Sorry, but you don't seem to be offering anything new here. We know there are large capital costs for hardware businesses. We know network effects exist for phone applications. We know UI performance is a key issue in smartphone adoption (currently).
Maybe "It's Hard To Build A Smartphone In 2013" would be a better title. But to suggest people will be using iPhones and Androids in the year 2050...Yikes. I pray that future doesn't come to pass.
The way I read this article, It is less about building new smartphone but more about the next technology shift that is going to change the direction. Basically, as oft repeated Ford statement goes, 'if you asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horse'. So, at this point, smartphone business is settling into a faster horse business.
So, I would really expect the next big thing to be not a be an iPhone but something utterly different. Neural implants, anyone?
The biggest problem the smartphone solved was boredom. That's the reason for it's popularity.
At it's core ,boredom might be manipulated neurologically, so maybe you won't feel bored and just feel content with whatever. If we're going to aggressive means as neural implants ,this seems a more interesting option.
Another options(without opening skuls) is something that offers far better experiences.
Maybe more immersive (up to a point we can't differentiate from real life).maybe something that enriches our daily interactions without interfering with them. Maybe something that help us manage emotions and brain states optimally. Maybe something that augments fluidly our cognitive capabilities without interfering with what we do.
Yes but a megadrive did not fit in your pocket, and the game gear, while backpackable, had awful battery life. The smartphone is successful running game gear level games because it will do so all day, and has a setup time of four seconds from impulse to game.
Plus the game gear was more a master system than a megadrive even if both would run columns (I was wondering if ppl from the US understand what a megadrive is since I think they call it genesis).
Talking about battery life, I had a lynx which was even worse I think.
I think you've got the tone right. Also... I hope you're right about Neural implants! I've wanted one ever since I read that MT Anderson book in JR high school (minus the dystopian homogeneity and fields of filet mignon).
Maybe Amazon will debut them on 60 Minutes prior to cyber monday 2014!
I'm sorry, but fields of filet mignon sounds great. Make it fields of bacon-wrapped filets and I would call it my own personal utopia (for as long as my heart held out)
They won't be. Smartphones will be disrupted by something else. People aren't using PDAs anymore either; they use smartphones. Eventually, something will come along that will make people stop using smartphones.
His point is that you can't be successful building something that is essentially the same thing as a smartphone. You can build something that disrupts the current smartphone market, but it would likely need to be something more than a smartphone (a la Google Glass.)
The network effects you mention are exactly the point: network effects are especially powerful in things like mobile app stores because they create a tipping point market. That means if an early entrant or set of entrants into the market can capture enough market share, they create extremely high barriers to entry. The more market share they have, the more powerful the network effects are and the less likely a new entrant is to have success.
If you're a smartphone developer, chances are you develop for iOS and Android. It would take tens of millions of users adopting a new platform for you to start developing for this new platform. But you're not likely to get tens of millions of users without a large app library.
Particular areas of software development rapidly change them plateau. I have an issue of Byte magazine from 1993. It was all about how RISC processors and next generation microkernels were about to take over the market. And yet here we are. Every new phone runs either an OS built in the 1980's (iOS), or a 1990's clone of a 1970's OS (Android). A RISC had a nice little run (ARM), but ancient x86 seems poised to wipe it out just like it did with all its previous competitors.
Modern "x86-based" CPUs are actually mostly RISC architectures under the Hood. Instruction sets are a mere front-end nowadays and don't tell much about the inner workings. Think of bytecode.
>Maybe "It's Hard To Build A Smartphone In 2013" would be a better title. But to suggest people will be using iPhones and Androids in the year 2050...Yikes.
Don't take any title literally. He is obviously not talking about 2050 or 2525 (if people are still alive, still alive).
He's talking about the market as is -- and an obvious timeline of around 10 years comes naturally from what we know of the tech industry and the pace of change.
Maybe "It's Hard To Build A Smartphone In 2013" would be a better title. But to suggest people will be using iPhones and Androids in the year 2050...Yikes. I pray that future doesn't come to pass.