McGuire’s Law

For about a decade I’ve been talking about “bandwidth built in” and for that long I’ve been using the watch as an example.  I’ve used it several times in the past month, so I feel compelled to share it with all of you.

Usually when I talk about the Mobility Revolution, I put it in the context of the PC/Microprocessor Revolution and the Internet Revolution, but this story works better to talk about the Electrical Revolution and the Microprocessor Revolution.  It’s all the same, really.  It’s a story about how new technologies radically change how we interact with the world and the rules of competition across industries in ways that we could never have imagined.

If I were a technology visionary 100 years ago and I went to a watchmaker and said “in the future, virtually all watches will have electricity built in”, he would think I was crazy.  In his mind, he would imagine a power cord running to the watch and he would say that no one would buy such a product.  He also would recognize that electricity wasn’t even available in much of the U.S., much less the world.

Of course, today, that prediction has come true.  Not in the way that the watchmaker envisioned, but through powerful, tiny batteries.  No one expects to wind a watch anymore.  Electric watches have freed us from the effort of winding, and from the worry that our watch will run down and we’ll need to re-set it - or at least we only need to worry about it every few years when the battery dies.

Thirty years ago, if I’d gone to a watch maker and said “in the future, most watches will have a computer built in”, he would think I was crazy.  He’d imagine the computers of the day - huge systems that required raised floor, climate controlled spaces to operate, and he could not imagine how that could be associated with a watch.

I couldn’t quickly find stats to prove this, but I would guess that today, that prediction has come true - that at least a large number of watches sold today are either digital watches, or they are “analog” (they have hands), but they also have microprocessors within them playing some role (even if just for displaying the date).

A decade or so ago, I started saying that “in the future, most watches will have bandwidth built in”.  At the time, most people thought I was crazy.  They envisioned a modem (remember those?) with a phone wire (remember those?) hanging out, and they couldn’t imagine anyone buying a watch like that.

By the time I started talking about it, I’d already bought a Timex Data Link watch (I still have it around here somewhere).  So, I can’t claim to have just dreamed the concept up.  Since then, most of the watches I’ve bought have had some form of bandwidth built in, whether they be linked via satellite to the national atomic clock, or even Microsoft’s failed “SPOT” technology.  Or my most recent exciting edition - a GPS-based exercise watch!

When I wear a watch that doesn’t have atomic time, I feel inadequate.  Even if I’m not traveling across time zones, simply giving up the confidence that my watch is perfectly accurate causes concern (I hate to be late for anything).  A brother-in-law who is a jeweler made a completely different observation about the atomic watch.  He said “wow, I bet they can make them really cheap that way.”  His point was that the mechanism in the watch doesn’t need to be very accurate, because the time is regularly updated with perfect accuracy, offsetting the deficiencies of the internal workings.

However, to prove my point even more than I thought…

Especially for young people, the majority of “watches” certainly have bandwidth built in, but not in the way I’d imagined.  I was just as bound by my foolish projection of current models into a future state as the watchmakers of old that I poke fun at in my story.

Today, for many people, the cellphone has completely replaced the watch.  My son may grow up never regularly wearing a watch.  (Since I have this fascination with watches, he’s felt compelled to wear one for a day or two at different times in his life.) For most people, the cellphone is always with them, it’s time is always accurate, it adjusts to new timezones (if it’s linked to the cellular carrier’s clock) - so why bind your wrist with some leather and metal?

Of course, this “bandwidth built in” is beginning to have a significant impact on the jewelry business.

What does “bandwidth built in” mean for your industry, your business, and how you personally interact with the world?

An early proof point of the Law of Mobility turns 30 years old today. Happy Birthday Walkman!

