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Begin forwarded message:
Subject: Palm, Access, Linux and Irrelevance
Hey Brad...
A friend forwarded me your "Opening up the Wireless Handset"
article, and I figured I have a few apropos comments.
First... I've been "in the mobile value chain" for almost a decade,
working first for RSA and Certicom and later at Handspring,
PalmSource and consulting for "the usual suspects." I've been using
Unix since the early 80's and Linux since rev 0.91 of the kernel
(not that there's much knowledge from the 0.91 days that's useful
today.) I'm the Co-Founder of the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club [1]
and a participant on various OpenMoko [2] related projects. I am
also, as far as I know, the first person to recommend the concept
of the "complete open phone," [3] the idea that the market is best
served by a collection of open hardware specifications, open source
software and the ability to buy single-unit quantities of
everything you should need to build your own phone. (Though good
ideas seem to spring out of the woodwork, so I wouldn't be
surprised if someone else came up with the idea, too.)
I guess what I wanted to say is... opening up the handset is about
more than deploying open source code (or even publishing hardware
reference designs.) It's about changing the way manufacturers,
marketers and solution providers interact with their customers. The
joy of the Treo (and earlier platforms from Microsoft and Psion)
was that individual users could make the decision what application
code they added to their devices. If you weren't happy with the
limited calendar that came with your Treo, you could buy or
download a replacement. If you worked in a vertical market, you
could add industry or corporation specific applications to your
mobile device that would (in theory) increase your personal
productivity. Or maybe it would allow you to implement a better
business process. The Springboard platform on the Visor extended
this concept to custom hardware; it's passing is partially what led
me to experiment with making my own "homebrew" mobile phone.
The great joy of mobile Linux is not, as it's used by Access, Palm
and Motorola, as a "cheap" alternative for some other operating
environment. Anyone who's worked with mobile Linux knows that free
can often be quite costly. It's great benefit is that it's a non-
denominational "meeting place" for ideas about software. Like other
Unices, Linux implements Posix and exports useful abstractions for
programmers and administrators. Got an idea for a better calendar
app? Just write it. Worried about security on your wireless
network? Maybe that security agent software made for the desktop
could work on your mobile device? Now that we're starting to see
more mobile devices with USB host and Bluetooth, devices made from
these standards are easy to integrate into a mobile Linux solution.
The great joy of Linux on mobile devices is not that it reduces
cost, but that it reduces risk. There are countless ways the
development of a mobile solution can be brought to a screeching
halt. Experience has shown that we frequently don't know what the
major development problems are when we begin a product design. But
for my money, the wealth of tools available for Linux means with a
little creativity, you can hack your way to a solution easier than
had you started with WinCE or Symbian (or even PalmOS to a lesser
degree.)
And the great thing about it is it's not owned by any one vendor.
To be sure there are many reasons why you might want to develop
with WinCE and Symbian (and PalmOS and iTRON and ... ) But the
future of Linux is not married to any one particular company. While
I love Platform Builder and Vis Dev Studio, I have noticed that
WinMobile 5.0 makes it easy to integrate with Microsoft-based
services (Windows Media, NTLM, etc.), but a pain in the keester if
you're trying to develop a system that uses open standards like
FLAC, Vorbis, Speex, etc. There's a perception that you don't have
these problems in Linux, and for the most part it's true.
From my experience, though, neither Palm or Access (or Motorola or
Nokia) understand this. Well... okay... Nokia and Motorola are
starting to show signs of catching on. But Palm and Access seem to
be taking a closed approach to Linux. Palm has noted that it's not
going to be licensing (or presumably releasing) it's distro.
They're using Linux to provide a stable underpinning for their
Garnet emulator (or so it seems to me.) Access is trying to make
money selling middleware and applications for Linux. Well... more
power to 'em. With Access' Hiker Project and Nokia's Maemo/Hildon,
both are asking application developers to increase the risk of
their projects by requesting they expend effort to customize their
apps for their own commercial products.
And then they wonder why people are spending a lot of effort to
deploy web-based apps that could, in theory, run on any device,
even a mobile browser. Hiker may die. Hildon may die. And it's my
sad experience to report that even the WinCE APIs vary over time.
But javascript, God help us, goes on. If you look at Access' price
sheet, this sorta explains why they're giving their middleware away
but selling their browser.
But... If I'm an app developer, why should I customize my app to
use a device-specific UI API, when I could extend my app's life and
applicability by using the browser (any browser) as a renderer. And
I think this is the question that both Palm and Access have missed.
TrollTech's QT is quite refined, especially when compared to either
Hiker or Hildon. And their dual-licensing model benefits
experimenters.
