The End of an Era

Earlier this week this blog was hacked. A couple of readers unsubscribed. Someone was kind enough to let me know it had been hacked. Otherwise, no one seemed to notice, which isn’t a surprise given that I’ve posted three times in the last three years. Seems like a pretty good indicator that the Mobility Revolution is now a historical fact rather than a future to be predicted and observed, as it was when this blog started.

I’ve just had the joy of going back through all the posts over the years and pulling out some highlights that give a sense for the historical journey we’ve been on:

• On March 10, 2006, I posted for the first time here with a piece titled “Introducing the Law of Mobility”
• On April 3, 2006, I wrote about Cord Cutting for the first time. Forrester Research had just reported that the number of mobile users who had cut the cord had increased from 5% to 8%.
• On April 5, 2006, my “What businesses could learn from Mickey Mouse” post discussed the launch of a Disney MVNO (which would become a quick high-profile failure that set back the MVNO industry for several years)
• On April 22, 2006, I posted “The Return of Text” noting that mobile e-mail didn’t display HTML-formatted e-mails well (remember, this was when a Blackberry was cutting edge)
• On June 16, 2006, I commented on a TechDirt article on the continuing market strength of disposable cameras. One of my comments was that “The $5 disposable camera will almost always yield better results than the $200 cameraphone!”
• On July 11, 2006, I first introduced “Big Bell Dogma” as the greatest enemy of the Mobility Revolution
• On July 31, 2006, I published the Mobile Declaration of Independence
• On August 9, 2006, I shared the news that Sprint had announced their 4G network, using 2.5GHz spectrum and the WiMAX standard (between then and now, Sprint spun out that network and bought it back, and 2.5 spectrum has gone from exceptionally high-band, to being reasonable mid-band)
• On September 21, 2006, in a post titled “Mobility Revolution – Is It Here Yet?” I compared the mobility revolution with the Internet revolution and felt like we were at about December 1995 – everyone knew the revolution was happening, but it wasn’t yet an essential element of how businesses operate
• On September 22, 2006, I thought Motorola’s $3.9B acquisition of Symbol Technologies was brilliant (Motorola Mobility was acquired by Google for $12.5B in 2012 and Lenovo bought the equipment part of the business in 2014 for $2.9B)
• On October 7, 2006, I predicted that Microsoft’s SPOT-based smartwatch would be a failure
• On October 22, 2006, in a post titled “Can Mobility Jumpstart Social Habits of Digital Natives?” I asked “Kids today. They don’t get out. They just sit in front of the TV or computer, playing games, surfing the web, and IMing their friends. What’s happened to the vibrant social life us non-natives to this digital world enjoyed when we were their age?” Remember Facebook wasn’t opened to the public until September 2006, and wouldn’t really go mobile until 2010, so it really was too early to fully consider my questions: “Will mobility jumpstart social skills? Will it bring more blessing or curse?”
• On November 25, 2006, I commented on the big moves by UK mobile operator 3 in moving toward unlimited data and an “open garden” approach to apps and content (and how Sprint was already doing those things), but also bundling apps with the service
• My summary of the top stories of 2006, posted December 30, 2006, included some interesting (in hindsight) stories: mobile revenue passing wireline revenue, major acquisitions by Motorola, Nokia (giants at that time, who would quickly fade) and Qualcomm, a joint venture between Sprint and Cable companies, and the AWS auction
• On January 2, 2007, I made 10 predictions for the year, including that Cingular would disappear, that most cellphones would include at least a 2 megapixel camera, that the breakout phone of the year would be popular because of its usability, and that people watching TV or downloading/streaming music on their phones would no longer seem fantastic.
• On January 9, 2007, in a post titled “Apple’s iPhone – Will It Matter?” I reported on that day’s announcement of the iconic device and pointed out some challenges with Apple’s initial approach including its reliance on AT&T’s 2G network (this would become a major frustration for early iPhone users). But I closed with this observation “Maybe, just maybe, the real revolution here is the true mobilization of the personal computer in a way that Microsoft and it’s partners have so far failed to accomplish. Now that would be insanely great!”
