Prediction: The Teens will be the Decade of Mobile

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, January 11, 2010 @ 5:31 am

photo credit: matsuyuki

I've made my fair share of predictions, and this may seem to be a layup, but I think it's a prediction worth making anyway: mobile devices and applications will transform business and every day life in the next decade.

Why does this seem like such a layup? Well, look at the iPhone and the ecosystem of applications and companies springing up around it. Android and Blackberry are trying to jump in on the business and everybody and their brother is cooking up a connected mobile device. And yes, that's obvious. Mobile devices are going to increase in importance in 2010 and if you don't already have an iPhone app cooking to complement your other online channels, you're behind the times.

But if you're just thinking that more iPhone applications are going to be the end of it, you're in for a rude awakening. Businesses have just started consolidating after the disruptive years of the 90's and aught's, with the transformative effects of the web largely digested by the marketplace (the newspaper industry is still thrashing but will soon succumb). A new disruptive decade is dawning that may see the passing or fundamental transformation of industries as varied as telecom, credit card and broadcast television/cable. Prepare to take your business through a roller coaster ride every bit as challenging as the web revolution.

What Will Change First? Telecom.

The introduction of the wifi chips into the iPhone broke the charge-by-minute mold. More and more carriers are moving to a flat rate and hybrid connection types will be standard on all mobile devices within a few years. Bandwidth will be purchased in bulk as it is between Amazon and carriers, leaving the consumer (in this case Kindle users) out of the transaction. Connectivity will be sold by the device vendors, not the telecoms, as a part of their offering. The customer relationship will be with the device vendor (much as you relationship with the iPhone is through Apple, not AT&T).

What will change next, or as a result of this enabling transformation? Lots of things:

1. Larger screens, always on solid-state mobile devices with long battery life, and higher bandwidth means that content distribution is moving away from the airwaves and cable and coming to a handheld device near you. What iTunes did to Tower Record will happen towards the end of the next decade to cable and broadcast. Like my friend who gets most of his content through Netflix and Hulu, they'll be saying "I have a TV, but I never turn it on."
2. Somewhere in the next few years, someone will invent a reliable and secure way to make payments through mobile devices. It will get broad adoption, and after a few hiccups and scares (Remember "Is it really safe to give my credit card information via SSL?"), they'll be acquired by Paypal and we'll be paying for all of our Xmas presents, in stores, with our iPhone Ultras. The banks and credit card companies will fight this, but before too long you'll be getting lines of credit and debit mechanism through your mobile devices. Time to cut up those credit cards, because they'll be useless.
3. Secure mobile devices will enter into every corner of the workplace and cause another productivity boom among those workers who are not tied to the cubicle. Since they use mobile devices in all other aspects of their lives, these will not be expensive new devices with steep learning curves. They will be based on widely existing technology (maybe Android?) and their use as natural to the workers as breathing or browsing Facebook.
4. Flexible, foldable displays will make an entrance late in the decade to make the size of mobile devices irrelevant.

These four fundamental shifts along with the change in the telecom will drive a whole new set of businesses, both products and services. New artforms will spring up, new ways of presenting information, new ways of social and political interaction.

As a Business, Take Nothing for Granted

Those sound like plenty of transformative changes to keep most businesses, large and small, either plotting to take advantage of them or worrying about their future. If you're the sort to embrace change, then there are a few steps you can take to prepare.

1. As a business, don't assume you know what your customers want. Your customers may have selected your product, for example, because it was a safe choice, not because it had the best features. Your competitors (or new, mobile entrant into the market) may have better, more informed customers and may be getting better feedback and developing a better product that will crush you in a few years time. The risk of this happening is greatly elevated when a new technology is destabilizing existing business models.
2. Do user research. The ways in which people are consuming products and services is expanding. Making naive assumptions about your customers will leave you delivering new software that behaves just like your old software, a sure recipe for obsolescence.
3. Invest in User Experience Design (UXD). UXD can help you with context. Why is context important? Because your customers aren't going to be just sitting in a cubicle or at home. They're going to be in stores, shopping, or out on the road, deciding where to stop to eat, or on the sidewalk, trying to find a cool coffee shop. Their context is going to be different as are their goals. The most successful businesses are going to deploy software that understand the importance of context and optimizes how they can achieve their goals in the environment (context) they are in.

Yes, definitely, the bar has been raised to be successful in business. If you're already uncomfortable with your web channels, then this is another headache you're going to have to handle. But if you think of it in the same way that you think of your web presence, you'll miss the boat.

Related posts:

1. 6 Tips for Designing Mobile Interfaces
2. Apple’s Earnings Call: Enterprise iPhone Adoption Growth
3. Single Purpose Devices vs. Flexible Platforms and Functional Cases
4. Which Mobile Platforms Should You Target? (Part 2)
5. 5 things I can do with my windows mobile phone that you can’t do with your iPhone

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