I keep thinking that TrollTech, Palm, Access (and to a lesser
degree, Microsoft) have missed an opportunity to move "up the value
chain." IBM did this in the 90's... it was painful, but ultimately
profitable. By shedding their low-margin businesses and
concentrating on providing business re-engineering consulting, IBM
was able to focus on high-value, high-margin activities for their
customers. IBM still sells hardware, to be sure, but it's all stuff
they can't buy cheaper from other people or it's high-performance
equipment (SP2s, zSeries, etc.) thats meets specific customer
requirements (online transaction processing, etc.)
TrollTech and Access view themselves as software companies, and
that's the problem. Both organizations must overcome an
increasingly skeptical, cost-sensitive market. The cost of mass-
market devices is plummeting, and both companies need to hitch
their wagon to a couple more hit products if they are to survive.
Palm, Motorola and Nokia view themselves as hardware companies, and
despite several commercial and critical successes are struggling to
survive in a market with increasing pressure to reduce cost.
In his presentation "Models of Software Acceptance : How Winners
Win," [4] Dick Gabriel discusses the utility of evolution in
software development. Or more specifically, he points out that
evolutionary theory credits the changing environment, and not the
mutating individual as the primary agent of natural selection. We
sometimes forget this. In the tech marketplace, products that can
be adapted to new, specific requirements are the ones that survive.
Companies that make these products survive to compete another day.
To the degree that we can predict the future needs of our
customers, we can build products that meet these needs. But
internal conflict occurs when we predict the utility of a product
that competes with our current cash cows. Gabriel points out the
biological equivalent of this effect; "only things that are
relatively worthless change rapidly and dramatically." Molecular
biology, it appears, prevents mutation in genes that encode
survival traits.
Gabriel uses Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm" [5] model
overlaid on evolutionary biology to analyze how innovation is
related to market acceptance. Within his evolutionary model,
Gabriel advises tech companies to develop inexpensive technology
that adequately meets an emerging market need. If we read
Anderson's "Long Tail," [6] we're likely to assume this means we
should go after niche markets.
In "Sources of Innovation" and "Democratizing Innovation," [7] MIT
professor Eric von Hippel argues a similar point, but from the
perspective of the niche customer. In von Hippel's model, "lead
users" are individuals who are highly motivated to solve a business
problem, are not being serviced by existing suppliers and have the
ability to fabricate ad-hoc solutions. Companies who understand the
needs of lead users may make decisions informed by experiences of
real customers. Properly executed, companies use lead user studies
to discover what customers value and how their existing products or
services can be modified to efficiently meet the emerging markets
lead users represent.
If we again apply Anderson's philosophy on the value of niche
markets, and everything we learned from Taiichi Ohno [8], the
future may be large "Just in Time" manufacturing centers capable of
selling 98% complete products into a constellation of marketing
companies, each specializing in understanding the values and needs
of different niches.
Palm and Access are firmly focused on the international wireless
carrier market. And from their perspective, I wouldn't expect
anything else. It's a proven money-maker and a growth industry. But
they've both shown a bit of myopia when it comes to looking at the
"bigger picture." Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have failed in voice
chat applications, and Vonage is certainly skirting the rocky
shoals of corporate insolvency. But Skype seems to be taking hold.
Backed up by eBay's financial resources and joined at the hip with
PayPal, they are starting to be a serious competitor. But Palm and
Access are too dependent on the carrier's good graces to be able to
work with Skype or any of the VoIP players. In short, they're
trying as hard as they can to design products that make it easy to
browse the web over WiFi, but difficult to integrate SIP/RTP VoIP
solutions.
In the meantime, organizations like the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club
and the OpenMoko community are developing user interfaces,
applications, hardware designs and open source software to provide
"lead user" innovators with the tools they need to solve real world
business problems in a cost effective manner. Palm, Nokia and
Motorola appear to be competing to make the next Linux-based
Blackberry killer. Access is expanding the reach of its browser by
surrounding it with Linux middleware. Palm's competitive edge
against Nokia is it's installed base of PalmOS apps, and it's user
community. But the PalmOS heyday is long past, ask any PalmOS
developer. Nokia's been known to make mistakes, but should they
decide to move Linux into their mainstream products, they'll do so
as a market leader. By making the browser the center-piece of their
profitability smorgasbord, Access runs the risk of irrelevance
should a mobile version of Firefox ever deploy (or should Mark
Shuttleworth decide that he wants to make "Mobuntu".)
I wish Palm and Access luck, but I can't help but think they're
jockeying for position on the hierarchy of irrelevance.
-Cheers,
-Matt H.
References:
1. http://hbmobile.org/
2. http://openmoko.org/
3. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/etel/2006/09/05/the-complete-
open-phone.html
4. http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/AcceptanceModels.pdf
5. http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-Marketing-High-Tech-
Mainstream/dp/0066620023
6. http://www.longtail.com/
7. http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban
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