October 7th, 2008
Chicken, egg and mobile open source
There are growing worries that mobile open source is not moving ahead.
Name me a serious mobile open source outfit beyond Funambol. Exactly.
It’s a chicken and egg situation. (This chicken appeared today at my ZDNet Healthcare blog.) Carriers and handset makers want applications. Application makers want a market.
Mobile systems are not like server or client systems. The software needs cooperation to work. The handset maker must load it, or allow it to be loaded. The network must, in most cases, approve the application.
This makes even primitive mobile applications profitable. But it’s not the Internet, and the incumbent network operators don’t want it to become anything like the Internet.
T-Mobile has an Android phone coming out, and there’s demand for it. But the raw numbers, when compared with iPhone sales, are paltry. They’re paltry when compared to standard phones from Sprint and Verizon as well.
Sprint, Google and Clearwire are moving ahead with WiMax, but a network which only works in one city is not a competitor.
Don’t get me wrong. Mobile broadband is coming. The real Internet, the real broadband Internet, is coming. The success of the AT&T iPhone guarantees it.
But it will take time to create competition and change carrier attitudes. Until the chickens come home to roost, who is going to invest in eggs?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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