• On January 24, 2007, I predicted that Linux would be more successful in mobile devices than Apple. (Sometimes my predictions are off the mark – but not this time – remember Android is based on Linux – IDC estimates that Android has 84.8% of global smartphone share, compared to iOS’ 15.1%)
• On February 5, 2007, I observed that “Apple’s iPhone is most often compared to modern music phones. However, the real opportunity for the market (and the real threat to Samsung, Nokia and others) is in making mobile devices do so much more than just make phone calls and play songs.” (Hard to believe that pre-launch, the iPhone was mostly seen as a music phone.)
• On March 28, 2007, I commented on a number of announcements by Sprint, including the bundling of navigation for free in some of its data packs. Today, with Google Maps and all other free mapping apps available on all smartphones, it’s hard to imagine that we once had to pay for that functionality
• On April 14, 2007, I announced the Power of Mobility book, having just submitted the manuscript and expecting publication in the Fall
• On April 15, 2007, I shared that Viviane Reding, the top regulator for the European Commission, had referenced “McGuire’s Law” in a speech the previous month
• On June 8, 2007, I shared the Sprint Employee Referral Offer. I didn’t expect this to blow up my blog as it was broadly shared across the Internet resulting in thousands of gross adds for Sprint.
• On June 23, 2007, in a post titled “Are we a week away from a revolution?”, I identified four ways that the iPhone might disrupt the industry: “1. The iPhone may make the smartphone a mass market success”, “2. The iPhone may make listening to music and watching TV/video on your phone mainstream”, “3. The iPhone may bring full web-browsing to cellphones”, and “4. The iPhone may disrupt the industry’s handset-subsidy model.” In the end, all four happened, and the rest is history. (The original iPhone didn’t yet support Apps, or that would’ve been a 5th disruptor, and perhaps the biggest.)
• On September 22, 2007, I shared how impressed I was with my new Blackberry!
• On October 17, 2007, in a post reviewing a panel discussion I participated in at the Mobile 2.0 conference, I observed the common perception that the Mobile Revolution was all about making the Internet available on a mobile device. My conclusion “If mobility is simply taking the Internet to new places, then I’ve just wasted a couple of years of my life writing a useless book. If, however, mobility enables things that were impossible before, then mobility can change the rules of competition across industries and I hope lots of business people read my book and take critical lessons from it.”
• On November 5, 2007, I wrote “Why Android and the OHA Matter” referencing Google’s (actually the Open Handset Alliance’s) announcement of Android. My concluding thought was “I can’t wait to see the innovative ideas, products, services, businesses, and even new industries that will be launched now that developers have a standard to which they can confidently develop.”
• On January 21, 2008 I wrote a post called “Cellphone as Swiss Army Knife” talking about the joys and limitations of using your cellphone for all kinds of uses, but one of my examples was the camera. At the time, the phone I was using (a Blackberry) didn’t even have a camera, and phones with cameras took pretty poor quality photos. “Building a camera into a cellphone is a great thing. … However, most of us reach for a ‘real’ camera when one is available.”
• On April 28, 2008, I noted Microsoft’s decision to shut down the SPOT watch program.
