The Symbian OS (779886), страница 4
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7].9Market data for the period can still be found on the websites of market analysiscompanies such as Canalysis, Gartner, IDC and others, as can the subsequent widercoverage from news sites ranging from the BBC and Reuters to The Register.10In Q3 2005, for example, PDA shipments fell 18% while smartphone shipments rose75% year on year. See, for example, commentary at The Register, www.theregister.co.uk.TECHNOLOGY AND SOFT EFFECTS7Although in 1997 Nokia shipped just over 20 million mobile phones,in 2001 it shipped 140 million and the trends were broadly similar forother vendors.
(Nokia was the clear leader with over 30% of the marketin 2001, compared to second placed Motorola with closer to 14%.) Evenso, numbers which looked astonishing in 2001 [Myerson 2001] lookdecidedly tame today. In 2005, global mobile phone sales broke throughthe barrier of 200 million phones per quarter, with year-end shipments of810 million, close to 20% and shipments for 2006 rising a further 21%,almost touching the 1 billion mark.11 Close to 40% of the sales growth in2005 came from Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America.Against these totals, annual sales of smartphones at closer to 50 millionin 2005 look small (which is why Symbian has begun to chase the midrange market).
Nonetheless, Symbian OS still leads the market, havingdoubled its shipments in pretty much every year since the company’screation. Thus, shipments in 2003 more than doubled from 2 millionto 6.7 million; in 2004, they doubled again to 14.4 million; and in2005 they more than doubled again, with almost 34 million SymbianOS phones shipped in the year (see www.symbian.com/news/pr/2006/pr20063419.html ).1.4 Technology and Soft EffectsAlmost as astonishing as the raw numbers are the social and technologychanges packed into little more than half a decade.
The Nokia 7650,introduced in spring 2002, was a breakthrough product. The first cameraphone in Europe [Haikio 2002, p. 240] with MMS, email, a color displayand a joystick, the Nokia 7650 introduced the Series 60 (now rebrandedas S60) user interface and was the first Symbian phone to sell in significantvolume. Looking back, it is easy to forget how novel its camera was.Not even five years on, the mobile phone seems well on the wayto subsuming digital photography (the digital camera market began toshrink for the first time in 2005, although arguably that may indicatesaturation as much as competition).
It is an open question whethermobile phones will do the same to the personal music-player market.12Phones seem already to have subsumed PDAs. This is the principle ofconvergence; on the evidence of the market to date, given the choicebetween multiple dedicated single function devices or multifunctionmobile phone terminals (as mobile phones are increasingly described),the market is choosing the latter.11See www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=501734Apple’s Quarter 1 2006 sales numbers, for example, show a decline in iPod salesat the same time as the Nokia 3250 ‘music player’ phone has hit ‘triple platinum’ (i.e.1 million units shipped) within a single quarter.128WHY PHONES ARE DIFFERENTIt may not even matter what impact convergence has on existingmarkets.
Broadcast TV, Wi-Fi, and VoIP13 are queuing up for the roleof newest hot mobile phone technology and seem likely to sustaincontinued growth, with or without markets such as the personal musicplayer. (Digital terrestrial broadcast TV may yet prove to be the ‘killerapp’ for the mobile phone.) What seems certain is that personalizationhas worked.
Whatever the market drivers (and they are not necessarilythe same in all markets), person-to-person communications have movedfrom their Victorian origins in fixed lines anchored to fixed locations,to what used to be the distinctly science-fictional model of ubiquitousmobile phone personal communications (something rather more like theStar Trek model).Genuine culture shock accompanied the emergence of the massmobile phone market, with its new habits and behaviors: people chattinginto their phones in the street and breezily answering their phones inrestaurants and trains, breaking the unwritten rules of public–privatespaces and frequently meeting hostility in consequence.
Similarly, therapid rise of a ‘texting’ culture produced a predictable gap betweenthose who did (typically young users) and those who didn’t, with anequally predictable spate of newspaper scare stories. Today, these seemlike reports from a world long gone. Looking back at the vision for thefuture mobile phone information society that Nokia began promotingfrom around 1999, it is remarkable how much of it has come to pass. Thevision is spelled out in detail in [Kivimaki 2001].Telephony has always had a sociological dimension, ever since thefixed-line phone shrank the world and collapsed time, making twoway communications between remote locations instantaneous.
This iseven more striking for mobile telephony. Again, it is easy to forget howcompletely in the UK, for example, the first brick-like mobile phonesbecame the personification of the London ‘Big Bang’ deregulation of theCity, of the Thatcher era and the Lawson boom, every bit as much as redFerraris. (Local TV news reported at the time that motorists were buyingdummy mobile phones, simply to be seen talking into them while waitingat the traffic lights, thus catching some of the Big Bang glow.) Again, thecurious notion of the ‘car phone’ has left its legacy in the name of one ofthe UK’s larger mobile phone retailers, Carphone Warehouse. (Elsewherein Europe, where the sociology presumably was different, the brand issimply Phone House.)The mobile phone is an astonishing product phenomenon.
