Month: June 2006

Mobilementalism has a feature on what Nokia sees as the future of the mobile phone. Apparently the company has forbidden its employees from calling their products “phones”, instead using the term “multimedia computer”. The strategy is for the mobile phone to perform all the tasks that an MP3 player, a mobile phone and a PDA do separately today. The N-series is the coming-together of the first two. The target is now devices like the Treo. Eventually the company sees the computer as we know it today to fade into obsolescence. Consider what the article has to say about Nokia’s N80 device:

…images and video stored on the Nokia N80 or a compatible PC can be viewed wirelessly on the living room TV, while listening to music stored on the device through the living room audio system. It also lets you print wirelessly to any compatible UPnP-enabled home printer or printing kiosk. It’s only a small step from the Nokia N80 to a device that renders the PC obsolete.

Nokia is banking on the fact that we are increasingly moving our data online, having them stored on remote servers. Today we interface our smartphones with our home computers, for storing and sourcing multimedia captured on these phones. With the advent and ubiquity of high-speed networks in the future, we can interface in the exact same manner with such remote storage. The PC will no longer be needed as a local store for data.

Here’s the company’s ultimate goal, though:

If you hook up a monitor and wireless keyboard to a suitably-equipped mobile phone, you have no need for a PC:

• all your files are stored remotely;
• your web browser resides on your mobile phone, but is displayed on your monitor;
• and all the applications you currently use reside on a web server, again accessible through the web browser from your mobile phone.

Indeed, you won’t even notice you’re not using a PC, as you still use a keyboard and monitor, and all interactivity occurs through a browser, just as most of it does now.

Fascinating! And as the article summarizes at the end, Dell had better watch out!

Michael Mace of Mobile Opportunity talks about the issues with using a Wiki as a tool to facilitate debate about a topic .

A wiki is designed to facilitate the sort of debates that engineers have among themselves. When it works right, it can dramatically increase the speed with which a group reaches agreement, and can quickly integrate the ideas of many contributors.

A challenge for wikis is that many (actually, most) people don’t share the engineering culture. Many people are deeply attached to their beliefs and aren’t willing to revisit them no matter how much evidence is presented. In many subjects one person’s idea of objective truth may be very different from another’s, and in some (religion, for example), it’s arguable whether there can be any truly objective truth at all. Energy levels and willingness to participate in an extended discussion also differ dramatically from person to person. Often the most energized people are the fanatics, the people who are least likely to engage in an unbiased debate.

This is probably one reason why, for most science-related articles on Wikipedia, there is widespread agreement (resulting out of the best co-operation), and contrastingly, for topics dealing with history, there is often a great deal of controversy. A case in point is the debate over the Kashmir page on Wikipedia, where Indian and Pakistani zealots are vitiating the atmosphere by continually changing content there to represent their viewpoint, often to ridiculous extents.

At least Jonathan Schwartz is candid. But clearly, Sun is having huge problems getting even the most basic messages out. For instance, consider a recent event where Schwartz interacted with a Fortune 100 potential customer:

To test, I asked, “before today, did you know that Solaris was open source, or ran on Dell, HP and IBM hardware, not just Sun’s?” “Nope.”
And like I said, this was a Fortune 100 opportunity.

Well – if it isn’t general knowledge that Solaris now runs on x86 (and has been since Solaris9), and that anyone can download and use it, then Sun’s got a HUGE problem. I talked before of Sun needing to leverage the Solaris brand. For that, it is imperative that they at least get the message out that Solaris, our next-generation OS, can do all these wonderful things, AND yes, it’ll run on all the hardware that you have now, and anything else you’re planning to buy .

I’m not sure how Sun is going to get this message out – they’ve pretty much tried all that there is, including opensolaris.org, Sun Engineer Blogs, and all of the other “word-of-mouth” channels that Schwartz’s talking about. What I find worrying is that he’s decided that advertising through traditional channels is not the way to go. No more “$500 ad budgets”, he proclaims. Well, I don’t know what kind of ads Sun is running, but nowhere in their advertising have I ever heard them shout from the rooftops – “Solaris runs on Intel!”.

By the way, I’m reasonably sure that Solaris doesn’t have a POWER port yet, so a blanket claim that it runs on IBM hardware is incorrect. So there.