• On May 7, 2008, I reported on the multi-party deal combining Sprint’s WiMax network and spectrum with Clearwire and investments from Google, Intel, and the cable companies. Comcast’s Brian Roberts said of the deal “This transaction is attractive to us strategically and financially and puts in place very attractive wholesale relationships for access to Sprint’s existing 3G and Clearwire’s 4G networks, giving us complete flexibility to introduce wireless mobility in terms of product innovation and deployment.” (of course it would be 9 years before Comcast actually started offering wireless services)
• On June 13, 2008, I shared two exciting early examples of broadband wireless being built into industry changing products. DriveCam was a connected dashcam and CardioNet monitored patients with irregular heartbeats. Pretty cutting edge stuff for the time
• On July 31, 2008, in a long wrap up of many mobile discussions across the Internet, I quoted Kevin Tofel praising the success of Palm’s Centro smartphone “Congrats to Palm, however. They take a fair amount of ribbing on their product line these days, but you have to give them credit: they not only saw the potential for a low-cost smartphone, they got such a product to market. Two million of them to be precise.” Unfortunately, Palm was heading into its final days…
• On August 14, 2009, I shared a column I’d written for Christian Computing magazine on Smartphones. Here’s my brief summary of the birth of the smartphone “Smartphones were born out of the marriage of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellphones. The first commercial smartphone was probably the Nokia 9000, released in 1996 as the outcome of joint development between Hewlett Packard and Nokia. However, the first smartphone commercially successful in the U.S. was the Handspring Treo 300, released by Sprint in 2003. (Handspring was founded by the original founders of Palm and was later bought back into Palm.) The Treo ran the Palm operating system, which already supported thousands of developers. Applications developed for any Palm OS device would run on any other Palm OS device, creating a viable business model for developers.” (Ironically, HP, co-developer with Nokia of the first smartphone would later buy Palm, but once again fail to develop a winning smartphone strategy)
• On November 10, 2009, I quoted myself from an interview for Enterprise Mobility Matters about mobile opportunities in business “I would specifically point to three areas of huge growth within the enterprise space. The first is pure bandwidth – mobile broadband. Mostly today that means 3G data cards, but 4G is coming on very rapidly. The second area of huge growth is in mobile business applications – software that runs on the handset that employees use to do their jobs. The third area is in machine-to-machine – the embedding of wireless connectivity into devices that businesses use to more efficiently and effectively operate core processes.”
• On November 13, 2009, in discussing my talk at the Open Mobile Summit, I shared Brian Huey’s great observation that a real question in mobile development is “Do you want innovation to happen at carrier speed or valley speed?” And how Sprint was working to enable developers to move at valley speed
• On June 11, 2010, I wrote a post titled “The Ultimate Swiss Army Knife” about the Evo 4G – the first 4G smartphone on the market.
• On July 16, 2010, I shared the key points from my talk at the MobileBeat conference, where I shared that mobile operators don’t need to just be dumb pipes, they can contribute real value to the developer ecosystem. I boiled it down to Bandwidth, Bills, and Bags – or the value of our networks, our relationships with customers, and our retail presence.
• On September 27, 2010, I shared an exchange with Tony Fish during our Fireside Chat at the Mobile 2.0 conference. Tony asked “If Apple is the new Microsoft, and Google is the new Apple, where do Mobile Operators fit?” My response was that the operators are the new IBM. IBM spawned the PC revolution Tony was referencing but enabled Microsoft and Intel to emerge as dominant in the ecosystem. I went on to clarify “The question is whether Mobile Operators will be the IBM that focused on using OS/2 to try to put Microsoft back in their subservient box. Or, will Mobile Operators be the IBM that became a champion of open source, enabling tremendous innovation that only sometimes directly benefited Big Blue.” I thought most Big Bell operators would take the OS/2 route, but I hoped Sprint would take the open source route.
• On December 13, 2010, in a post about my participation in Chetan Sharma’s Mobile Breakfast in Seattle, I captured this interchange: “I responded by explaining that Isis is a perfect example of Big Bell Dogma. Carriers think they can do a better job than Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and others in the payments ecosystem, so they invest billions to try to replicate capabilities and compete with existing players rather than focusing on what carriers actually do well and enabling the existing players and nimble startups to leverage the carrier’s infrastructure to bring real value to consumers. Carriers have been trying to do that for over a hundred years in different industries. Sometimes they get lucky and succeed, but most of the time it’s a miserable failure. That’s when Jim corrected me and said ‘it’s not a miserable failure, it’s a glorious failure.’ The billions they invest may not actually generate financial returns for the participating carriers, but it will help put in place (either directly or by spurring competition) infrastructure (e.g. near field communications point of sale terminals) and standards (cross-carrier NFC standards) that Sprint and the payments ecosystem will benefit from.” (BTW – Isis was a mobile payment joint venture between AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile that was announced in 2010, launched in 2013, and folded in 2015)
• On March 23, 2011, I noted the proposed acquisition of T-Mobile by AT&T. (As part of the merger agreement, AT&T committed to a break-up fee that included $3B in cash and $1B worth of spectrum. When regulators blocked the merger, that cash and spectrum fueled T-Mobile’s resurgence into the juggernaut it is today.)
