I spent most of the Interop 2010 conference attending sessions in my part of the event, the Mobile Business track. I must say that I was really impressed with this year's speakers; there is a lot going on, perhaps because of all the pent-up demand coming out of such a severe recession, perhaps because wireless and mobile technologies continue to evolve and improve at such a rapid rate, and perhaps because that's the way it's always been, at least in my almost-20 years in the field. It's safe to conclude that the rate of innovation will remain high, accelerating demand, and you won't be looking forward to a weekend with nothing to do for some time to come.
Among the more interesting notes I took during Interop sessions are the following:
- The debate over the optimal mobile applications strategy will continue for quite a while. Local apps or Web/cloud services? Given that there's just too much data and often the need for a lot of processor resources, I still contend that the latter will win. Note also that many (if not most) smartphone apps are just front-ends for Web/cloud services. How come .mobi/mobile.site.domain/etc. never really caught on; they should have, and if they had, we'd be device-independent, or at least a lot more than we are today, which is really in our (as users) best interest over the long run. On the other hand, Apple needs the money.
- At least partially because of the lack of device independence, you'd better increase your training and support budgets. Bad news - labor costs are going up, and inadequate support and hard-to-use products and services are a recipe for a death spiral. Beware, big-time.
-Availability of spectrum is going to become ever-more critical. Yes, the FCC is thinking about this, but the model is wrong. We need a demand-based spectrum allocation policy and mechanism, not one that optimizes for yet more revenue for the government to waste. More on this over the next few months, especially as the debate over the White Spaces and the FCC's broadband policy proposal intensifies.
- Personal liability, I'm convinced, is going to become the norm. Your company will give you a budget for a PC and a handset; you mostly get to pick what you want, and mobile device management will be a huge, huge, growth industry for the next few years.
- The limited lifespan of mobile devices is becoming a point of severe frustration for power users. Lisa Phifer mentioned that her shiny new Droid of four months ago is now less than useful because a newer version of Android is required to run the apps she wants to run. My POS Windows Mobile 6.1 handset still has four months to go, and yet the two apps I bought it specifically to use are no longer valuable to me anymore. We need to decouple handsets and service big time. Why are we, in this case and so many others, victims of our suppliers, who treat us more as prey than valued customers?
- Unified networking is going to be huge. More on this in my Information Week column later this month.
- Handset virtualization has real potential, but it's out in 2012 at the earliest.
There's much more, but, hey, this is a blog, not a thesis. The bottom line, though, is that there are, even at this theoretically advanced stage of the mobile market's development, so many issues yet to solve.