From varnelis.net:

On July 1, the Sony Walkman will be 30 years old. It’s hard to imagine what urban life was before the Walkman. Sony first introduced portable transistor radios in 1957 and these proliferated rapidly. With an earphone (like this), it was possible to carry music around on the go, but both sources and quality were limited. Portable cassette players and boomboxes flourished in the 1970s and if the latter served as means of building impromptu communities, they were also consciously thought of as sonic assault devices, marking out territory and creating tension in urban spaces. The Walkman was a counter against this, turning music inward toward a solitary experience (although not entirely: as Scott points out, Walkmen often had two jacks, making them less solitary than iPods). If the boombox represents the last moment of urban decay and street violence, the Walkman represents its re-colonization.

Last week, I was in California for a meeting of the MobileBeat Advisory Board, with a great group of folks helping fuel the mobility revolution. I was asked to share my reflections on the first week of the Pre being on the market. I tied it all back to the mobility revolution, and how Sprint is focused on making mobility instant, compelling, and worry-free. The Pre is a great proof point for all of that.

Then, this week, I read “Three Things the Palm Pre Does Better Than the iPhone 3GS” by John Mahoney at PopSci.com. Especially this quote - “But the Pre and especially its webOS software is so interesting because it’s the first phone to actually build on the trail blazed by the iPhone in some truly key areas of functionality. And what’s more American than some good ol’ fashioned competition begetting forward-looking innovation that elevates the playing field for all?” - reminded me of a piece I wrote almost two years ago, just as the original iPhone was about to hit the market.

Titled “Are we a week away from a revolution?”, I was pretty spot on in picking ways the iPhone would push the mobility revolution forward (okay 3 out of 4 ain’t bad…).

But my favorite hope/prediction was in the closing sentence: “But I’m excited to see how Friday’s release will push our industry to the next level, with new consumer excitement, new consumer enthusiasm (and willingness to spend), and hopefully a strong response from the industry to new consumer expectations.”

With the Pre, I’m glad the closing phrase has come true!

This weekend I had the pleasure of “test driving” the new Sprint MiFi. This is an incredible device that I expect will dramatically advance the Mobility Revolution.

If you haven’t heard of the MiFi - here’s how I’ve been describing it to folks: You know that box you have at home which is your broadband router? And you know the box sitting next to it which is your WiFi access point? Well, combine those two boxes together into a battery powered device about the size of half of a deck of playing cards. Wherever you go (within Sprint coverage), you have broadband connectivity for up to five devices. Today, those devices are probably laptops or netbooks. But increasingly, they will include media players, game machines, cameras, and all kinds of other devices.

Imagine how this kind of always/anywhere connectivity will change the way we live our lives and do our jobs.

And it’s available now at Sprint.com! (It’s not yet available through Everything Plus, but…)

This past Monday I had the pleasure of speaking at the CIO Bootcamp at Interop. It’s a great event and this was my second time to participate.  I promised the participants that I’d follow-up with a posting summarizing my talk and providing links to some of the case studies I mentioned.  And here it is!

The outline for my talk was taken from a post I wrote at Seamless Enterprise early this year including my predictions for 2009:

• VoIP is dead. Long live AoIP!
• B’bye desk phone
• IP surges ahead
• Economic challenges drive mobile productivity
• Mobile Broadband becomes standard configuration
• Outsourcing explodes
• Unified Communications make real inroads

I talked about the challenges that come from our current economic conditions. Borrowing a phrase that Bruce Barnes had introduced earlier in the morning, I challenged the group to consider how mobility can help them transition from “order takers” to “value creators.” There are two ways to create value - increase revenue (I again borrowed from Bruce in referencing Blue Ocean strategies), and increase productivity/reduce costs.

For revenue growth and really for changing the rules of competition, I referenced a number of examples including:

• Avis Roaming Rapid Returns
• TeleNav
• Montclair State University
• Portable-On-Demand Storage (PODS)
• Sand Springs Police Department

From a cost savings perspective, I talked about how IDC estimates that 2/3 of workers are already mobile some of the time. At Sprint, we’ve translated this into $20M/year in real estate savings. Further, I provided a more detailed case study of our implementation of Unified Communications which is providing an incremental $6-8M per year in telecom cost savings by eliminating hundreds of PBXs and the associated ILEC circuits.

