t suggest anyone build a new line of PCs or cars
Seems to me it's easier than ever before to build a "smartphone": Android has everything you need and is open to everyone. What's hard is to build a smart phone operating system. And in some ways (not all!) that's a good thing - you need a pretty big justification to reinvent a giant wheel. If you have one, great. If not, do your innovation on top of Android.
I am still waiting for the Facebook Phone. They already have a fully customized Android Home Screen. The biggest problem is probably that Facebook has no experience in selling physical products.
Anybody could slap together an Android customization. On the other hand, what is the point? If you do not profit from selling the hardware (like Samsung) or the software (like Google), then why sell a smartphone? Maybe Salesforce could sell enterprise smartphones bundled with their software.
> Small to medium businesses will use apps on standard devices like iPads
I used to get lunch at a Specialty's sandwich place in SF. You could place your order at the counter (to a human, who would mess it up) or use their iPad app at the self-service counter (this got the order right every time). The iPad app worked well, but it was a source of bemusement to me that the self-service counter was just a counter with a row of iPads mounted on it. I once hit the home button on one, to see what would happen, and was taken to the home screen. I feel like for business use you might want more of an ability to lock the device down.
In all seriousness, if he means smartphone from a hardware perspective, I might actually agree. The startup costs there are crazy high.
But, if he means software, no. Ubuntu is doing it and doing it very, very well. I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it. All Android using hardware manufacturers are crazy to continue with Android now that Google owns Motorola. Look at the Moto X. Nothing can compete with it and no one will be able to in the future.
Samsung and the rest should very actively be looking to remove Android from their handsets as quickly as possible. Ubuntu is by far the best choice.
Another reason you can't make new smartphones is lawsuits. I imagine Ubuntu OS will be sued out of existence by patent trolls should Samsung adopt it. They don't have an army of lawyers like Android/Google.
This should be called "Why You Can't Build a Smartphone Ecosystem"
Building the phone itself is easier, license the software from google, develop some cool hardware, build and sell it.
Admittedly, selling it is probably the hardest part, hard to innovate on features, you can innovate in packaging, price, assembly place, any number of other things.
If you have a big enough bucket of money, you could build a new ecosystem, it wont be easy though. Even without the bucket of money you could build a new ecosystem - but you might only capture 2-5% of the market.
Another far-out option is building a solution not dependent on the carriers, which have already captured the IP space. There is no more internet, it's all just "telecom" now. That's the first mistake people make when starting an "internet" business. Business is reliant on communication and your communication is reliant on telecom. It's pretty much the same landscape as before the internet existed.
> no device can enter the market without carrier help.
The iphone was successful exactly because it sold to rich people before, with no carrier help. in fact, in the beginning the carriers would throw anything at you to move you from an iphone. In fact, the reason you have to pay a "smarphone fee" until recently was because AT&T greedily charged a mandatory $30 extra for "iphone data" if you ever wanted a subsided iphone.
I think many of the author's points are valid, but I do still believe that companies like Blackberry and Nokia can build Android or Windows Mobile phones successfully, as they won't have to deal with a) user inertia from changing to a new OS or b) developing entirely new UI and operating systems.
As far as I can tell, there won't really be any new carriers or any new operating systems, but that doesn't preclude competition in the hardware space.
I believe that smartphones are actually a slice of the embedded systems development market, the same as desktop computers. They are probably the most profitable slice, but that is exactly why the biggest players in the market pay top budget to compete about the shares. Because of that understanding of mine, I think you don't really get into the "smartphone market" as a start-up, but you get into the embedded systems market. And that is quite possible. You just need to find a slice of the market that is not so highly competed in and you can enter there, e.g., producing small Linux computers for public transportation companies with different, very specific tasks, or building remote controls for model airplanes/quadrocopters. There you get all the know-how of building your own computers, working on your own operating system, finding suppliers and when you are really, really good, you might even come up with a platform of some sort that you can get other developers on to make Apps for, just in the business-to-business area instead of the tough endcustomer market.
It's an open question of using WiFi as the universal carrier - we're not at that point yet; but it's not a question of using existing GSM networks. It's going to be hard for carriers to deny, after some point, minutes to paying customers.
2. The cost of entry - OS, cloud store, apps
This happened time and again. Remember when Linux has appeared on the stage? Seen porting projects, like Wine, PetrOS, Mono? Realize that Android was built not from scratch, at least concerning interfaces? Second time is almost always cheaper - and in our times, by a wide margin.
