A year ago next month, Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim was holding court after a panel discussion at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit. Bedecked in his archetypal faded jeans and sandals and bubbling over, as always, with enthusiasm for technology, he was showing a small group around him how to navigate the Net on his new Apple iPhone.
"Finally," Bechtolsheim proclaimed, "someone has delivered a cell phone with a compelling experience of the Web."
As is often the case, Bechtolsheim was right. I have owned three cell phones that offered Internet access, but after sorting through the 14 clicks to get to "mobile optimized" CNN feeds on their tiny screens, I gave up on mobile surfing.
Just as it did earlier in personal computing, Apple Inc. took ideas pioneered elsewhere and brought them alive in the iPhone in a way no one had to date, using unassuming off-the-shelf hardware and a stunningly simple and fun user interface. And once again, Apple created a marketing firestorm that captured the imagination of the public as well as astute technology watchers like Bechtolsheim.
In the past 18 months, the Apple effect has rocked the industry. Last November, Google announced it would launch its own cell phone software, dubbed Android--a similarly compelling mobile Web environment from another industry darling. The kicker: It will be available as free open-source code.
Late last month, Nokia weighed in. The world's largest cell phone maker (it shipped an estimated 437 million phones in 2007) is buying Symbian in an effort to create a unified operating system that includes Nokia's own S60 user interface and elements of software platforms developed by the likes of Japan's Docomo, Sony Ericsson and Motorola. It too will be made available as free open-source code.
"It's crazy," said Scott Rockfeld, a mobile-group product manager at Microsoft Corp., speaking of the twists and turns of the past year and a half. "We've reached an inflection point and everyone is jumping in," he said, quickly noting that Microsoft is something of an incumbent here, having sold some 35 million licenses to Windows Mobile since its release about seven years ago.
Indeed, the proverbial knee to the curve appears to be dead ahead. International Data Corp. estimates 10 percent of the nearly 1.2 billion handsets that will ship this year will be Web-ready smart phones, a slice IDC predicts will grow to 30 percent by 2011.
"All cell phones will be smart phones eventually," Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot and Treo, told me the last two times I interviewed him. "If you've been in this industry a while, you can see this will happen," he said, referring to the trickle-down techonomics of Moore's Law.
Now that Apple has crystallized the concept of the Web-ready phone, the question is how this mobile platform will evolve in today's hypercompetitive environment.
