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Open Kernel Labs Blog
January 12, 2010
Mobile Momentum 2010 and Beyond
Crystal ball gazing is a hazardous pursuit. When you hit the mark, you made a lucky guess. And when you are wrong . . .
But as 2009 draws to a close, I find myself too bullish and too excited about the mobile/wireless marketplace to remain silent. The coming 12-36 months will bring about important changes in our industry:
Open Everywhere – Even Apple – Or Else
In the past five years, Open Source and open platforms in mobile/wireless grew from marginal status, deployed on a handful of phones, to the increasingly dominant paradigm. Following the debut of individual Linux-based handsets at Motorola, Samsung, NEC and Matsushita, entire platforms opened up their source code, APIs and channels. Who would have imagined an open source Symbian or a shared source Windows Mobile? With the advent of Android and its embrace by leading OEMs, there remains a single bastion of proprietary software and closed practices – Apple.
I know – past pundits’ prognostications for an open Apple have come to naught. But by 2011, Apple will face
- real competition from accelerating growth of Android, its open source platform, and the open Android Market
- pressure from its own developer community to open the platform and enable competitive features like true multitasking / background execution
- incremental decline in its ability to command subsidies from operators (if not outright carrier rebellion), combined with price and margin pressures from increasingly able, lower-cost competing devices
If Apple doesn’t open the iPhone and mobile MacOS X by 2012, its current growth will not just reverse – the Apple mobile platform will be relegated to a market position even more constrained than its single-digit share as a boutique desktop.
Mobile Software Consolidation
Today, and through 2011, the mobile application market is enjoying organic, broad-based and perhaps even chaotic growth. The on-going application gold rush on the iPhone and coming one on Android are attracting hoards of small developers, and just beginning to interest more substantial ISVs. But while mobile volumes are huge, margins are not – the average ROI for iPhone application development is not just unimpressive, it is increasingly negative. Apple and Google both bet on the siren the song of highly visible popular applications to build and excite developer communities. But over time, this enthusiasm is not maintainable without sustainable revenues.
Over time, the mobile applications marketplace will seek out economies of scale. In 2010 and 2011 we will see the first wave of consolidation among mobile software houses and acquisition by established ISVs, especially for mobile enterprise software. By 2013, the mobile applications market, independent of channel, will look increasingly like the desktop and enterprise software marketplace.
Real Convergence
Convergence has been a buzzword in telecommunications for the last decade. Satellite-terrestrial. Wireless-landline. Handset-PDA. The new forms and hybrids that emerge from converging technologies and market trends quickly become mainstream, the predecessors passé.
2008 and 2009 saw the emergence of the netbook and related form factors. Rather than representing the maturation of the marginal subnotebook segment, they evolved as a response to stagnant PC and notebook markets and to challenging economic conditions. Already, this new segment is losing ground to its parent category – full notebook prices now track those of slimmer netbooks, whose low-end provisioning sorely limits the real-world use cases for these devices.
In the same time period the smartphone exploded out of its early-adopter high-priced niche. The Apple iPhone and emerging Android-based handsets showed a broader public the real potential of handheld connectivity, pulled along by a burgeoning smartphone applications marketplace.
Both netbook and smartphone form-factors made great strides in scratching the itch for ubiquitous on-line access and personal presence. Both also face limitations directly related to their size and provisioning. Netbooks are still too unwieldy to serve as personal communications platforms – they bulge beyond pockets and purses, boast limited battery life, and don’t meet expectations for voice communications. Smartphones increasingly do fit the bill, but fall down as productivity platforms for an increasingly mobile workforce – small screens and touchpads and tiny keyboards severely constrain basic office applications. Desktops and notebooks still confer a superior platform for creating documents, running spreadsheets, building presentations, composing email and even browsing. Ditto for software development, graphical design and CAD.
In 2010 we will begin to see the next wave of convergence, driven by a workforce that spends less and less time in corporate offices and more hours on the road and working at home. While the web and the Cloud and desktop virtualization technologies offer options for projecting the enterprise applications onto remote devices, the challenge remains of how to make those capabilities ubiquitous and resident in a single device.
Dockable Mobile Devices
The answer lies in a concept that OK Labs and our partners are exploring today – a dockable smart phone: on the road, it serves the traditional roles of 3G voice communicator, thin email and web client, and personal media device (that can run applications). At the office and at home, this converged device plugs into the large screen, full-sized keyboard and mouse that enable essential productivity.
Smartphones already complement 3G baseband with Bluetooth and WiFi for peripheral connectivity and networking. Qualcomm and other chipset vendors have already announced HD video capabilities in their chipset roadmaps. We are only a few small steps away from ubiquitous devices that sit on our desk and slip into our pockets without skipping a beat.
Mobile Virtualization Goes Mainstream
Key to enabling the above trends is another ubiquitous technology – virtualization. Commonplace in the data center, increasingly deployed on the desktop, virtualization is already finding compelling use cases in mobile devices. Indeed, mobile virtualization enables greater security, greater flexibility in provisioning (e.g., to support multiple OSes and stacks), migration and maintenance paths for legacy software, a tool for hardware consolidation and BoM cost reduction – even options for optimizing energy use for greener mobile computing.
Mobile virtualization and openness go hand-in-hand. Open OSes are more easily optimized for virtual machine execution, and mobile virtualization enables open handsets to run multiple OSes to meet the needs of end users and of their employers’ IT departments – on a single device. Virtualization powers convergence by trivializing the current divide between handsets and notebooks, and among the OSes and applications they host.
Ubiquitous, mainstream adoption of mobile virtualization is already occurring – my company’s OKL4 Microvisor today enjoys deployment on over 500 million devices, a number expected to double by 2011.
In 2010, 3 of the 5 leading mobile chipset suppliers will offer virtualization-ready silicon, out-of-the-box, to their handset OEM customers. By 2012, virtualization-enabled multicore mobile chipsets will dominate the handset market, ushering in an era of completely mobile, always connected computing and communications.
Posted by Steve Subar on January 12 at 03:17 AM
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About Steve Subar:
Steve Subar, CEO and President of OK Labs, has been an honored leader in the technology industry for 20 plus years and has received several accolades for his work. Steve is an avid runner who can also be found communing with his surfboard in Bondi Beach, Australia; skiing the slopes of Beaver Creek, Colorado; or searching for the perfect Pinot Noir all over the world.