3. Access to hardware components - need good hardware...
No. I don't care much if the phone is 5 mm or 2 mm thick, 100 g or 250 g heavy - just like a word processor user doesn't care if letter appears on the screen in 10 ms or 90 ms after he hit the keyboard. At some point it becomes irrelevant, and competition shifts elsewhere. See Firefox phone as another example.
4. Retreat to the low end
Yes, you see it. The fact that the product is a commodity doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
5. A disruptive UI
It was surely a pain to switch from sleeky Nokia UI to strange future of IPhone, no? How about Sugar, from One Laptop Per Child project, which was done anew?
6. Be realistic?
I certainly see a point in what you're saying; but don't you see the power of fashion - ones all important things are by default? As soon as changes become unimportant, returns dwindling and defaults good enough, attention goes to other things - a similar thing happened in automotive world, where a lot of customers buy not the functionality, but trendiness.
femtocells (wifi size cells) are virtually never cost effective, not enough density to support the infrastructure.
a combination Microcells and picocells, however might be doable, you use mesh networking to tie the picocells to to each other, and back to the microcell, ideally its a slow speed low power network, around 900 mhz, providing a access method for text messaging, and push notifications (sub 100kbps, think of it as a faster control channel), Data could be mesh even between handsets, passing (some) data thru to the nearest base. A higher speed network used for more intensive data use situations that goes directly to the nearest micro or picocell, For voice calls or in rural areas, you could default to the regular BTS.
[+] [-] willvarfar|12 years ago|reply
I was surrounded by people with strong ambition and vision, at UIQ, Symbian, at our owners Motorola and Sony Ericsson, who wanted to build the iPhone and knew how to build the iPhone long before the iPhone was announced and before they knew anyone else was doing it.
We knew all about capacitive displays, finger-touch and so on. To be honest my own vision was tainted by Flash-based UIs and the mechanics of that, but the Flash demos I was trying to enable were fancy iPhone-like UIs. The artists had the design ascetic that was the iPhone to a tee.
But the phone manufacturer upper management were essentially very traditional hardware manufacturers with traditional channel relationships and techie vision was never given much attention.
Not taking away from Apple, not saying actually I could imagine it having turned out any different. Its simply that Apple didn't have the management constraints. Apple created new teams to make new products. The entrenched phone makers made existing teams punch out variants and incremental refreshes of the same tired formulae.
I imagine it was much the same in Finland too.
The big question is, without Jobs, will Apple settle into defending what they have - and punching out variants and incremental refreshes of it - or will they have fresh ambitious restarts?
[+] [-] bobbles|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] girvo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downer93|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Aqwis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pxtl|12 years ago|reply
As much as we're loathe to admit it, the USA represents the largest single market of wealthy (in global terms) customers. That means the USA is the place high-end consumer tech lives or dies. Other markets are more fragmented (so they're more expensive to sell in) or less affluent. There's lots of exciting things happening in Brazil and India, but those are lower-end spin-offs.
I'm a Canadian. Our entire consumer market is based on getting America's sloppy seconds. I have no illusions.
[+] [-] girvo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnaffle|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoi|12 years ago|reply
They control a section of the market that every smartphone mnnufacturer relied on. The Radio frequencies. This gives them power via their marketing subsidies, and it was this power they leveraged before they screwed up and ceded control to the platform. It used to be the case that the carriers controlled your wallet. Every single thing you did on the phone, the money went to the carrier, they held your credit details. AT&T screwed up and gave up consumer power.
[+] [-] hoi|12 years ago|reply
Appstores did exist, Docomo created the first appstore and any phones that were released by the carrier had to comply to Docomo's requirements. Nokia created an appstore with N-Gage, it didn't work and created a carrier backlash.
What Apple did was to stealth in their app store. It was all due to a strategic mistake by AT&T. Sure the Apple was a great device, but remember, the first version was 2G with a crappy camera and an amazing UI/UX and already seen as obsolete in developed 3G markets like Japan (I was working at Nokia in Japan at the time).
AT&T's mistake? Unlike any previous carrier or vendor relationship, AT&T ceded control of software updates to Apple. Apple could update the phone any way they wanted. They already had enough market power in the US that would prevent carrier boycott. At the time, all the carriers were trying to copy Docomo and push out their own appstores, and this decision by AT&T killed it.