• On May 4, 2011, I shared the news of AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile scaling back their Isis joint venture as Fierce Wireless reported “Less than six months after AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA announced their mobile commerce initiative, called Isis, it appears that these major players are already starting to rethink their ambitious plans…. It appears that AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless are taking a cue from Sprint.”
• On July 6, 2011, I reported “Yesterday, Verizon confirmed their elimination of unlimited data plans for smartphones and revealed the details on their new tiered usage-based pricing plans. In doing so, Verizon followed AT&T’s lead in adopting usage-based pricing as a weapon in their fight against the mobility revolution.”
• On October 6, 2011, commenting on the passing of Steve Jobs, I noted “Steve Jobs was extremely innovative and extremely anti-innovation. … Jobs was a master at leveraging incredible design instincts to turn nascent ideas into mass market hits, and in the process completely redefining industries. That’s why I believe he was extremely innovative. … However, Steve and Apple have also been extremely anti-innovation. … They want to put constraints on how innovation can happen so that they dominate the ecosystem and extract the most value. … Apple, perhaps uniquely, does an excellent job of monetizing innovation precisely because of this innovation paradox.”
• In a post on November 13, 2011, I shared the four drivers of the Mobility Revolution that I had recently shared at Sprint’s Open Solutions Conference: 1. Mass market adoption of smartphones, 2. Mobile bandwidth built into all kinds of products, 3. Ubiquitous broadband (wired and wireless), and 4. Emergence of interfaces between mobile devices and the real world (NFC, compass, gyroscope, cameras, other sensors)
• On September 27, 2013, I noted “According to a Mobile Marketer article, research firm iGR has found that 72% of companies have implemented a mobile strategy and 92% recognize the need to. When I launched this blog 7.5 years ago, I would guess those #s would have been more like 2% and 5% and my key objective was to raise awareness that it would become essential for businesses to transform their businesses via mobility.”
• In a post on April 15, 2014, I shared the 6 C’s of Mobility that I had recently shared in a talk at a Mobiquity event. Six ways in which mobility adds value to a product or service are: Connectivity, Community, Content, Context, Commerce, and Cost
• On September 3, 2014 I shared that I was leaving Sprint and that October 3 would be my last day
• As we near the end of this wrap up, it’s appropriate to point to a post on September 15, 2014 reflecting a conversation in a cab ride with Chetan Sharma at that year’s CTIA conference. One quote from that post is “Big data analytics, connected devices (Internet of Things), and cloud all point to this next revolution, which Chetan calls Connected Intelligence and that I’ve been calling the Intelligence Revolution.” The mobility revolution was drawing to a close – time to focus on the next revolution.
• On October 6, 2014, I introduced my new consulting/advisory business – SDG Advisory Services (sdgstrategy.com)
• On November 8, 2014, I commented (at length) on how the Internet of Things will suffer, at least for a time, because of the “best effort” nature of the networks on which it relies.
• On February 2, 2015, I commented on a Wired article “Reading this article took me back to early 2012. Facebook’s IPO was the big story and the biggest knock on the company was that it lacked a mobile strategy. Today, more than half its revenue comes from mobile and they are being lauded as one of the few to have figured out mobile. Back then, Facebook wasn’t alone. Perhaps setting the tone for the year to come, in late 2011, the world’s largest technology company at the time, HP, ousted their CEO, at least in part, for a failed mobile strategy (the company doesn’t show up in the Wired piece because they haven’t been able to recover to a leadership spot in tech). Later in 2012, Intel’s CEO was forced to resign because of a failed mobile strategy. (Like HP, Intel rarely gets mentioned these days when folks talk about the companies leading the technology industry.) 2012 was the wakeup call. 2015 is showing which companies jumped and which hit snooze.”
