Why the I-Word is Relevant
So there was recently a thread on the Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club mailing list in which one of our members noted that we had been yammering on about "Innovation." The person in question I respect greatly as someone who is a "doer" and not a "yammerer on." We had, on the list, started talking about the I-Word, and quite frankly if you're more of a "doer," you might very well interpret such discussions as corporate claptrap, simple blathering by people too stupid to actually go out and do things for themselves.And normally I would agree, but for two facts. Firstly, in this case, the people who were doing most of the blathering were all people who had actually gone out and "done something." I've recently build my own "FrankenPhone." Or maybe it's better to call it half of a phone, I'm still using my laptop to control it while I finish the GumStix based control software. Other people in the conversation were responsible for mobile gateways to eBay auctions and interesting new text input technologies. Secondly, sometimes there is actually a little wisdom in the yammering of old farts.
Here then is a snippit of the conversation. It's basically my take on why, as we start building our own mobile phones we simultaneously have to challenge the carriers yet find a way to work with them. In the words of the Darth Vader, "If they (the carriers) could be turned, they would be a powerful ally."
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Thanks for breathing a bit of fresh air into the subject.
I think you're right that a lot of us are "in the biz." You're right... working in the mobile industry will change your perspective.
Hunter S. Thompson once wrote about the music industry, "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." I think the mobile industry can be described the same way, though in the 21st century, we've come around and started to like natural materials again, so the only difference I would say exists is that the mobile phone industry is more of a "long imitation wood-grain veneer hallway."
Now it may seem odd that someone would say of a shallow money trench, "there's also a negative side," sort of like he's saying it's a good thing for there to be a shallow money trench that attracts ne'er-do-wells. Well... I think it is in a twisted bit of logic. (stay with me here... I'm going to tie this all back into the club and the phone industry in just a little bit.) The important part of Thompson's statement is that "thieves and pimps run free." While it's sad that good men are dying like dogs, the essential "freedom" of the industry is indicative of a vitality that eventually benefits everyone. It's really, really sad that Keith Richards probably can't remember what planet he's on, but I saw the Stone's in concert back in '98, and I've got to tell you, it's absolutely amazing, he can still play the opening riff of "start me up" perfectly.
No... the important part of this equation is the aspect of personal freedom. Keith is free to go fall out of coconut trees and I don't even want to know what his dialysis bill is each month, and I'm guessing he's on his third or fourth liver. <sarcastic_comment>That our society would let such a good guitar player descend into the pit of depravity is terrible. I mean seriously, just think how good he would have been had he not blown his mind out with sex, drugs and rock 'n roll.</sarcastic_comment>
No.. what's important is that Keith live in an environment that he's free to do things that are really bad for himself. If Keith were living in the sort of homogenous 50's-esque world, I've got to think he would not have become the soulful and capable musician he was (and to a major extent still is.) Rather, he probably would have spent his days playing rhythm guitar for Pat Boone's European tour. The music industry has an essential freedom that allows musicians to essentially do whatever they want, as long as the industry gets to commoditise their image. That pimps and thieves are running free simply means that someone did the math and found out that the losses from pimps and thieves are smaller than the opportunity losses you would get by enforcing a "no pimps or thieves" rule. In modern society rock musicians play the part of court jesters. They're allowed to bend the rules and insult the king as long as they do it in an "over the top" manner. Without pimps and thieves, and good men dying like dogs, I think a number of us would be highly distrustful of rock-'n-roll.
Now... turn that around and apply it to the mobile industry. It's not exactly the same. I mean nobody follows T-Mobile's executive staff's every activity, waiting for them to get drunk on the Concorde and be so abusive to the flight staff that they're met at the gate with a straight-jacket and a syringe full of Thorazine. No... it's a much more civil industry. (or so you would believe from the lack of tabloid exposé's.)
The mobile phone industry is a money trench that's been left largely unregulated by governments. This is a good thing because I can guarantee you, some of the people in the US government that would be making decisions about a regulated mobile industry, I don't trust them to order a Latte at Starbucks or tie their shoes correctly. But it's a bad thing because you wind up with an industry that views mobile phones as "money troughs" instead of devices to enhance and promote personal freedom.
To a large degree, the mobile industry IS ALREADY as free as the PC market. You can order parts from SparkFun and GumStix and as long as you don't crack open the GSM module or send a bizillion SMS messages to Verizon's Manhattan area network, no one really cares that much. But I think what you're talking about is that in addition to the freedom, you want availability of resources and a slightly easier time of stringing them together.
I built my first computer in the mid-70's. I bought an 8080 CPU, some support chips and a collection of LEDs and switches. I designed the board myself and etched it in my parent's garage. After about three months of twiddling, I was eventually able to get something that "worked." The only interesting thing you could do with it was blink a few lights, but it worked. A year later my parents bought a TRS-80, and whoa... I could actually program the thing without using front panel switches! Then came Apple ]['s and Commodore 64's and Exidy Sorcerers and Amigas and Atari 520s and eventually someone at IBM noted there was something of a demand for personal computers and entered the market. The rest is, as we say, history.
