Next Monday, I’ll be speaking at App-Solutely Enterprise, a pre-conference networking event kicking off CTIA Wireless, which is being hosted by CTIA, 151 Advisors, and The Enterprise Mobility Forum. It promises to be a great day of connection and conversation, and I’m hoping to add to the mix by contributing some thoughts (at 2:45PM on Monday) on how we currently perceive mobile devices — and how changing that perception has become critical to our understanding of mobility.
My assertion is that it’s time to stop thinking about mobile phones as, well, phones. It’s time to recognize that they are, first and foremost, computers. They possess more processing power than laptops of just a decade ago. It’s in our interest to think about them as true computational endpoints, not just cell phones that have a few extra-fancy features. If anything, the inverse is true; these are powerful, handheld computers that just happen to have telephone capability.
My appeal for this change in thinking is not so much about dealing with the devices. It’s really about recognizing that we’ve been here before. We have the wisdom and experience, as an industry. In short, we’ve seen this before.
The disruption is really not computing power. The disruption is mobility and mobile apps. But everything else, development, back end, performance analytics — we’ve tackled these challenges from day one of dealing with desktops. The fact that these things are now mobile is what we have to solve for. Consider, for example, the explosion and mobility of all these end points. They go into cars, they get clipped on belts and dropped in backpacks. That means they move through multiple networks throughout the day. Addressing the new challenges created because of mobility is where we need to concentrate our innovative fire. The device itself? Old hat.
It’s actually amusing how these mobile computers have changed our expectations about how devices should perform. We constantly complain about our connectivity, dropped calls, sputtering app downloads, etc. — and the device receives our wrath. But if you consider what suffering a few burps gives us in exchange for walking around with more computing power than was used for the Apollo program, it puts our gripes in to scale.
I could go on, but I think Louis C.K. says it better than anyone.
Hope to see you at CTIA Wireless and the App-Solutely Enterprise event next week. And I’ll be sure to post my presentation slides when I get back.