In terms of smartphones being a commodity, it already is, anything that sells int he hundreds of millions is effectively commoditized, that doesn't prevent new players from coming in to try and disrupt the market. This is probably the third disruption in mobile phones, from dumbphones -> feature/early smartphones -> current smartphones, however it may be 'too soon' as each cycle has been around for about 10 years each.
[+] [-] collyw|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] untog|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnaffle|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wissler|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamestomasino|12 years ago|reply
A new phone with a bare-bones linux-like OS designed to piggy-back on existing networks may have a small place in the market, and others like Jolla that seek to grow toward something big may pick up fractions of a percent as well. Even surviving a decade with a low, but consistent, share is a success (e.g., Apple in the 80s).
Finally, there's the novelty and growth of industry to consider. The current big players in the smartphone market are already scrambling to address the emerging wearable revolution. The "internet of things" is right on the horizon as well and there's no telling where the chips may land. To be fair, the author did mention innovation as a key to potential success. We should consider the grander implications of a constantly evolving business model and offering in that sentiment, though. It's not just a matter of making a neat new feature, but of the entire game changing every 5 years.
While the author makes plenty of good and valid points, I don't think the outlook need be so bleak.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] TheLegace|12 years ago|reply
If anyone thinks that the mess in the Play Store and the development environment of Android doesn't leave a bad taste in your mouth they should really re-consider thinking that Android is going to be around forever. I would like to ditch this platform the first moment I get. There are a lot niches that are not addressed by market players today, and the overlap between them can wedge a dent in the market. Google has serious weakness in hardware, and it looks like they will never get over that hump. Can you honestly expect them to optimize performance and battery life, if they can't even make their own devices.
Niches like:
Open-Source/Flexible development environment
Sustainability
Emerging Markets
Actual Innovation
Disruptive technologies and emerging markets shouldn't be counted out either. Nor should finding ways to monetize open-source. People, developers especially are increasingly looking for open platforms/devices, that market is NEVER going to get smaller only bigger.
Imagine actually being able to use Javascript or Python or Clojure for your apps, or scripts. Will you actually discount a platform where you can program without managing a thousand configuration files or worry about the gatekeepers(Google/Apple). See these problems aren't necessarily problems in Linux(not to say there aren't other drawbacks).
The great(maybe not?) thing about innovation is that if your to busy looking at the technology today your going to completely miss out what is coming next. - At least it's great if your competing.
I can't help thinking about what Jobs says, "Experts" are clueless.
>Experts—journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus can’t “do” so they “advise.” They can tell you what is wrong with your product, but they cannot make a great one. [1]
[1]http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20117575-37/what-i-learned...
People seriously underestimate the power of a great product. Products that don't rely on massive feature lists that mean nothing a day after buying your device. I regret falling into this trap and wasting precious time instead of thinking about creating a better product experience. But again this is easier said than done.
[+] [-] natural219|12 years ago|reply
Maybe "It's Hard To Build A Smartphone In 2013" would be a better title. But to suggest people will be using iPhones and Androids in the year 2050...Yikes. I pray that future doesn't come to pass.
[+] [-] gbvb|12 years ago|reply
So, I would really expect the next big thing to be not a be an iPhone but something utterly different. Neural implants, anyone?
[+] [-] exelius|12 years ago|reply
His point is that you can't be successful building something that is essentially the same thing as a smartphone. You can build something that disrupts the current smartphone market, but it would likely need to be something more than a smartphone (a la Google Glass.)
The network effects you mention are exactly the point: network effects are especially powerful in things like mobile app stores because they create a tipping point market. That means if an early entrant or set of entrants into the market can capture enough market share, they create extremely high barriers to entry. The more market share they have, the more powerful the network effects are and the less likely a new entrant is to have success.
If you're a smartphone developer, chances are you develop for iOS and Android. It would take tens of millions of users adopting a new platform for you to start developing for this new platform. But you're not likely to get tens of millions of users without a large app library.
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
Don't take any title literally. He is obviously not talking about 2050 or 2525 (if people are still alive, still alive).
He's talking about the market as is -- and an obvious timeline of around 10 years comes naturally from what we know of the tech industry and the pace of change.
[+] [-] sologrrl|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Pxtl|12 years ago|reply
It disappoints me that nobody does this. Every attempted "competitor" I've seen that stands against the iPod Touch either costs more than the touch or is reviewed as unusable garbage.
