That being said, there's nothing like people getting it. And for that, I'm kind of happy that we can have these rants and push things forward.

That being said, there's nothing like people getting it. And for that, I'm kind of happy that we can have these rants and push things forward.

Now try doing the same thing in Chelmsford, UK (an example of a provincial town with a few nearby cinemas).

Yes, it would have taken longer over EDGE, or on a crappy browser, but this isn't bad.

Ewan, we're going to chat soon

Try this for size – sorry for the length, but I think you’ll see where I’m coming from.

Every weekday, nearly 18 million vehicles are on our roads. Around half of these are ferrying people to work in office buildings. Many of these people will then spend the next 8 hours looking at computer screens and typing on keyboards, or talking on the phone, or attending meetings. But little else.

Now, imagine those people found a different way to work. Imagine that half of them didn’t need to go to the office (or visit clients) ever again. Imagine another half only needed to go to the office (or again, visit clients) 2-3 times per week (we’ll average it out at 2.5 days for the sake of simplicity). That would mean, all other things being equal, nearly 7 million less vehicles on the road each day, or close to a 40% reduction. That proportion will only increase as the UK moves ever further away from “hands-on” manufacturing and towards an economy in which service is the overwhemingly dominant sector.

And that’s just “the workers”.

Now take into account the numerous “2nd car families”. While many of those 2nd cars are engaged in that daily commute, there’s also a big proportion which aren’t. Those cars exist for different reasons – to allow the stay-at-home partner/parent to get around while the “1st car” is off on commute duties. What for? The infamous school run, for one – while in my day I walked (to primary school) or took the bus (to secondary school), in today’s environment of street crime and sick individuals who prey on kids, many parents don’t want to take that risk every day and would rather take the direct responsibility for shifting their offspring door-to-door. Then after the school run, it’s time to go to Tesco or wherever – with grocery shopping more and more taking place in megacomplexes on the outskirts of town rather than on our local high street, walking to the shops simply isn’t an option anymore.

But imagine that all went away too. Shall we say another 10-12% less vehicles, so we’re now looking at a 50% reduction in total.

So… I’m just a touchy-feely environmentalist, and I’m dreaming. Aren’t I?

Actually, anything but. I personally feel the environmental lobby is a bit of a crock based on pseudo-science that’s been manipulated to provide an awful lot of people with jobs. But, I suppose I could be wrong, so bear with me. What I’ve just described, regardless of reason or motivation, is HALVING the traffic on our roads, which would in turn, again all other things being equal, equate to a 50% of traffic-generated carbon emissions. The benefit might be fuzzy, but it can’t hurt, can it? Moreover, what’s not so wooly is that what would equally follow would be a 50% reduction in the congestion suffered by our massively overburdened road network – that part, I would argue, is pretty much solid.

So what’s this all about and WTF does it have to do with communications technology? Because all of this is achievable, through technology.

Let’s take our “worker bees” first. OK, I’ve described what they do, now tell me what, in those functions, they couldn’t do… from home. We have access to fast connections. We have PCs. We have email. We have IM, and we have SMS. We have phones. We have remote access to systems and files in both office environments (even if just through good old Terminal Services) and “sitting out there on the cloud”. We can even videoconference – there’s even a program already installed on every PC in this country called Netmeeting. Nobody uses it anymore. It might be basic, but for a simple videomeeting? It’s all you need! Damn, our kids do it all the time on MSN Messenger! What about Skype and other VoIP systems? So why the hell do we need to go to offices to do all of this? I’ll explain why, but not just yet.

Now, our two car families. Before I get to the “School & Tesco crowd”, let’s stay with the workers for the moment. An interesting statistic, published in one of the rags just this last weekend. The article showed a map of Britain, with where the biggest growth and lowest growth in 2 car families was occurring. Guess what? The highest growth was in the North of Scotland. The lowest (and in fact, it showed a decline) was in London. Stands to reason, doesn’t it? While London/Ken Livingston has made great efforts to drive people onto public transport (by both carrot and stick), the further you get from the capital, public transport becomes more and more of a joke. Certainly in the North of Scotland, public transport is so sporadic that it isn’t even an option to get to where you need to be with any kind of expediency. No wonder they need two cars.

Yet what’s driving this requirement in the North of Scotland? It’s the economy. It’s the fastest growing local economy in Britain. Land is cheap, so are rank & file workers (relatively speaking), so it’s an attractive area for companies old and new to relocate to, especially if your needs are not tied to geography, and as Britain moves more and more towards the service-based economy, that will only continue to be the case. All of which makes it even more ironic that those same companies based in Inverness or wherever, who’ve rejected geography as a limitation, still insist on pulling their staff into the office, day in, day out.

