The End of the Mobile Phone Monopoly
There was a time when we accessed the Internet through a wide variety of software and protocols. Gopher, Finger, Ftp, Telnet, browsers like Mosaic and Netscape. There were many ways to access ‘the digital’. I remember frequently trying new browsers, new messaging software, new email clients. There most certainly wasn't one singular gateway.
Today, it seems that there's one predominant gateway to everything digital services: the mobile phone. In particular so for our private, non-professional lives. And we’re very, very addicted to our phones. They’re ever present, always on, heavily personalised, and we now positively depend on it. Many people would find it hard to believe that one day we won't use these hand-sized digitally connected touch-screens with cameras.
And yet, history has shown us time and again that technologies come and go.
Market consolidation or industry consolidation is a process where many small companies or products in a particular industry merge or are acquired by larger companies, leading to a market dominated by only a few key players.
This process often follows the product life cycle, which has several stages:
Introduction: A new technology or product is launched, often with a high level of competition and many different solutions.
Growth: The market expands, sales increase, and new competitors may enter the market.
Maturity: The industry reaches market saturation, sales slow down, and competition becomes fierce. At this point, companies may merge or acquire others to increase their market share and achieve economies of scale.
Decline: The product is eventually displaced by a newer, better technology, and sales drop.
Another related concept is technological convergence, where previously unrelated technologies become integrated and unified into a single system. A great example is how the functions of a camera, music player, and computer all converged into a single smartphone. Together with the market consolidation that happened in parallel, this convergence led to the mobile phone being the default gateway to all digital services.
The signs are still weak, but I am sensing the first challenges to the dominance of mobile phones.
There's a variety of technologies on the rise, which all have the opportunity to be lower-barrier than a mobile phone. Ultimately, a phone remains just a hand-held touch screen with it's shortcomings, primarily the requirement that you’re holding it. It won’t move on it’s own accord, you need to unlock it to give it commands, and it’s not normally observing what you’re observing.
What I'm seeing is a whole bunch of technologies that overcome some of these shortcomings in addition to being able to provide all the functionality of a normal phone, in particular smart speakers, social robots, and smart glasses. These technologies are quite advanced, now going through a second or even third generation of devices. Crucially, this time these technologies seem much better placed to grab people's attention and become a major means of accessing digital services. Let's look at each in turn.
Smartspeakers were the first widely used voice-command interfaces. This has made them indispensable for many consumers, and it’s fairly normal for a house to have multiple devices to cover the whole house. Downsides remain that it doesn’t see the user and the major brands don’t equip the smart speakers with a screen, but that can be addressed in a next generation. A more concerning issue is that today there’s no great commercialisation model for smart speakers. Amazon has famously lost billions on Alexa. Finally, smart speakers lack the ability to move and pro-actively engage with you. That would make them a….
Social Robots have the opportunity to combine natural language, multimedia interfaces that include screens, and in contrast with smart-speakers they do have the ability to move about. They can pro-actively be at the right place at the right time to let you connect to digital services in a number of ways that would exceed the capabilities of phones. No need to hold that phone at arms length during a video call - the robot will position itself at exactly the right place, even if you're moving about the house. Don’t just create a shopping list, the robot can go and do the shopping for you. A new generation of robots is now being developed, and this time they're clearly designed to be of real use to people in their daily lives. From Enchanted Tool's brilliantly engaging Mirokai characters designed to offer help in hospitality and care settings, to Cartwheel's cute robot designed to be a child's best friend, these robots promise to combine purpose with functionality.
Smart Glasses are always on, and can see and hear everything you do. Like smart speakers and social robots, you can control them with your voice. Early prototypes for which information is available online also include visual information presented to the wearer, much like a screen. If that becomes really useable, with quality that equals that of a phone screen, then smart glasses could be used with a lot less friction than a standard smart phone.
There are probably other technologies that we haven’t even conceived of that could be contenders for the crown to displace the smart phone. That is the whole point of the chaotic technological phase we are about to enter: there will be many players, there will be many offerings, and it will be impossible to guess which one will win. It will almost certainly not be the obvious choice at the start, and it may well not be the ‘best’ technology (remember Betamax? VHS won). However, after a number of years of having many players, it’s certain that there will be only a small number of winners left, and they’ll be the proud winners of an immense market: the mobile phone plus associated digital services market is projected to be worth $11 trillion by 2030.
So, forget about the next boring iPhone or Google Pixel. Instead, ask yourself what new technology will replace the mobile phone entirely, and start investing in the ecosystem that makes that possible!