Mobile mania: the telephone becomes a computer

The first computers were the size of a room, and ever since they have been becoming ever smaller and more powerful. Simon Silvester looks at how the mobile phone is taking over from the personal computer

When computers were first invented, they were the size of a room. By 1970, they had shrunk to the size of a car. By 1982, they would sit on a desk. By 1995, they were portable. Today we have reached the age where a big, powerful computer fits neatly inside a mobile phone.

This latest stage is the most important. For the past 50 years, using a computer has always meant sitting down in front of it, followed by a startup process, and then launching applications. This desk-centric process has been so fundamental to computing, it has defined the way people think of them. The first menu command in 80% of computer software today is still the desky word 'file'. And when you delete a file, you move it from a 'desktop' to 'trash'.

The deskiness of computers has stopped them getting into every corner of our lives. They aren't there when we socialise. They aren't there when we shop, travel, or go to bed. And they are just not designed for the 80% of humans who don't sit at a desk all day.

Not so with the phone. A mobile phone is a very different device. It's always on. It's always connected. And it's always with you. It's a paradigm shift. Putting computing power into such a small device is likely to change computing out of all recognition, and our lives with it. Thirty years after the invention of the personal computer, computing is about to get intimate.

WHAT WILL CHANGE?

How will the way people use computers change as they start to carry powerful ones with them all the time? Probably in much the same way as computers changed when they stopped being the size of rooms and started fitting on desks. When this happened in the 1970s and 1980s, it wasn't just about a change in size. People started doing things that were thought uncomputery at the time.

Things like writing letters and playing games. And drawing pictures, installing screensavers and wallpapers. As computers move into phones, computing will change yet again. And the new uses of the computer will feel as weird as the idea of listening to a song on one did in 1980.

Things will also change because phones are more 'conscious' than desktop computers. Thanks to GPS location, accelerometers and compass functions, a modern mobile phone increasingly knows where it is and what it's looking at. Soon they will know other things, such as the temperature, and how many of your friends' phones are close. They will feel less like a tool and more like part of your brain.

The speed of change can be seen from the iPhone app store. Three billion apps have been downloaded from it since it opened in 2008.

Nokia, BlackBerry and other handset makers have also opened stores. The speed of change can also be seen from the rate of sale of smartphones. At the height of the 1990s internet boom, a total of 200 million computers were connected to the internet; 180 million smartphones were sold in 2009 alone.

Half the people on the planet carry a mobile phone with them all the time. Nearly all use them constantly. It is likely that they will become consumers' main computing device of the future. This boom should be democratic.

The mobile phone-based internet may move faster in poorer countries than in the West. Put a copper telephone wire into an advanced industrial country, and 50 years later that wire will still be there. In a poorer country, that wire will have been dug up for scrap within a month.

This put poorer countries at a huge disadvantage during the fixed-line internet boom. But this also means that the mobile internet is now the only internet in poorer countries. So mobile innovation there may be faster.

WHO BENEFITS?

In a boom like this, the winners will be those with the paradigm-shifting insights. But where do you find such an insight? It's the most difficult question in the world. When the internet first appeared in 1993/4, no one could quite explain to outsiders what was so good about it.

Email let you send messages to anyone with an email address. But the only people with an email address in 1994 were scientists. So to nonscientists it sounded completely pointless.

The first webcam went live in November 1993. It allowed computer scientists in Cambridge, England to monitor drink levels in their department coffee pot. But why, wondered outsiders, didn't the scientists just go around the corner to check the pot? And why would anyone on another continent want to look at it?

In 1994, the funniest thing on the net was a scientific paper about exploding toaster strudels. Yes, it was funny – if you were a nerd.

It's always the same with great conceptual leaps. Before they actually happen, no one can see their value.

So how do you come up with an idea for a mobile app? It's the million dollar question at the moment. Here are some thoughts that may help you.

1. Make stuff easier

People don't like complex processes. They type domain names into Google rather than into browser address bars. Not because they need to search, but because Google doesn't make you type www. and .com to get you to the right place. Think lazy.

2. Think simple

In the age of desktop computing, software was often complex. But the user of mobile apps may well be drunk, or half asleep, or distracted. To succeed in this new era, software needs the simplicity of consumer electronics devices.

3. Cut out steps

As every e-commerce analyst knows, every stage a customer has to go through to buy loses sales. Amazon's big leap forward was one-click purchasing. Simplify your process, too.

4. Don't let 'mobile' confuse you

People use their mobile phones for voice calls at home. Don't let the 'mobile' moniker make you think 'out of home'.