[+] [-] mason55|12 years ago|reply
Maybe this speaks to Tim Cook's operations wizardry? If no one can get components at the same quality or price as Apple then they're stuck either selling a crappier device for the same price or a good device at a higher price.
If you can't beat Apple in hardware price or hardware quality then you'd have to win on software cost or software quality - sounds like a perfect place for Android. It's likely that the companies with the resources to do this have decided that the market is too small or they don't want to cannibalize their phone sales. Otherwise you'd think HTC or Samsung would be releasing Android-based media players.
[+] [-] fembot__|12 years ago|reply
It seems to me that if I am looking to join the smartphone industry, I make myself indispensable to Africa. I think Africans are less likely to care for features like Siri or luxury components. My thought is that developers for devices in that part of the world will have the freedom to think outside the box--what will a smart phone look like on a continent with minimal financial resources, but avid interest in quick data and communication? What do people want from their phone when they don't have necessarily have a computer or strong infrastructure?
[+] [-] contingencies|12 years ago|reply
Linux, via Android, commodified smartphone platforms by giving away the OS and thus commodifying the position of mobile device hardware manufacturers. This was coming anyway, but was a brilliantly timed commercial play by Google to head off Apple's strength in devices. Google's allies were the carriers, who were unhappy with Apple owning (via signup-time credit card) who they perceived as their customers.
FirefoxOS and that new Jolla thing the Nords are working on basically use exactly the same hardware and OS platform (ie. Linux). There's no huge investment there, the investment is in higher layers of the software stack, and in FirefoxOS' case in marketing to different segments (the developing world, which still has 'growth', and necessitates less competitive component acquisition for manufacturing batches).
To say a small team can't do something similar is plain wrong. I'd say the effort required is similar to launching a new Linux distribution. As long as there is a niche you can cater to, there is no reason it won't survive and thrive. CyanogenMod is only the beginning: cross-pollination is a good thing.
Start with preferably https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/ (or otherwise http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html) and begin thy mission to conquer portable computing!
(Edit: Added content after the initial paragraph after it was downvoted. Fair enough, it was a bit snarky :)
[+] [-] davb|12 years ago|reply
To say that any tech market is completely closed to new entrants seems slightly ridiculous. Sure, the barriers to entry have increased - if you're chasing mass-market appeal, a strong app platform is as important as excellent hardware. However there will always be some niche to serve or an opportunity to tackle bloated or less open, established competitors.
I think Josh's option is very biased and colored by operating in a certain type of environment. Not that it's any less valuable or valid than any other, but I disagree with him.
[+] [-] sharpneli|12 years ago|reply
Solution: Just use the android drivers directly. In my Jolla phone there is the good 'ol android /system/lib/. As an example the libGLESv2.so (the OpenGL ES 2.0 library) in /usr/lib/ simply opens the counterpart in /system/lib with android_dlsym and calls the equivalent functions (and in case of floating point arguments moves them to int registers). And what's the overhead of this? 9 instructions and 2 loads (for the function pointer). So it's essentially completely free.
Same approach applies to rest of the system. They just take the core of the android and run on top of that with just the bionic -> glibc layer on top. Brilliant.
The actual lib can be found at: https://github.com/libhybris/libhybris
That means they can basically just walk to some SOC vendor (like they did to Qualcomm) and say "I want to buy a mid range Android SOC" and they have everything ready.
[+] [-] namenotrequired|12 years ago|reply
For anyone interested, Fairphone are doing so pretty successfully right now.
http://fairphone.com/
[+] [-] CanSpice|12 years ago|reply
Apple sold over 9 million iPhone 5s and 5c models in the first weekend they were for sale.
While it's impressive that an independent group is putting out a phone, their sales are orders of magnitude away from what Apple puts out in a single weekend. Sure, they're "joining the game", but they're not in the same league.
[+] [-] delicious|12 years ago|reply
Of course, today google still rules, yet they act incredibly threatened by facebook; and niche engines like duckduckgo are making inroads.
Is this true for smartphones? All we can really say is that he (and I) can't think of a way to enter... but that doesn't mean there is no way.
Like electric cars...[+] [-] zmmmmm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qznc|12 years ago|reply
I am still waiting for the Facebook Phone. They already have a fully customized Android Home Screen. The biggest problem is probably that Facebook has no experience in selling physical products.