Not just thebusinesses of the phone vendors, but completely new operator businessestoo have been built on the back of selling and serving the mobile phone.New business models have been invented from subsidies for phones13Voice Over IP (VoIP) telephony uses non-dedicated IP networks to carry voicetelephony traffic. Internet phone services such as Skype are VoIP-based as, increasingly, arediscount packages offered by mainstream phone providers.DISRUPTION AND COMPLEXITY9to pre-payment and the marketing of intangibles such as ‘airtime’ and‘messages’. Meanwhile some old business models have collapsed underpressure from the cannibalization of neighboring markets including fixedline telephony.It is easy to underestimate the depth of these ‘soft’ effects.
The PCbrought about several social revolutions: as the visible embodiment ofthe ubiquitous microprocessor, as the medium for the Internet, includingemail, and most recently as the medium for the web. Arguably, the mobilephone transformation runs even deeper, because it impacts public andnot just private behavior.
It has both caused and enabled new socialuses (it has changed family relationships, enabled ‘remote mothering’[Ling 2004, p. 43] and so on), as well as new patterns of behaviorwhich have rapidly become the norm (it has changed the way muchbusiness is done, changed the way people set up meetings, and meltedprivate–public distinctions). The mobile phone ‘fits into the folds ofeveryday life’ (L. Fortunati quoted in [Ling 2004, p. 51]) in a way that fewother technologies have and the effect has been extremely powerful.1.5 Disruption and ComplexityA strong theme of this book is that mobile phones are uniquely complex,both as devices and as products, and are therefore uniquely challengingfrom a software perspective.
Of course many things are complex. Rocketsare complex and so is the Internet, and so are corporate services,battleships and submarines. But mobile phones outdo them all in thecomplexity of the package.Mobile phones are complex packages of multiple software functions(computing, communications and multimedia), hardware technologies(battery and power, radio, displays, optics (lenses), and audio), andfabrication and manufacturing technologies (miniaturization, online customization and localization, global procurement, and sourcing anddistribution) which are sold globally in unprecedented volumes.
Theyhave moved from a niche market to the mainstream in two decades, withmuch of that growth in the last five years. They have been technologically,commercially, and socially disruptive.The typical pattern of a disruptive technology is that it succeeds not byoutperforming existing technologies (many disruptive technologies havein fact failed first time around as direct challengers), but by subtly shiftingthe ground on which it competes.
Instead of competing like-for-like,it outperforms the incumbents on shifted ground, in effect skewing theexisting market and creating a new, related and overlapping but essentiallydifferent market. It removes the ground beneath the old technology notby replacing it directly but by sidelining it, often by moving the market inan unprecedented direction.
It is rather like adaptive evolution, in which10WHY PHONES ARE DIFFERENTan unproductive mutation becomes unexpectedly relevant and thereforesuccessful because of a shift in the external context.14Disruption is part of what makes it so hard to predict the future. WAPfailed dismally in one market whereas i-Mode was a runaway success inanother, but on the face of it both offer essentially the same service. Themissing ingredient for success in the case of WAP was not a technologyingredient but a market or social one. Andrew Seybold says that i-Mode‘is a cultural success – not a wireless success’ (quoted in [Funk 2004,p.
13]). While the analysis is probably only half true, it does make thepoint that the social and cultural dimensions of technologies cannot beignored.Arguably, convergence is itself a form of disruption. One reason tobelieve that the mobile phone will dominate at the expense of laptops,PDAs, digital cameras or dedicated music players, all of which areobjectively fitter for a single purpose, is that while these devices may scorehigher on function (in their niche), they score lower on personalizationand value as an accessory.
Symbian OS does not itself count as adisruptive technology, but it is a vehicle for the disruptive effects ofconvergence.151.6 The Thing About Mobile PhonesMobile phones are different from other devices for many reasons andmost of those reasons make them more complex too.• Mobile phones are multi-function devices.• Mobile phone functionality is expanding at an exponential rate.• Phone-related technologies are evolving at an exponential rate.• Mobile phones are enmeshed in a complex and still evolving businessmodel.• Mobile phones are highly personal consumer devices (even whensomeone else pays for them).In a word, the mobile phone difference is ‘complexity’ and the trendtowards complexity appears to be growing at an exponential pace.14Disruption is a widely discussed (and fashionable) concept, first identified by Christensen [1997] as innovative change for which the market is the trigger point (see [Tidd2005, p.
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