But what of those “non-commute” second car families I mentioned? How do we reduce their travel requirements? Again, why not let technology take the strain? Groceries? Ahem… Tesco Direct, anyone? Or any of the equivalent services offered by their competitors? Great service, no idea why more people don’t use it. The School Run? OK, let’s get radical – how about we only send our kids (physically) to school 2-3 days per week, and the other days… they stay home and “attend” over the internet? Videoconference lessons, etc. The only actual reason we should even send them to school at all is for the sake of their own social and personal development, to interact with others. Would it cause problems with kids being at home and childcare required? A minor logisitical difficulty – give ‘em all laptops, then parents can develop rotas of watching over a few kids at a time (and if more parents are at home anyway, you’ll find plenty of candidates). The teacher, meanwhile, can check attendance via webcam, and can log onto any kid’s box at any point in the school day to see what’s going on (the same system could be used by paranoid bosses who think their staff are skiving off). Privacy? Not a concern – each user has to consent to let the teacher/boss see what’s on their PC, and at the end of the day, they disconnect them, whether they like it or not.

The benefits? God, where do I start?

(1) Our companies and corporations no longer need to invest in buildings capable of housing hundreds of people if many of their employees never need to come in, so they can save money with smaller premises where hotdesking schemes can be put into operation.

(2) Our schools will no longer be so overcrowded – which might, in turn, allow the pupils who need more help to have more time spent on them. They could physically attend the school to have teachers work directly with them. I don’t even need to mention the fact that every bit of evidence ever published also shows that today’s kids are far more receptive to PC-based learning than anything they get in a classroom. Oh, and did I mention that MAYBE, if they spend all day at the PC, they might actually get off their fat little butts and do something more energetic in the evenings instead of being glued to the screen as they are now?

(3) Supermarkets will no longer have to hold massive landbanks, which will free up more land in our overcrowded nation. We actually might spend a bit less with them though, because we’ll no longer face that situation we’ve all encountered where we buy something only to find we had enough of it in the fridge all ready, and we end up having to toss it out. Considering we throw, what is it… a third of what we buy in the bin nowadays? Not a bad idea.

(4) That saving, of course, will pale next to how much we’ll save on fuel and on wear & tear on our vehicles – take away the daily commute, the school run and the Tesco Express, and what’s left (I’d say 90% of my mileage is spent on these three things, maybe more)? Except maybe for many of us to actually enjoy driving again? In fact, even if our employers asked for a small reduction in salaries (say 5%) because we didn’t need to commute anymore (another benefit for them), I think a lot of us would take it (especially as it would only equate to even less after tax) if the benefit to us was not having to spend 10% of our disposable incomes on fuel every month. Everyone wins! Damn, have I just done the Bank of England’s job for it and reversed wage-driven inflation as well?

(5) How about the TIME we would save not having to sit in traffic each morning and each night? Time we could spend with our families, and our friends. Time we could spend with our neighbors – I recently spent some time with an old school friend who I hadn’t seen in years. He’s doing well: nice house, nice area. I asked him what his neighbors were like. Guess what? He barely knows them. He hardly sees them because he’s out of the house at 6.30 and not home until 7.30 at night. Did I mention he’s only lived there about five years? Suffice to say, you can’t have community spirit if you don’t actually have a community.

(6) Similiar thing (and a topical one) – that we also get to spend a lot more time enjoying that house we just mortgaged our asses off to buy instead of using it as little more than a place to sleep, eat and spend the weekend. How about the London property market in particular, where nothing’s affordable anymore? Well, no more need for the well-off to keep that “city crash pad” they use four nights a week because “home” is four hours away out in the counties, so all that living space suddenly is freed up!

… and I could go on.

Yet it’s not happening. Why?

It’s not that we lack the software to make this all happen. We have 99% of it – right now. The 1% we don’t have isn’t anything to be scared of either, it’s the kind of stuff that could be built in months, maybe even weeks, if the developers actually knew there was a market for it and someone asked them to build it. It’s not lack of desire either – nearly everyone I know would be delighted to be able to lead the kind of life I’ve described above. So what’s stopping us?

Implementation.

