Russell Beattie Notebook – Where’s the Mobility?
Beattie noted that a couple of important conferences had significant gaps in their programs:
I first noticed that the leaders of Silicon Valley are *still* behind the times when I saw the line up for O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference. Not a single member of telecom industry there and only one session that talks about telecom – and its focus is VoIP. Are you kidding me? Anyone who doesn’t realize by now that the Web 2.0 is going to be dominated by mobile devices must be living on, well, here in the U.S. Not that Yahoo and Google aren’t going to play a role, but there are going to be *billions* of mobile devices on the web very soon now and that’s going to change things fundamentally. The Web 2.0 is going to be dominated by XHTML-MP – why isn’t this the number one topic of a conference like this?
You’d think that maybe that conference was just an aberration, but I just got a link to SuperNova 2004 in June. A decent lineup of speakers – the so-called ‘thought leaders’ – yet again there’s only one mention of ‘wireless’ and it’s about WiFi and WiMax. It’s almost criminal. I mean, these conferences are *expensive* and supposed to be about exploring where we are and where we are going when it comes to technology in our homes and businesses, yet the most profound piece of technology to come into our lives for the past century is being completely ignored.
Business Analyst Michael Gold comments:
Beattie is the one who is behind the times. What he’s saying was all the rage in 1997. Notebooks w/Wi-Fi have already happened and there isn’t that much to talk about there. The fact is that for smaller devices, usability of mobile Internet solutions is very, very poor. Security stinks too. It might get better, but what’s the point, considering that the telcos are the gatekeepers for everything mobile. Bottom line, if a telco can’t make money on something then it doesn’t happen. Who do you think is going to roll out WiMax, etc? It’ll be a telco. How are we going to use things with tiny screens and tiny buttons? If there’s a way, it has to be found by a telco. Not likely to happen, sorry. And whatever happens, it costs by the bit, by the minute, by the mile. PDA market is in crisis, smartphone markets are hardly better, handheld Internet apps are not looking good right now, 3G is a disaster, and Beattie is out of touch.