moses choi

The mobile industry, the industry that I somewhat accidentally stumbled into, moves at a breakneck pace and is very difficult to predict the future of what the landscape will look like in the next 3 years. I’ve been thinking about this recently because of all the action (Google-Motorola, patent lawsuits, HP and the struggles that my former employer is going going through) and a question one of my good friends asked me the other day. He asked me what I think smartphones will be like in the about 3 years. I can imagine what a smarthphone might be like in 3 years based on technology in the roadmap, but what I cannot imagine is who the major players, what the major trends and the user experience will be like. It is so cool to be part of one of the most important technological shifts happening today.

When I see the news about HP, Nokia, and RIM, I feel like the end of an era may be at hand. But I admire the courage that HP’s leadership has in looking to drastically change its core business. Margins on PCs are very slim and so in order to generate a good chunk of revenue, the company has to generate a tremendous volume. I remember whenever I’ve had to buy a PC, I’ve always looked for the best price with the best specs. A couple times, I’ve even built my own computer back about 10 years ago because it was cheaper back then to do so. Today, with the slim margins, the competitive nature of the industry and the commoditization of PCs, it makes sense for companies to HP to really think about whether it’s in its long-term benefit to continue to pump out a commoditized product. The difference between a company like HP and Apple is that Apple is vertically integrated and can control the entire end-to-end experience from a hardware and software perspective. Companies that use a licensed OS cannot do this.

Regarding Nokia, I think we will see the Nokia-MS partnership bear fruit in the next year or 2. And to be honest, I hope to see some innovation from them. Competition is the best driver of innovation and personally, I would hate to see a company like Nokia continue to struggle.  They’ve decided to focus on Windows for their smartphones going forward and have also recently announced their intention to penetrate the North American market by being very aggressive with pricing.  To be honest, I think there’s a good chance they may be able to do pretty well, if the recent Meego N9 is any indication of where things are going.

And finally RIM. I’ve been a BlackBerry user for the good part of almost 10 years before moving over to Android for work purposes. They have a lot of work to do to begin excite people again en masse. What the BlackBerry does well, it does exceptionally well, but these features (aside from perhaps BBM) are not sexy features that people get excited about and cause them to spend a lot of money. Imagine you are looking to buy a car and at the dealership the salesman pitches the following attributes of the car you’re considering: fuel efficiency, number of airbags, number of cupholders, and the comfort of the seats and ergnomics. These are all important features for many people and may in fact be the key differentiators that people look at when trying to decide 2 identical cars. But, they are not ‘WOW’ features. Wow features when purchasing a car are things like: horsepower, torque, external styling, the way the ‘electric blue’ color looks, alloy rims on 19″ wheels, and overall sex appeal. Some of RIM’s competitors just have more ‘sex appeal’ and this is what drives mass consumption and genuine excitement. It sounds like RIM is looking to change things up with QNX and I do hope it goes well for RIM. Again, it is better to have more competitors to drive innovation and also for people to have choice.

Overall, it appears that the industry is heading towards a state where it will be a clash of platforms that are anchored by hardware manufacturers.  In other words, I think in the long-term (relatively speaking), we will see Google-Motorola anchor the Android platform with several OEMs also producing Android phones, Microsoft-Nokia anchoring the Windows platform with OEMs also producing Windows Phones, and of course Apple with iOS and RIM with QNX.  It looks like a formidable battle.  My the odds be ever in your favor!