Just as you are disappointed with how far the mobile comms market has come, I’m even more disappointed with how little we’ve actually done with the communications industry as a whole. Our networks are rancid – quite frankly, if everyone adopted this lifestyle tomorrow, it wouldn’t last 5 minutes. The sheer bandwidth it would require is massive, hundreds, perhaps thousands of times what today’s backbones are able to handle (for a microcosm of this, wait until next week when you’ll see a whole bunch of disappointed 3G iPhone wielders wondering why their shiny new Stevephones don’t seem all that quick after all – because a hundred thousand mobile devices suddenly hitting our pathetic 3G network is way more than it’s able to handle). That assumes of course that we could all actually get connected in the first place – and we wouldn’t, because with everyone logging on “as an individual” rather than via a company proxy server (if they even use a proxy, many office based users don’t use anything more than their LAN because they never need to “leave the building” to get what they need), we’ve suddenly brought the IPv4 address availability issue home to roost in a nightmare scenario of permanent latency. In short, the internet as we know it will crumble through overwhelming capacity demand. Tesco might not need that landbank for stores anymore – but I wouldn’t sell ‘em off, they’ll need them for server farms.

And that’s where we are – the internet, in the widest sense of the word, is just not built for this. That, to me, and considering the benefits I’ve shown above, is nothing short of criminal. Massive investment is required, and yes, someone (us) will have to pay for it, but the benefits are too large to even contemplate ignoring. But the future (and this is where I rejoin the mobile world) is definitely… in mobile. To lay the amount of hardwire cable to accomodate this sea-change in communications will take three or four decades if we try to dedicate “a cable for everyone”. The efficient solution HAS to be wireless, if even for cost reasons alone. Yes, it’ll cost billions, but better billions than trillions. Yes, we’ll need hundreds more masts, and the environmentalists and NIMBYs will no doubt complain, but considering what we’ve already done for the environment (see back at the top), I think they’re asking for an inch after we’ve already ran a mile.

Like I said, I liked your article, but I think there’s bigger things out there than being able to read restaurant reviews and book one from our handhelds in less than 10 seconds, or finding out one of our friends has just bought a book on Amazon and thinks we might like it too. Perspective here – these are luxuries, frivolities… things that make you go “yeah, that’d be nice”, but let’s face it, we’re pretty darned spoiled if we’re saying that’s what’s going to ramp up our life-satisfaction index a few more points. I’d far rather change the entire fabric of our society for the better. It can be done, but we’re moving at a snail’s pace.

Utopian Rant – Done.

The new thing about it is that it’s graphically pleasing. Well – if you rule out Nokias music- store or N-gage – because either of those are similar types of apps.

So when Apple manages to sell phones and start the Apple Store – I hope you realy understand that nothing new happens. It’s still a one- device platform (soon to become “two device platform”), and is even more restricted for developers in terms of connection services than any of the existing platforms have ever been. Compared to java, it’s a remarkable joke. Even if their specific device- dependent platform happens to use commonly available technology for implementing their program, of course.

In other words, there’s no magical barrier that has to be broken here by making the Apple Store popular. The magical barrier exists, like carefully laid out in the main post, in the mobile industry’s fetish for platform exclusivity and closed device dependent solutions. And frankly, that has nothing to do with whether or not the leadership in the phone- industry are hung up on old technology. I know many old programmers (also in the mobile phone business) who can draw up process- diagrams that perfectly explain an abstraction of a multi- layered network, more than well enough to successfully implement widget deployment systems of various kinds.

So when we’re talking about psychology here, I think we should be specific enough to say that the problem many people see is that the platform- dependent and operator controlled solutions won’t take off. That people will not buy bad mp3 recordings on the phone, or want to browse news on a tiny screen on portals the operators allow you.

Just remember that for example Opera mini – an aberration in terms of the mobile industry, in that it can be deployed on just about all devices at the moment, in all kinds of resolutions and layouts, and read actual web- content as it’s intended to be watched – is still a very popular browser.

Now – why do you think that is? Is it because the psychology of the buyers don’t think the web is cool enough on a mobile? That people won’t log on to twitter with their mobile browser? It’s just not the case. But the problem is data- costs – and why spend exorbitant amounts of money on something you can do on your computer, if it can wait? In the same way – why in the world spend your battery and money on a developers specifically and platform dependent solution if you can do the same on your computer?

Again – it’s not that the Apple Store will break any boundaries in anything except brazen exploitation of underinformed customers. While the ones who want to seek actual platform- independent solutions are seen as the enemy, who wants to hollow out the mobile industry’s core: the exclusivity that forces customers to pay them. While in reality the only way to actually make these new services available on the phones, as well as economically viable, is to adapt to the actual standards.

