Back to the future…

I started in the computer industry in the late ‘70’s. I didn’t work on mainframes, the norm in that era. I spent most of my waking hours on these new things called microcomputers. If you wrote software for a microcomputer, you were in absolute control. It was an era when could do anything you wanted or, more to the point, were capable of designing. True to the Wild West attitude of the time, before I graduated high school I owned a company which wrote, among other things, personal accounting software for Radio Shack’s TRS-80s. You had to pick your bets and choose which machine you wanted your software to run on. When machines such as IBM’s PC came along, we had to decide whether the device would take off and, if so, whether it would appeal to the demographics we were going after. In short, we spent our time porting our software so it would run on whatever was selling to our target market at any given time. In all cases you had to craft your application to get the most out of the device you were running on.

So why am I babbling about the past?

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I was on a Wedbush Morgan roundtable panel recently where we discussed mobile applications.  

It reminded me again that diversity of background and experience is absolutely critical when you are trying to figure out where a given market or technology is going. Wedbush do a great job with their panels to make sure that the discussion can be open and that everybody from the chip manufacturers through the apps guys in a given space are represented. I am always awed by the caliber of the folks attending and the mutual respect people approach the discussion with.  

As a result of Wedbush’s approach, you get a coalescing of opinions from the app guys (like Movius) that things are going a certain way then out of the blue the CEO of a company who optimizes backhaul from the base station says “well, here is the problem if that happens”…and the discussion launches down the path of what impediments are which make that path impractical for another decade.  

It reminds me of GPRS. I spent a great deal of time, in what seems like a previous life, launching GPRS as quickly as possible. Five years later, I finally found an application, email of the RIM, which used the technology to add value to my life.   

So, in homage to the Wedbush, I would like to do a bit of a survey to see if we can start an educational debate. Let’s start a discussion. What do you think the next hot discontinuity will be in the mobile space? Please give a quick summary of your background and then make your prediction, elaborating on why you expect it to be so. I am really interested in what you have to say. 

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One of the things I love about working in the telecom industry is that we work to enable one of the most basic building blocks of society—communication. I have had the privilege over my career in this industry to travel and talk to people from around the world about how such a fundamental aspect of human society varies in subtle ways around the globe and even by demographic within a geography. Though subtle at their roots, those differences eventually manifest themselves in fairly fundamental wa... [More]