Painfully living in the real world
Jason Fry, in his column in the Wall Street Journal this week (subscription required), wrote about frustrating gaps between how we want the mobile world to work and how it really does. I share his frustrations. However, his article rambles quite a bit and reaches an inconsistent conclusion.
His first observations are about how we’ve come to enjoy the power of the Internet, and then he laments that that power isn’t yet available on mobile devices.
I had a recent experience with that frustration, which should be a lesson for any business. This weekend, my family and I went shopping. Before we left, I looked up online the address of a couple of businesses that I’d never been to but that I wanted to check out. My memory is lacking and I accidentally left at home the paper on which I’d written down the addresses, but the first place I wanted to try I remembered the general area it was in and, based on the address, believed I’d be able to see it while driving down a main thoroughfare.
Unfortunately, we didn’t see it, even after retracing our steps a couple of times.
No problem. I pulled out my PPC-6700 and typed in the web address for the chain of businesses, one of which I was looking for. The website format totally fell apart on the small screen of my Windows Mobile device, but I was able to find the form field to type in a zip code and the button to “Find Stores.” With my broadband connection, the resulting page quickly appeared, however, the dark blue left border of the web page completely covered up everything except the last few characters of the longest lines of each address, making it impossible to read anything.
As frustration and impatience grew within the car, we merely drove on to their competitor whose location I’d remembered well enough to find.
The mobile world failed, simply because the web developers of that global business had failed to accomodate the needs of a mobile user. As I’ve pointed out before, this is not such a hard problem to solve. Broad adoption of mobile-friendly adaptation of web content would be a huge first step towards making the Mobile World a better world.
But Mr. Fry doesn’t stop there. He spends most of the article talking about the cool use of a compass and GPS in a cellphone as embodied by GeoVector to enable information interaction in a real-world way that goes way beyond anything possible on the Web.
This is truly cool stuff and really points towards the power of mobility. I hope that these kinds of futures happen and that they happen soon.
But, Mr. Fry closes by blaming wireless providers for the fact they haven’t happened yet.
“If even GeoVector’s current services sound like science fiction, to an unfortunate extent they are — in the U.S. Why does it seem like our cellphones and PDAs do so much less than Japan’s? Blame a combination of factors — but above all, blame the four big U.S. wireless companies.”
Given that GeoVector only announced their technology on May 1 of this year, I think Mr. Fry needs to give wireless carriers time to adopt this new cool stuff.
Hopefully we’ll all soon by pointing and clicking on the real world (as GeoVector would describe it).
In the meantime, Mr. Fry and I could both benefit from learning to exercise some patience.