• On February 23, 2015, I listed 10 strategic issues facing mobile operators: 1. Duopoly, the Rule of Three, or the Rule of Four (would Sprint and T-Mobile ever be allowed to merge, or would AT&T/Verizon dominance hurt consumers); 2. Wildcards: Google, Dish, América Móvil; 3. Licensed vs. Unlicensed Spectrum; 4. Spectrum Portfolio; 5. Network Technologies; 6. Cash Management (Capital Expenditures, Expense Management); 7. Plan Types; 8. Commoditization; 9. Quad Play or Cord Cutting; 10. Re-intermediation
• On March 12, 2015 I reported on Google’s acknowledgement that they would be offering some kind of MVNO in a piece called “What Did Google Really Say?” (short version – Sundar Pichai was careful to set the context for an MVNO within the same model as Android and the Nexus handsets)
• I followed up that post on March 13, 2015 with a post called “What Did Google Really Do? – A Historical Perspective” reviewing Android, Nexus, and Google Fiber
• And finally, on March 14, 2015 I posted “What Might Google Really Do?” where I shared 3 potential scenarios: 1. A competitive new entry into the space disguised as an “experiment”; 2. A smartphone-centric experiment working closely with mobile operators; 3. An IoT-centric launch of a device connectivity service. (Reality was probably somewhere between 1 and 2.)
• On April 10, 2015, as pre-orders for the Apple Watch had started, I posted on a discussion I’d had with a group high school students about the new product. One key takeaway was “the Apple Watch will be the first wearable that will attract a broad developer movement. The apps that we can imagine today are not the ones that some unconstrained innovator will envision and deliver that will truly be game-changing. And it’s those apps that will drive change across the entire wearables ecosystem, not just Apple.”
• On April 13, 2015 I posted my new Market-Value-Model Matrix tool for evaluating strategic options
• On May 1, 2015 I commented on the report by Strategy Analytics that “28.1 million smartwatches will be sold this year, almost matching the 28.6 million Swiss timepieces that were exported last year.” I shared “For a very long time and even now, I’ve often used the watch as an example of the impact of the technology revolutions on products and industries. In fact, for the past couple of decades, I’ve been saying ‘in the future, most watches will have bandwidth built in.’ It’s always fun when predictions you made in the past, which at the time seemed crazy, become reality that everyone takes for granted. (It’s even better when you documented it more than 5 years ago.)”
• On April 23, 2016 I posted “Not Your Father’s AT&T” where I observed that my parents’ generation would think of AT&T as Ma Bell – the integrated telephone company (phones, phone books, local service, long distance – everything); my generation thinks of AT&T as a long distance company; my son’s generation thinks of AT&T as a mobile company. “What will my grandson (if the Lord blesses me with one) think of AT&T as? A video company? A Mexican company? An IOT company? Time will tell…”
• On March 16, 2017 I posted “The box mobile operators find themselves in” in which I define the box by four questions: What applications require licensed spectrum? What applications/services work best using network vs. device intelligence? What applications can best be met by a single operator? What applications are best served via carrier billing? I concluded with “For today, mobile operators can have some level of success selling voice and data connectivity services to consumers. That’s clearly inside the box. Will the box shrink to squeeze even those services? What options do operators have for growth? Those are great and important questions.”

It’s been quite a journey. Thank you for joining me on it. I will leave this blog up for another week and then shut it down. I hope you’ve enjoyed and benefitted from it.

If you want to stay in touch, connect with me on LinkedIn and check out SDG Advisory Services.

God Bless,

Russ