5. Don't worry about gravitas

At $50 a DVD, an Xbox/PS3 game has to be pretty compelling to work. The criteria are much lower for $1 apps.

In Pocket God you manage an island of primitive people who fall into the sea and get eaten by sharks if you tilt your iPhone. It's pretty pointless. But at $1, it's a hit. Similarly, Paper Toss simulates throwing a ball of paper into an office wastepaper basket. It's not quite as immersive as Doom, but at $1, it doesn't have to be.

6. Concentrate on the universal

When Steve Jobs was thinking about launching a mobile device in 2000, his staff pushed him to launch a Personal Digital Assistant. After all, more and more people were bringing them to meetings. Jobs didn't think most people needed a PDA. But people had been listening to music since the dawn of mankind. So he launched an MP3 player instead.

7. Focus on the human condition

Most people are dissatisfied with search engines – not because they don't know how to search, but simply because they don't know what they want. If you can work it out for them, you will become rich.

8. Look for weaknesses

It came as a real surprise to the photographic industry that no one wanted to print pictures from their digital camera, and preferred to keep them on Flickr or Facebook instead.

It shouldn't have. Most 30-somethings have crates of photos in their attic that they never look at, and can't easily share. The problems mobile apps can solve are right in front of your nose.

9. Feel the power

Trucks get jammed on narrow roads because their drivers follow satnav instructions blindly, regardless of road conditions. Expect people to follow life instructions on mobile phones just as blindly. Be careful what you ask people to do – because they may well do it.

10. Don't overburden your user

Wii Sports Resort doesn't unlock 100 pin bowling until you are good at 10 pin bowling. Grand Theft Auto 4 doesn't unlock Manhattan until you're familiar with Brooklyn. Apple didn't let anyone customise buttons on the iPhone for its first six months. Introduce complexity slowly.

11. Solve big problems

Google solves big problems using solutions with scale – such as the need for a global visual street map. Solutions with scale can make you impossible to copy.

12. Think retro

Home dressmaking was dying in the 1990s. Then BurdaStyle.com started offering downloadable dress patterns. Alongside this, it created a home dressmaking community, allowing women to share pictures of dresses they had made online. Home dressmaking is now on the up again. If an idea once fulfilled a need, it could do so again.

And finally, here are a few warnings:

1. Don't believe the hype about faster data speeds

It's more likely that demand for mobile data will grow exponentially rather than the capacity available to transmit that data. So data transmission speeds in the future may in fact be slower, not faster.

The winners in the first internet revolution planned for slow data speeds, on the principle that you shouldn't have to wait for their services. Fast-loading ugly sites such as CraigsList survived. Slow-loading beautiful sites didn't.

2. Don't make it complex

You wouldn't buy a TV that required you to press ctrl-alt-del to switch it on. Or a fridge, or a car. So why copy the outdated protocols of 1970s computing when you design your software?

3. Don't have teething problems In the 1990s, most e-commerce sites lost most of their customers between the catalog server and the e-commerce server. They never came back.

Amazon worked from day one. And the efficiency of the logistics in its Seattle warehouse was stunning from day one too. Even in 1997 it never sent you the wrong stuff, and was the only e-commerce site that didn't.

An airline takes a year to recover from launching a new terminal and losing everyone's bags. An e-commerce operation is dead by then.

4. Never forget consumer need

In the internet boom of the late 1990s, entrepreneurs stopped talking about consumer needs and started talking about business models instead. Accountants, financiers and management consultants all nodded.

They felt much more comfortable with quantitative business plans on Excel than with the complex psychology of human need. But all the businesses that were built purely on business models went bankrupt in 2000.

Business models are nice. But if your business does not fulfil a consumer need, it will never fly. Good luck.

DID YOU MISS THIS IDEA?

Back in the 1990s, the most popular search engine was called AltaVista. One of its nifty features was its ability to list links coming into your website. All you had to do was type 'link: xyz.com' into the search box and up came a list of other sites that had linked to xyz.com.

It was a pretty cool feature. You could see how your web page was becoming more influential, and which journalists, websites and others had noticed it. Lots of web-savvy people knew this, and used it to reveal valuable insights. But the most valuable insight was staring everyone in the face. And no one saw it.

If the number of links coming into your site was a good measure of its popularity, would it not also be a good measure of other sites' popularity?

And so, if you ranked sites using this popularity measure, would you not create a better search engine?

If you'd had this insight, you might today be worth more than a hundred billion dollars. Because you would have invented Google.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Simon Silvester is EVP head of planning, Young & Rubicam Europe, Middle East and Africa.

[email protected]