What IBM and Apple both stumbled on (and I'm not sure they stumbled on it intentionally) was the idea that you can build a profitable and loyal ecosystem of suppliers, developers and users if you use open standards (I'm thinking of Apple's card bus and IBM's ISA.) The difficulty with which an IBM PC is extended to be an industrial controller, say, is nothing compared with the difficulty of modifying my first 8080-based personal computer design for the same task. And there's also the little bit about there being no software for my homebrew 8080-based computer save what I wrote myself (had I been smart I would have tried to implement the CP/M BIOS, but it seemed like a pretty big job back then.) Compare the "open" IBM and Apple experience with that of the TI-99/4. TI build a bizillion of these things and pushed them out to shopping malls around the world. In the latter part of their life-cycle, they were outselling Apple ]['s. (Of course TI was selling them at a loss, but that's a different story.) The important part here is that in order to get the tools to build "modules" for the 99/4 ("modules" were TI's name for ROM Cartridges). In order to get those tools, you had to fork over $10,000 to TI. They also told people that if you tried to make your own modules without licensing their technology, they would sick their stable of underworked IP lawyers on you.
In the long run I think we all want the same thing. I want to pay a reasonable price for a reasonably effective mobile device. I want to use it to make phone calls on someone's network, but I also want to use it to maybe play bejeweled when I'm stuck in line at the airport or display the day's calendar. Heck, maybe I want my phone to replace my iPod. But the underlying message is that I want two types of freedom with my "phone." First, as a user, I want to be able to decide what software goes on the device. The network operators have routinely demonstrated their inability to select good software for phones. Secondly, as a developer, I want to be able to develop software for my phone (and your phone too) without signing a mountain of NDAs and paying tens of thousands of dollars (if you want to be a Motorola developer, and develop apps for certain phones, you have to pay about $10,000, no kidding.)
In the long run, I think we all want the same thing. But the industry is a money trench, and it's really, really, really hard to get the players to back away from the trench long to even talk about the idea of adopting open standards, enabling consumer choice and making it easy for developers. The guys I know at Verizon have basically said they don't care about technical "lead users." In other words, they could care less if we're upset that we have to pay $2.00 every time we want to send a photo to or from our phone. Cingular is rolling out some new high-speed networks, and they seem to be at a loss for how to sell subscriptions. T-Mobile's in a somewhat similar situation. To these guys, the importance of our club is in the fact that we're building applications they'll want to commoditize later on.
And I'm not terribly upset with this model, because I'm starting to see some guys from the carriers take note of the fact that it wasn't until open standards were a big win for the PC industry. I'm no more upset that Verizon wants to do "less clever" things than I am that someone wants to sell me a PC motherboard. Well.. I'll be upset if they take apps I develop and force them on people or don't allow other people to load them onto their phone. But that's what I think the big win of an "open phone platform is." In the same way that the PC BIOS allowed people to put multiple OSes on stock hardware, an open phone platform should, in theory, allow people to decide how they want their phone to operate. If they want to use the stock config from the carrier, that's fine with me. Just as long as they let me extend my system.
So getting back to all the yammering about innovation...
The reason we're yammering about innovation is that this is the language that the guys at the money trench understand. You can jump up and down all you want about how IBM re-invented itself as a Linux company and how GCC is now the de-facto compiler for non-windows systems (and even for many windows-based applications.) The guys at the money trench are going to ask three questions: 1. how much money can I make? 2. are other people doing the same thing? and 3. how soon will I see a return on my investment?
From this perspective, arguing for open systems is a bit of a subtle argument. These guys have been making money with closed systems for a long time now. They understand how that process works. If you come in with an open alternative, and you want carrier buy-in, you've got to address the three questions above. In the business community these days, the language we use to describe the benefits of open systems goes something like "blah blah blah innovation. blah blah blah lead users. blah blah blah radical customization. blah blah blah let your customers tell you what they want you to sell them. Do this and you get a lot more money."
So... that's why all this talk of innovation is relevant.
But I can certainly see that if you're not "on the inside," it can sound like just so much corporate drivel. And to a certain extent it is, but it's less bilious than the corporate drivel that says, "let's monetize our synergy with a proprietary offering."
But... keep telling us if you think we're going too far afield. I think those of us in the club that are also "in the industry" haven't drunk the kool-aide yet, but we do sniff the vapours every day, so you never know. Also... It's really, really good to know that people "outside the production chain" value the open-phone concept. No... it's more than important, it's essential.
So... to recap... part of the thing I think you like about the PC industry is that you have the freedom to buy a motherboard from one company, a video card from another and a hard drive from yet another. Even if you don't assemble the thing yourself, you still benefit because the guy who does assemble the thing has a wide selection of cheap parts. Open standards created a commodity market for PC parts, and there are few people these days that will say that's been a terrible thing. We want to do something similar with the mobile phone industry. We want to see commodity phones where users can mix and match hardware features, software and services.
But the guys who run the show today are making a lot of money and we've got to have a good argument why they should change their tune and start selling open platforms. The simple answer is... look at the PC industry today versus the industry in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Platform standardization was a terrible thing for some PC vendors (note that IBM even sold off their PC business.) They could no longer charge $6000 for a PC. But it's been great for the rest of the economy. PC technology has been popping up all over the place making people, businesses, non-profit corporations and governments more productive. And the total size of the market today is... well I don't know how much larger it is today than it was in the late 1970's, but I'm going to guess it's a lot larger. More money is being made, but it's being made by companies that are thinking more like ID Software and less like US Steel.
This sorta scares the old dinosaurs in the industry, and the only way to convince them to play ball is 1. start building some of these open platforms and 2. convince their investors and management that open platforms will be a net-win for everyone.
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