Once again, the Bootcamp was a wonderful event and I was pleased to be a part of it.

Two months ago I participated in eComm. What a great event! (Thanks Lee!)

My talk was on “Cutting the Cord on Big Bell Dogma.” I think it’s a pretty compelling story. You can check out the video here and the slides further down in this post.

Two recent stories provide two different perspectives on how the Kindle is radically changing the book business. The revolution the Kindle unleashes is almost entirely driven by having Sprint’s wireless networking seamlessly integrated into the device and the business model.

First, the user perspective, from Pete Peterson:

I’m the sort of person that typically reads four or five books at a time. Depending on my mood I might pick up Hugo, Buechner, Lewis, Berry, or maybe even Barry. This presents a sizeable problem to a man that travels often and has to weigh the packing of his suitcase against the weight of the many books he’d like to have with him along the way.

The Kindle did away with that problem in one swift stroke. It lets me have a quarter of a million books at my fingertips no matter where I am. That’s because included in the purchase price of the Kindle ($250) is access to Amazon’s Whispernet 3G network that allows you to purchase a book wirelessly, from the Kindle Store’s library and download it in about thirty-seconds flat.

That means that when I’m sitting in a restaurant talking to a friend and he recommends a book that I can, right there, on the spot, pull my Kindle out of my backpack, buy the book, and be ready to read it without ever leaving the table.

…

Now I don’t go to the bookstore without it. This makes bookstore owners want to put out a hit on Kindle-carriers, I’m sure. But wait, just because I buy a book on the Kindle doesn’t mean I won’t buy a hard copy later. I will certainly still pick up a hardcopy of a book, even if I’ve already read it digitally, simply because I want it on my shelf.

…

So the Kindle undoubtedly simplifies the buying of books but what about the reading of them?

…

Remember what I said about a book being about much more than just the words on the page? I was wrong. I was wrong and it seems so obvious to me now. I haven’t yet read a book on the Kindle and wished I had bought the physical book instead (although I have thought that I would like to go buy a physical version much in the same way that movie geeks love to buy a special edition DVD.) A book is about the story. It’s about communication. I love cover design, and paperstock, and the feel of a unique book in my hands just as much as anyone else, but when it comes right down to it, when it comes to the reading, all that other stuff disappears into the background. What matters is the story.

Meanwhile, author Steven Johnson wrote a comprehensive and forward looking view of eBooks for the Wall Street Journal, touching on some of the business implications to flow from the Kindle:

Every genuinely revolutionary technology implants some kind of “aha” moment in your memory — the moment where you flip a switch and something magical happens, something that tells you in an instant that the rules have changed forever.

…

The latest such moment came courtesy of the Kindle, Amazon.com Inc.’s e-book reader. A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully working my way through an e-book about business and technology, when I was hit with a sudden desire to read a novel. After a few taps on the Kindle, I was browsing the Amazon store, and within a minute or two I’d bought and downloaded Zadie Smith’s novel “On Beauty.” By the time the check arrived, I’d finished the first chapter.

Aha.

I knew then that the book’s migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.

The book industry has been Mobilized. Will your industry be next?

This afternoon I spoke to Eric Fultz, a Vice President, with Anyware Mobile Solutions. They have had tremendous success lately with their digiTICKET offer. It’s really a pretty cool proof point for the value created by mobilizing a previously paper-based process.

In a recent press release, one of Anyware’s customers provided the basic value proposition:

Mike Carter, Assistant Chief of Police for the Sands Springs Police Department stated, “This is a revolutionary step for our department. It will improve officer safety and driver inconvenience by minimizing the time a vehicle is stopped along the roadside to issue a ticket. It will also allow us to use our administrative resources more prudently and effectively.”