Anybody could slap together an Android customization. On the other hand, what is the point? If you do not profit from selling the hardware (like Samsung) or the software (like Google), then why sell a smartphone? Maybe Salesforce could sell enterprise smartphones bundled with their software.
[+] [-] justin66|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lotyrin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|12 years ago|reply
> Small to medium businesses will use apps on standard devices like iPads
I used to get lunch at a Specialty's sandwich place in SF. You could place your order at the counter (to a human, who would mess it up) or use their iPad app at the self-service counter (this got the order right every time). The iPad app worked well, but it was a source of bemusement to me that the self-service counter was just a counter with a row of iPads mounted on it. I once hit the home button on one, to see what would happen, and was taken to the home screen. I feel like for business use you might want more of an ability to lock the device down.
[+] [-] fingerprinter|12 years ago|reply
In all seriousness, if he means smartphone from a hardware perspective, I might actually agree. The startup costs there are crazy high.
But, if he means software, no. Ubuntu is doing it and doing it very, very well. I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it. All Android using hardware manufacturers are crazy to continue with Android now that Google owns Motorola. Look at the Moto X. Nothing can compete with it and no one will be able to in the future.
Samsung and the rest should very actively be looking to remove Android from their handsets as quickly as possible. Ubuntu is by far the best choice.
[+] [-] joshmarinacci|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dobbsbob|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aloha|12 years ago|reply
Building the phone itself is easier, license the software from google, develop some cool hardware, build and sell it.
Admittedly, selling it is probably the hardest part, hard to innovate on features, you can innovate in packaging, price, assembly place, any number of other things.
If you have a big enough bucket of money, you could build a new ecosystem, it wont be easy though. Even without the bucket of money you could build a new ecosystem - but you might only capture 2-5% of the market.
[+] [-] AsymetricCom|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcb0|12 years ago|reply
> the iphone changed the game
> no device can enter the market without carrier help.
The iphone was successful exactly because it sold to rich people before, with no carrier help. in fact, in the beginning the carriers would throw anything at you to move you from an iphone. In fact, the reason you have to pay a "smarphone fee" until recently was because AT&T greedily charged a mandatory $30 extra for "iphone data" if you ever wanted a subsided iphone.
[+] [-] kosei|12 years ago|reply
As far as I can tell, there won't really be any new carriers or any new operating systems, but that doesn't preclude competition in the hardware space.
[+] [-] erikb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avmich|12 years ago|reply
1. Data networks
It's an open question of using WiFi as the universal carrier - we're not at that point yet; but it's not a question of using existing GSM networks. It's going to be hard for carriers to deny, after some point, minutes to paying customers.
2. The cost of entry - OS, cloud store, apps
This happened time and again. Remember when Linux has appeared on the stage? Seen porting projects, like Wine, PetrOS, Mono? Realize that Android was built not from scratch, at least concerning interfaces? Second time is almost always cheaper - and in our times, by a wide margin.
3. Access to hardware components - need good hardware...
No. I don't care much if the phone is 5 mm or 2 mm thick, 100 g or 250 g heavy - just like a word processor user doesn't care if letter appears on the screen in 10 ms or 90 ms after he hit the keyboard. At some point it becomes irrelevant, and competition shifts elsewhere. See Firefox phone as another example.
4. Retreat to the low end
Yes, you see it. The fact that the product is a commodity doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
5. A disruptive UI
It was surely a pain to switch from sleeky Nokia UI to strange future of IPhone, no? How about Sugar, from One Laptop Per Child project, which was done anew?
6. Be realistic?
I certainly see a point in what you're saying; but don't you see the power of fashion - ones all important things are by default? As soon as changes become unimportant, returns dwindling and defaults good enough, attention goes to other things - a similar thing happened in automotive world, where a lot of customers buy not the functionality, but trendiness.
[+] [-] Aloha|12 years ago|reply
a combination Microcells and picocells, however might be doable, you use mesh networking to tie the picocells to to each other, and back to the microcell, ideally its a slow speed low power network, around 900 mhz, providing a access method for text messaging, and push notifications (sub 100kbps, think of it as a faster control channel), Data could be mesh even between handsets, passing (some) data thru to the nearest base. A higher speed network used for more intensive data use situations that goes directly to the nearest micro or picocell, For voice calls or in rural areas, you could default to the regular BTS.
[+] [-] walshemj|12 years ago|reply