Many of history’s great innovations arrived too soon.

Henry Ford’s Model T was a two-speed without a driver-side door that couldn’t make it up a hill without a full tank of gas. Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone could only call one pre-designated number, came with a single opening for both speaking and listening, and had no dial tone, requiring the caller to whistle for an operator. Similarly, mobile applications arrived, to great fanfare before they were ready.

We refer to this early period, around 1999 – 2007, as Mobile 1.0. The promise of mobile applications was well understood long before Mobile 1.0, but when they first arrived, they were no less cumbersome and incomplete than the Model T or telephone in the early twentieth century. They were slow, simple, and designed for particular devices. In fact, most mobile apps were built for the Palm platform because it was the only Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) with significant market share — and all non-PDA devices,including cell phones, either didn’t support external software or, if they did, had such limited memory that no real applications could be loaded anyway.  

Most early applications were consumer-focused and performed basic tasks, such as tracking travel expenses, storing grocery lists, and managing birthday reminders. These simple applications were available on simple devices, which most often had no wireless connection. Devices that did have a wireless connection, such as the Palm VII or WAP-enabled cell phones, were  rendered all but unusable by slow, unreliable, and expensive data networks. Even the tech-savvy, early adopters received little value because the community of wireless users was too small.

Businesses typically avoided mobile applications during the Mobile 1.0 period because they didn’t meet even the most basic  price-performance requirements for devices, networks, or applications. And when they did, the user experience was poor. As in most early technology adoption life cycles, the promise (or hype) of mobile apps created demand from both businesses and consumers, but also frustration and disappointment when it became clear the gap between promise and reality was significant.

After about a decade of dramatic wireless technology improvements and rapidly changing socio-cultural trends favoring an increasingly mobile lifestyle —from Apple’s iPhone, iPad, and App Store to Google’s Android and Market — we’re now closer than ever to fulfilling the promise of Mobile 1.0: an evolution we call Mobile 2.0.

CATEGORY 

 

MOBILE  1.0

 

MOBILE  2.0

 

Devices

 

Short battery life
Unstable OS
Many platforms

 

Long battery life
Stable OS
Clear standards

 

Networks

 

Slow
Unreliable
Expensive
Limited coverage

 

Fast
Reliable
Affordable
Ubiquitous coverage

 

Applications

 

Optimized for device or network  or backend

 

Optimized for device and  network and backend

 

Resources

 

Many questions, few answers

 

Blogs, newsgroups, events,  case studies

 

User Priorities

 

Mobilize tools

 

Mobilize business

 

Table 1. Mobile1.0 vs. Mobile 2.0

Mobile 2.0

Mobile 2.0 has a distinguishing characteristic, which is the shift from PCs (either desktop or laptop) to mobile handheld devices as our primary computing devices.  With Mobile 2.0, PCs will be used for computing tasks that can’t be performed on handhelds. And mobile devices will be used more for data than for voice. What indications show that Mobile 2.0 is close — if it’s not here already?
•       There are more than 5 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide. To fill that demand,industry reports have estimated that almost 1.4 billion units were shipped in 2010, which was up more than 18 percent from 2009.
•       In many countries, there are now more mobile devices than people. In Estonia and the United Arab Emirates, for example, there are twice as many mobile phones as residents, says the International Telecommunications Union.
[i]
•       Growth of  data-equipped mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, exceeds feature phone sales by a factor of four to one, according to most analysts.
•       Mobile telecom revenues will reach $1.1 trillion by 2015, with 40 percent of carrier revenue coming from data services.[ii]
•       As of 2011,90 percent of the world’s population lives within wireless coverage.[iii]
What is driving the continued transition from Mobile 1.0 to 2.0? Primarily, two forces:
1)      New ways of doing business are emerging that give competitive advantage to mobile employees.
2)      The 1.0 technology-centric approach to mobile application design is yielding to the 2.0 user-centric approach.
There is no use denying that mobiles are here, part of our daily lives, part of our jobs (both using and supporting them), and over the coming weeks  of our experts will provide even more details on how to utilize solutions from BMC’s Mobility for ITSM to better manage your “mobile enterprise”.
By: ITSM Guy