Eric walked me through the business case drivers that make eTicketing work for even a small police department:

• Consider a police department with 10 officers who write 500 traffic tickets per month, with an average ticket representing $150 in revenue to the city.
• Since the paper process typically involves a difficult 4-5 part carbon copy mess, the average stop takes 10-15 minutes.  If there are multiple violations, each one requires a complete additional ticket, meaning that realistically, an officer won’t write more than 2 tickets per stop, even if there are more violations.
• The paper tickets then need to be manually processed by clerks who have to decipher what was scrawled down by an officer in a dangerous situation.  When they have trouble reading the tickets, they need to contact the officer who may not be able to even figure it out herself.  A police department can easily lose 5% of their tickets this way. (Large police departments typically lose 15-20% because it’s not worth the effort to find the officer.)

Using an eTicketing solution, the process is dramatically improved:

• The officer can scan in the driver’s license, automatically populating many of the fields in the ticket.
• Violations can easily be added without having to reenter all of the information.
• With wireless connectivity, once the license is scanned, it can be immediately and automatically checked against a database of outstanding warrants.
• The driver can leave with a printed copy using a Bluetooth printer.
• But the actual citation is electronically sent to the department’s/court’s Record Management System, bypassing the manual entry stage.

The results are significant:

• 35% increase in tickets issued (both from capturing more violations per stop and being able to make more stops).
• Tickets lost in processing drops virtually to zero.
• Increased safety for the officers (less time standing on the shoulder) and increased convenience for the stopped drivers.

In this case, the police department investment can be completely paid back in 2-3 months - and can start creating incremental revenue and reducing processing expenses from that point forward.  And given the state of municipal finances these days, what taxpayer can’t appreciate that?

Well, maybe the drivers whose “mobility” now must be constrained within the speed limit.

Another of my posts at Seamless Enterprise is worth referencing here: “What does Social Grass mean for the Enterprise?” The full post is probably worth reading, but here’s a shortened version:

In a recent interview with Telephony editor Kevin Fitchard, I introduced the concept of “social grass” as a component of how mobility will shape the next couple of decades. Even if you figured out what I meant by “social grass,” you probably struggled to see how it fit into a corporate environment.

Let me take a shot at clearing up the confusion on both fronts.

…

What’s relevant to me right now is based on many factors, some of which aren’t hard for a mobile device to determine - where am I, what time is it, who am I with, what’s on my calendar, etc. But more than anything, relevance is based on relationships - my relationships with people and companies.

The fact that Joe Smith serves on the board of Habitat for Humanity in Tulsa, Oklahoma may or may not be relevant to me. Even if I’m meeting with a Joe Smith for lunch, how will the systems that can prepare me for that lunch meeting determine whether it’s the same Joe Smith?

The term social grass combines three different concepts into a rich view of relationship determination. The first concept is the “social graph” which has been referenced heavily by players in the online social network space. The second concept is “grassroots” - the natural and spontaneous development of communities and their activities. The third concept is “grass weaving” - the intertwining of individual strands to create a strong, yet beautiful product.

This “social grass” - separate social graphs growing naturally and spontaneously in different places, woven together into a reliable indicator of my relationship with people and organizations - can connect me to the Joe Smith that I’m having lunch with, to his company, and to his community involvement with organizations like Habitat for Humanity. And can help me be prepared to talk about how every man, woman and child should have a decent, safe and affordable place to live.

…

Check out the full post!

I’ve been pretty busy lately, so haven’t had a chance to cross reference my posts at other forums.

Back in February I posted “Seven 2009 Business Telecom Predictions.” Check out the original post for all the details, but here’s the short summary:

1. VoIP is dead. Long live AoIP!
2. B’bye desk phone.
3. IP surges ahead.
4. Unified communications makes real inroads.
5. Mobile broadband becomes standard configuration.
6. Economic challenges drive mobile productivity.
7. Outsourcing explodes.

Check it out!