Technology takes time
There are many different technology adoption models out there. Geoffrey Moore's curve--the one that uses terms such as "Early Adopters" and "Late Majority"--is a common one. And different technologies end up getting adopted at strikingly different rates. This fascinating chart from The New York Times shows how the telephone made its way into U.S. homes only over a span of many decades while the VCR went from rare to commonplace over about a single 10-year stretch.
In general, new technologies are permeating the market faster than ever before. Still, the length of time it takes for even an ultimately successful innovation to become commercially important is routinely underestimated by lots of industry watchers. I've been guilty of this myself.
One issue is that many of us in the IT ecosystem are early adopters by nature. We're enthusiastic about the new coolness for its own sake, not just for what it's capable of. By contrast, the ultimate buyers are often more conservative and mostly want technologies that have already proven themselves. It's a potential that we as analysts try to guard against, in part by speaking with different types of end users.
Another issue is that new technologies are often more interesting in combination with other pieces than they are in isolation. To use the old cliche, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. However, the corollary is that it takes more work and more time to bring that combination into being than it does just one component. Frederick Brooks discussed this reality in the context of bringing the IBM System 360 to market in his widely read "The Mythical Man-Month".
I bring up this topic because of something that caught my eye in a Web 2.0 Summit presentation by Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley. She devoted a large chunk of her presentation to mobile trends, beginning with a slide that stated "Mobile = Incremental Driver of Internet User / Usage Growth." She went on to say that "Mobile Internet usage is and will be bigger than most think."
This computing growth includes Apple. She stated that "Near term, Apple is driving the platform change to mobile computing. Its mobile ecosystem (iPhone + iTouch + iTunes + accessories + services market share / impact should surprise on the upside for at least the next 1-2 years." However it also includes a rich set of other devices including automobile electronics and home entertainment devices. In some respects, this is the "Internet of things" as Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos has called it. (Although as Richard MacManus over at ReadWriteWeb suggests, the full Internet of things, including RFID sensors and the like, is something more expansive.)
The "secret sauce" in this growth? Location-based services. Meeker quoted Mathew Honan, of Wired magazine, who wrote: "Simply put, location changes everything. This one input - our coordinates - has the potential to change all the outputs. Where we shop, who we talk to, what we read, what we search for, where we go - they all change once we merge location and the Web."
What caught my eye about all this was that I remember all the enthusiasm over the imminent arrival of the mobile Web back during the first Internet build-out about a decade ago. Here's a typical press release from a company named Optus in November 2000: "Mobile phone users can locate a close-by restaurant, chemist, bank or cinema now that Cable & Wireless Optus has launched Australia's first range of sophisticated location-based services on its Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) service, Optus Networker."
There were many such claims at the time and many proclamations that "place" was the Next Big Thing.
Ultimately it appears the proclaimers were right. But it took a while. It arguably took the second or third iteration of iPhone for applications that make use of the user's location in smartphones to take off in a big way. And thereby make the promises of press releases of the year 2000 a mainstream reality.
Some of it is just technological maturity of the device and the network. A mobile browser that can access the "real" Web with reasonable fidelity and performance rather than being restricted to a dumbed-down mobile Web turned out to be one major piece.
Key too was a development environment that made it possible for many casual developers to create applications and not just a few working closely with a handset maker.
The vast amounts of data created over a number of years through various types of social media is pretty important as well. We don't mostly find nearby restaurants through formally curated data; we find it through Yelp.
In short, the rich mobile experience isn't about one thing but many. And aligning the pieces always takes time.
Gordon Haff is a principal IT adviser at Illuminata and has more than 20 years of IT industry experience. He writes about what's happening with enterprise servers and data centers, "Yotta-scale" computing, and related software and device trends as part of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. 
Ask a typical American cellphone owner what an Osaifu-Keitai is and you'll get a blank stare. Ask a typical Japanese person the same question and they'll say that your cellphone is your wallet.
Near-field contactless payment: wave your phone over a sensor as a transit pass, loyalty card (like a store's "club card"), to purchase concert or sports tickets, pay for groceries. Their dominant mobile telephony provider NTT DoCoMo basically said "this is how the mobile payment is going to be" and that was the end of discussion.
It will take decades for the United States to get various vendors, cellphone companies, transaction processors, etc. to agree to a common system.
The technology is certainly there, it's just that aligning the pieces takes longer in some places than others.
- by rubenerd October 24, 2009 7:01 AM PDT
- As I've said on my own blog, I always find it a pleasure to read your stories Gordon because you takes the time to really research and hash out ideas for us rather than just making sweeping comments after an otherwise dry news story. It might also be one of the reasons your stories rarely attract the trolls that plague other CNET News.com stories which is a relief beyond comprehension! (though perhaps just as much spam alas).
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- by ghaff October 26, 2009 9:49 AM PDT
- Interesting point about software upgrades. Presumably upgrades and therefore the introduction of new technologies happens faster in a SaaS environment than if upgrades need to be consciously installed. As Rich said in another comment, one of the reasons that location-based services have taken off so quickly of late is that it's so easy to acquire and use them.
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(5 Comments)On the topic in question, it does seem uptake of technology is accelerating, though its still far slower than I think people who spend their entire lives studying and reporting on tech realise. You humbly admit that you've "been guilty of this", but I think its fair to say all of us in this industry have been, and certainly on a plane of hype and reality you definitely fall on the more moderate side!
What I also think is interesting is how so called cloud computing services are changing the paradigm of the software "upgrade". In this case, because software is running on their servers they can be confident everyone is running the latest version of their software. Even with pervasive (pun on your blog's name!) software updating tools, this simply isn't possible with client side software. I suppose this is what people advocating thin clients were saying last decade.
As for the comment about Optus, they're my telephone company for my iPhone in Australia and they're pretty terrible! I'm studying here but grew up in Singapore where they really have mobile phone networks figured out, as cvaldes1831 said.