Wave of Change

I came across a press release this morning from Nokia announcing their acquisition of the remaining 52 per cent of Symbian that it does not already own estimated to be about $410 million. Without question, recent changes in the cell phone market initiated by Apple and further pushed by Research in Motion and Google, have changed the landscape of the cell industry. In essence, features and functionality are taking second place to ease-of-use and integration.

There are many comparisons that can be made with other industries. Take the automobile industry for example. For years, American car manufacturers have added every bell and whistle to their vehicles including things like HUD displays that on the surface look cool, but only serve to complicate the user experience and add one more quality control item that could fail. Japanese car manufacturers, in contrast, had much fewer features but ensured the quality and the user experience were second-to-none. As a result, Toyota, Honda and Nissan consistently top user satisfaction and customers’ intent to repurchase surveys.

Looking at the operating system software industry, Microsoft has dominated the industry with their Windows platform but their logic of adding every feature imaginable including countless options for configuring each feature has started to catch up with them. Not only is the depth of configurations daunting for most users, but the glut of code to support this is not only impacting performance but making the software increasingly prone to errors and problems. Windows Vista, for example, has had so many problems that Microsoft has included a free downgrade option so users can either install Vista or the more reliable Windows XP. This has opened the door for increased market share from the Linux camp as well as Apple’s Mac OS X.

Moving back to the cell phone industry, most people use less than 15 per cent of the technology on their cell phones. The common features beyond phone functionality are text messaging and taking photos. The other 85 per cent of the features rarely or never get used. Enter the new age of mobile technology where the manufacturers work to ensure a seamless, easy-to-use customer experience and suddenly cell phones offload functions currently performed on PCs and open new markets to everyday users such as GPS, web browsing and searching, gaming, and multimedia such as TV-on-demand.

Competition is good and it is time the cell phone industry evolves to the next level.