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Mobility Needs To Embrace Innovation And Ditch The Demand For Stability And Control

While reading the Bits blog of The New York Times earlier today, it struck me that the wireless industry is still stuck at the same impasse it's been at for years. Isn't it time to ditch the old demands of stability and embrace open technologies and user-driven innovation?

The wireless industry has been governed by the carriers almost since its inception. Telecoms -- both wireless ones and their landline parents -- have always favored stability over innovation. If it's not five 9's compliant, they don't want to offer it as a service.

The handset makers, on the other hand, have been pushing for innovation for a while. With the introduction of the smartphone in the earlier part of the decade, the old model of stability no longer made sense. But the handset makers couldn't challenge their carrier customers, so they had to push for more openness while working hard for the carrier partners. Not a great place to be.

The problem with the stability paradigm is threefold. One, it's expensive to maintain, since it requires large companies at the top with little room for upstarts. Two, it requires a small number of gatekeepers who exercise a ruthless degree of control to maintain the kind of environment necessary to keep things calm. And three, it often staggers innovation.

The enterprise IT market, one that also came out of a stability model (and still clings to it stubbornly at times), started to embrace more open technologies in the 1990s. Scalable technologies such as Windows allowed businesses to deploy more applications faster and at a lower cost while a just-good-enough solution, TCP/IP, beat its more over-engineered rival Token Ring.

This decade has seen that trend continue, especially as newer, cheaper Web 2.0 technologies promise to re-define enterprise IT yet again.

If we step back from enterprise IT to IT a while, during the last three decades those who favored innovation have had a much better track record than those who have favored stability.

Now, there have been a few exceptions to this rule. Apple is one that leaps to mind. Apple is a company that has traditionally been able to maintain stability while constantly innovating. Although it, too, has been bitten by its dedication to stability. It was Microsoft's embrace of a more open platform -- Windows (if one can actually imagine Windows as the more open alternative, though compared to the Mac platform in the 1980s, it was) -- that enabled it to beat Apple during the PC vs. Mac wars of the 1980s.

Sure, some of the innovators, like Netscape, fell by the wayside. But overall, the more open technologies have beaten those built in more closed, stable systems.

Turning the attention back to the wireless industry, during the early 2000s an open technology, Wi-Fi, piggybacked on the success of its landline parent, TCP/IP, to transform the ways businesses offer mobility and Web access both on the company campus and on the road.

Now as we stare down the end of this decade, it looks like cellular wireless technology is looking at this same moment of transition. Companies like Google and the armies of eager iPhone hackers are pushing the industry to embrace innovation. And the only way to do that is to open up the networks. Yet, carriers like Verizon Wireless and handset markets like Apple continue to fight this macro-trend.

I think the wireless industry -- and business mobility as a part of it -- finally needs to acknowledge the need for innovation and get on the winning side. Carriers need to wake up and realize that they're pipes while handset makers need to throw open their devices and let openness reign.

Companies that are pushing openness, like Google and increasingly Nokia, seem to get this and look prepared for the future. Those that don't may find themselves in dustbin of history.

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