Ne Tentes aut Perfice -If somethings worth doing, its worth doing well

Jonesthephone

In the beginning it was proprietary—everyman for himself , quickly followed by WinPad, GEOS, Apple, Palm,  Symbian, Win CE,  Linux , Brew, Android or was it .

Having been involved with each of these platforms in their early stages it was always a steep learning curve

 

Much as I love the evangelical marketing approach of Apple and the fact that  I-phone is an iconic aspirational product  have the Jobs boys sewn the seeds of their own downfall in their go to market strategy.

By only selling to one Network Operator per country they have created a demand for a competitor  product in the other 3 . By Selecting O2 in UK they have forced Vodafone to be pro-active in commissioning competing products from Samsung , HTC et al.driving up the value and feeding frenzy for the perceived value of Android in the process.

 

 

 

I hear rumours that Nokia is going to see a reduction in its market share and it will not progress beyond 42%. In the wake of the demise of Motorola’s challenge for the number 2 position and with Ericsson floundering who are going to fill the gap obviously Samsung who are also #2 in the world silicon business are the candidates— Are they also considering the case as to whether  to abandon Android  and follow Nokia into developing their own platform—figuring that the not so benevolent dictators at Google are just as much a threat as were Microsoft if they could combine  their back office social networking clout with a client in every handset.

Barry Jones  GSM Congress Feb 2002

Jones on Phones

“The mobile phone industry faces the significant challenge of delivering compelling content to end-users. This single fact underpins the success of 2.5 G and the financing of 3G without which the business case for 3G networks does not exist.

 

The mobile telecoms industry needs to generate £80 billion per country from mobile Value added Services to pay for the roll out of 3G mobile Networks In addition it would need to encourage its customers to find another 500 Euros per head to cover the additional cost of handsets.

Assuming current penetration levels each user will have to bear a cost in excess of £2,500, considering the current ARPU of £282 per year this represents a payback period in the region of 9.5 years of approximately.

The economics are simple, this cost has to be created out of none voice traffic because the only justification for 3G is the additional bandwidth and support for value added services. If we consider that only 15% of mobile revenue is non voice service related then the payback period is 59 years.

The current rate of mobile data revenue is clearly unsustainable in terms of ROI.

 

As a disruptor why not simply adopt an EDGE network platform and have 10 years of relatively debt free and profitable business at the same time as your Network Operator competitors are struggling to pay off the debt and buy back in at the next technology step.“

Is it possible the lunatics have taken over the asylum?

The clarion call of  accountants conducting R101 turnaraounds of mobile device companies is move development to low cost centres.

Each month we hear more announcements of closure of development centres in Europe and ramping up of resources in China, India or the next low cost location. In fact guess the next low cost development centre to emerge is a good sweepstake game for the engineering office is it Vietnam or

 

I am no defender of protectionism of inefficient or unprofitable business but the truth is that time to market is far more important than cost per head of engineer and low cost centre do not have the experience and nous to shave development time off a complex software based product first time out.

 

There is a very steep learning curve to get 20 years of evolutionary experience, there is no doubt that in 5-10  years time these markets will have developed those skills but by then they will no longer be low cost and the