Mobile Computing: The Cloud is the killer app
Since the launch of the Nexus One comparisons with the iPhone have been everywhere, and rightly so, as Apple has so far set the standard in smartphone design and user experience. As observed by of the NYT however, major players such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo are now competing across ever widening market segments. Whilst the companies started out from very different beginnings we’re now seeing more convergence as their activities increasingly overlap.
Whilst the hardware itself is important, the cloud infrastructure to provide services to new mobile devices will play a decisive role in determining the future of mobile computing. Just as choosing a desktop computer is largely a choice of operating system, choosing a mobile device is also increasingly about which OS a particular device is running, and the cloud infrastructure which supports it. Tim O’Reilly has pointed out that for Apple, great hardware may once again not be enough:
Overall, the Nexus One is good enough that it’s conceivable in a way that it wasn’t a few months ago that we’ll see a replay of Apple’s experience in the PC market twenty-five years ago, in which Apple’s fit and finish was unquestionably superior, but a commodity platform that was “good enough” and available to the entire industry ended up taking the lead.
Google and Apple are now directly competing on both mobile hardware and software services. Whilst Apple has a considerable lead with their app store their productivity software offerings are still mainly desktop based. O’Reilly continues:
Apple needs to either beef up its capability in the kinds of data-backed applications, or partner aggressively with companies with more expertise than they currently have. They also need to re-factor their core applications like iPhoto and iMovie to make them web-native, turning them into a base for collective intelligence. Picasa and iPhoto both sport image recognition, but Apple has to train its algorithms on sample data sets, while Google gets to train Picasa on billions of user images. As Peter Norvig, Google’s chief scientist, once said to me, “We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more data.” Collective intelligence is the secret sauce of Web 2.0, and the future of all computing, and by locking user data into individual devices, Apple cuts itself off from this future. Rather than having MobileMe as a separate revenue add-on, Apple needs to make all of its applications web-connected by default, so that they can learn from all their users.
Seamless integration with cloud services is essential for the development of mobile platforms. Gmail is so good on the Nexus One that for the first time we can imagine being totally without a laptop. There’s no need to worry about address book or calendar syncing as they are always up to date. Maps and navigation are great and the potential of Google Goggles, though still a little rough around the edges, is very promising.
But there’s another factor that could play a role as competition in the mobile arena increases. The open source nature of the Android project means that the operating system is already available on an ever increasing number of devices, and in many different flavours. Whilst it could be argued that the diverse uses of Android could lead to fragmentation, it’s also true that a more open and ubiquitous operating system will only increase it’s sphere of influence. notes that we’ve seen this play out once before:
Yes, Apple also made other mistakes—most notably, maintaining a premium price point, ditching its famous founder and spiritual leader, and developing clunker products. But the mistake that doomed its primary business, the Macintosh, to niche status was the insistence on maintaining complete control over every aspect of the product while Microsoft drove for software ubiquity.
To create compelling mobile computing experiences companies will have to look to provide an ever richer range of services to support their mobile devices. Hardware technology has now advanced to a stage where mobile computing will become a reality in 2010. The deciding factor is now likely to be the software and services which drives these new devices. With Apple likely to announce new content services to support their rumoured mobile tablet on 27th January and Google pursuing an active lead in the development of Android, 2010 promises to be an interesting year for mobile computing.
