Hi elmatador,
Re: One question for the North Americans: What if the mobile access is the real thing and takes over the world by storm?
Well, I've seen Peter E.'s reply and I'm sure he's right about some of this. He sort of echoes George Gilder's old comments about the PSTN being locked in a copper cage, responding with a DSL-hell kludge to the demands of the market.
I think that your question about mobile access misses the point of what a good number of people use the 'Net for here in Norte America. That is, we aren't particularly interested in using the Web to enable us to buy a can of Coke from a DNS mapped vending machine. Nor are we particular interested in paying our parking tickets this way. And we surely don't want to attempt long emails, SI posting or spreadsheet applications with mobile devices. Nope, what we want are vast, capacious, flickerfree vivid screens of information, data, images, music, and film all available in a comfortable setting. I myself run 3 17" monitors concurrently to make my research easy. We're talking square feet of screen here. To imagine that I'm going to scale down and use the puny screen of any wireless device and feel satisfaction is the equivalent of asking me to revert back to an American Budweiser once I've tasted the real thing. I'll rebel against the insipidity of the experience and demand that any technology coming along provide at least as much benefit and satisfaction as the arrangement I currently enjoy.
Let me reverse your question. What if, for instance, the i-Mode craze in Japan is just a passing fad, a stage that predominantly teen-age girls are going through, the fad for the phone having replaced the fad for the Tomogotchi of a couple of years ago. And as this age-class gains maturity, and jobs and babies, their interest in reading their horoscopes on their clever little Internet toys slips away like our's did for the hula hoop. Interesting conjecture, eh? That people can simply become bored and turned off to these little devices unless they continually provide novelty and fascinating new applications.
Or perhaps, the mobile access thing will totally take off as the devices become the non pareil method to gamble. On the stock market, football games, outcomes of elections, lotteries, whatever. Now that would make the mobile device the tool of the devil in the eyes of the born-again crowd. Would we see an effort to recreate the Volstead Act (Prohibition) and a black market of surruptitious players? Would we have a "Mobile Users Anonymous" offering 12 step recovery programs? Anyway, it's interesting to speculate what the uses of the new devices might be. Blind dates, anyone?
Babbling, now that is what these mobile devices are all about, and let's not forget it!
TTFN, Ray |