But as long as the sickness of platform exclusivity remains in the mobile business – then it’s a waste of money. Analoguous to what’s going on now is the Internet Explorer html implementations, against the actual standard – how many didn’t predict that if Microsoft wasn’t allowed to do this, then they would lose market- share. And that it was only fair and proper to allow Microsoft to fuse their very bad implementations into their system, so that in order to actually display pages properly, you’d have to use IE? While in reality – that’s not necessary, and it makes no difference whether you’re using one browser or the other if the html is actually coded well. Neither does it ruin IE’s popularity to adapt to the standard, rather than having people adapt to it. In fact – making sure we’re doing away with things like this has done quite a lot for web- development in general. Because it opens up for actual competition, and allows people to look at the possibilities of the platform, rather than just the limitations.

So sure – there’s psychology involved. But it has to do with users not trusting the solutions they’re offered, and not seeing the use of them. The Apple Store is no exception, something you can see from the actual sales (while ignoring the hype and constant flow of inane advertisements) for a while.

For example – ask if people have tried SE’s playnow index, or nokias music store – and you’ll hear that sure, people have tried it, but they don’t know what they’re really buying (good quality, bad quality, right version, bad version, is the price comparable, etc.), and they think the shelves are very thin with applications. And for example – owing to SE’s brilliance in marketing talent – you can still only download the java- version of google maps from the playnow pages, even if you have a smartphone. And to find the applications for those phones, you have to look around quite a lot. And even then – we just have so few pages where people review the phones and the opportunities with the phones that there’s no wonder people don’t use them.

In the same way phone- reviews always – and why this is I cannot understand – orient themselves around the manufacturer’s sales- pitch. Never do I read something like this when people review computers, or computer program suites. They’d be laughed off their site if they did – just listen: “Dell constructed a good computer on this model, and office applications are particularly good. You can also buy music with it over the internet, as well as use IM with particular in- built clients, which come integrated into the browser and PIM application. If you wish to install 3rd party software, you can even do that”.

But again and again – even when people do know better – that is how the reviews are written. Some even go to great lenghts (like mobile-review.com) to avoid mentioning 3rd party support for applications, as this is not “part of the sales package”. And therefore should not be included in the evaluation of the product.

So yeah – there’s psychology involved. But it has nothing to do with certain people’s infatuation with yet another platform- dependent solution to pull money off ignorant users. And besides – there’s got to be a limit to how many weather- applications you can sell – even to iPhone users.

I tried lots of apps with an S60 phone and unlimited data plan and basically found none of them compelling enough or integrated enough to make me want to keep using them.

I see two problems:
1) Operator control
2) Integration of the software on a phone

The operators have spent so much money that I just can't see them letting go very much.

1) I think it was mentionned that for MobileMe Apple are installing kits at the Telcos. How else does a developer send a notification to wake up a phone so that it doesn't need a permanent battery sapping 3G link?

How are developers going to get reasonably cheap access to location info? (this might get solved when every phone has a GPS)

Will operators become more open with IMS systems? I doubt it.

Without these types of services the applications you can offer are more limited.

2) I hope that Android manages to show what can be achieved when add on apps are first class citizens. I don't think that dumb data pipes to the internet are enough for a properly open system. Something like Opera mini shows what a great job a reformatting proxy can do but it doesn't integrate with the rest of the system. The google mail app is quick and usable but it doesn't do proper push mail.

There may be some shining examples of great apps but it just doesn't make a compelling system at present.

Let me put it this way – java on mobiles: a common platform with a well- known specification and minimal requirements. OpenGL ES. 1.1: a common platform for all mobiles, with or without 3d acelleration, with a well known and open specification from one end to the other. Both platforms are well used, there are numerous development tools for either, and it doesn't require licensing to use them. AJAX – mobile web 2.0: ability to deploy xml- specified applications with server- side and client side deployment, finally making the operators unecessary for the actual operation of the applications. The handset makers (or independent developers) might only have to create small interpreters in various visual shapes to display the “apps”.

Result: nothing. Result: mobile operators claim exclusivity on deployment. Result: mobile operators spend insane amounts of money on making their own device- specific standard that no one else can use. Result: Apple launches “Apple shop” and claims they invented widgets. Nokia will follow soon with their own widgets – that are both INCOMPATIBLE WITH ANY OTHER ***ING PLATFORM! Result: SHITE!