Oinc, Oinc? (and where's my MMS?)
Been mulling this one over the whole weekend, thanks to an FB Friend’s Feedback on earlier postings about the issues raised by so-called “Bandwidth Hogs”
Upon my venturing to read into the future of these issues, specifically into the market’s future being segmented much like PC’s and Apples are today now, I asked:
“… if you had a chance to look at the latest blog entry… did you read me dissing Sprint for what amounted to a weekend incommunicado on my Blackberry? and this is about fifty miles from their corporate HQ?”
And about Palm, Nokia, Motorola and all the others: I feel that this is a time of consolidation, and that the main beneficiary, since you’re also reading ’em trades, will be RIM; I mean, a recent issue of Fortune mentioned that since the iPhone’s launch, sales have tripled worldwide to about 3.4 billion USD, and they hold here in the U.S. a steady 50% market share…
… and just by the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen in my immediate family down in Venezuela, both millenials, boomers and x’ers appear to be craving for RIM’s products, as after all – and I’m not 100% sure about what I’m going to say – the iPhone has a very limited footprint, network-wise, given this exclusive deal with at&t.
Bottom line?
I can easily see the same pattern we had with apples and pc’s a couple of decades ago, with RIM in this case playing the role of Microsoft, fighting tooth and nail to keep their corporate clients on price and base functionality, whilst apple caters to those well-heeled enough to pay extra for the ease of use and “no need to compromise” as the most recent ad implies…
End of the day, competition may breed innovation, but consumers may simply decide to vote with their wallets (i.e. Verizon’s current BOGO on BB’s) and polarize the market with a couple of dominant brands that offer an installed base of mature and/or properly developed applications, which at the end of the day, are what have made IBM, Microsoft and many other stalwarts what they are today…
IMHO, of course!
To these comments, my friend stated in various responses…:
“Apple products have never been about feature lists. In fact, they’re often well behind on features. They just do what they do better. But, yeah, AT&T has been a royal pain in the butt. They had no idea what theywere signing up for with the iPhone. Way beyond their capacity… [There are] lots of elements at play: networks, devices, OS’s, apps. Still such a developing market, it’s too early to read any tea leaves… And how does app development and availability contribute? BTW and for the record, I think competition is good.” (JL, 2009)
... So what's MMS for, again?
Development and Availability are key, definitely, and when one ponders the true monetary factors (i.e. ROI, TCO) of the SDLC aspects (Sofware Development Life Cycle) that are involved in supporting TRUE applications, not just betas of widgets and gadgets a single guy is developing, but the threaded and secure kind of applications that are the lifeblood of a larger outfit, is where we may see the real battle lines drawn…
… and sadly, as though it may not be the best nor the sleekest, we have somehow managed to endure decades of dominance of the Windows setup, which if you recall, had a lot to do with the binary setup Apple chose NOT being able to communicate with the ASCII that mainframes are still using; in other words, sometimes a legacy application, given its higher monetary value, will trump all other considerations, as the cost of migrating an existing app … to an entirely new platform, when sometimes all you’re truly doing with the app is basic data entry (I/O) and querying; there, as the current market share numbers attest, the established and mature apps that still run on not only mainframes, but mid-range setups such as an AS400, an NT4 server running SQL Server 7, etc, whose data is valid and whose cost has been paid for for a while, may hold back the lines as moving everything over to a better yet more expensive platform.
Still Smokin'!
All about the money, dude, and as you know, BB/RIM is already cranking up its development efforts in a way where developers benefit more than them; which echoes what Microsoft has done to keep such a dominant presence in the market.
The best part? That all these back and forths, as you mentioned elsewhere, push innovation into new areas, DO give us better choices, as perhaps an SMB about to start operations may eventually find that using Open Source and an Apple Back End infrastructure DOES payoff in the long run – given, of course, that they can find the developers, first, and second, that they can pay them their fees.
So what do you think, reader?
- Would the lines still be drawn as they are today, as cheaper yet more “compromising” platforms allow for legacy applications to survive for a few more years?
- And is the availability of programmers still the core issue when it comes to embracing any platform?
Tags: Barriers to Entry, Cloud Computing, Computing Power, CPU Load, Developers, Legacy Applications, LifeCycle Replacement, Mainframes, Performance, ROI, SDLC, Software Development Life Cycle, Software-as-a-Service, TCO, Windows
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