McGuire’s Law

A column this week by Richard Martin, senior editor of Unstrung, highlights the key points made by panelists in a session Martin moderated at the Globalcomm conference.

The panel included Dr. Pat King, head of global electronics strategies for Michelin; Luc Roy, the vice president of product planning for Siemens AG ; and Nate Walker, the senior director of product management for Meru Networks Inc.

Martin referenced a slide by Siemens’ Roy as saying “the overarching responsibility of the traditional IT department moving from ‘information technology management’ to ‘mobility management.’ In other words, the entire job description and world view of IT are being shifted by the larger transition to mobility that we are seeing in enterprises today.”

Although I totally agree with the general direction of movement - that mobility will be a dominant focus for IT in the coming decade - I think he’s going a bit far.

What do you think?

According to Red Herring, Alain Lamassoure, a French member of the European Parliament has proposed a tax of just under 2 cents on each SMS and a miniscule tax on each e-mail.  Red Herring estimates the SMS tax alone could total $5B per year across all 25 EU member countries.

As lawmakers look for new sources of revenue, telecom is constantly in their cross-hairs.

Not only would yet more taxes represent raising the barriers to building mobility into more products and processes, the accounting challenges of tracking and assessing the charges could put a huge burden on service providers.  For SMS, the issues may not be significant, since providers have typically established usage-based billing structures for texting services.  However, very few providers of e-mail services charge per message, and the nano-payments involved (is that a thousandth of a cent per message?) are increments that standard accounting and billing systems aren’t designed to handle.

Hopefully this proposal will fail and not set a global precedent, however, we should expect telecom services to continue to be targeted whenever tax revenues seem to be falling short of increasing government spending.

An article at Morningstar provides a telling indicator of what the mobility age means for chip companies like Texas Instruments and Intel.  The article states that chips for cellphones now outpace chips for computers.

If you think about it, the PC age put Intel on the map.  Companies like IBM that thought the single-vendor integrated system was the winning model in the industry were the big losers in the PC era while companies like Intel and Microsoft that provided key components and companies like Dell and Compaq that integrated together components from different suppliers were the big winners.

In the Internet age, Microsoft has struggled a bit because, just as the PC era knocked the single-vendor system model off the pedestal, the Internet era shattered the single-vendor software model.  Instead, Google has been the big winner with its focus on enabling “smash-ups” that integrate capabilities from different innovation leaders into customized solutions.  But the biggest losers have probably been companies like AT&T and MCI (R.I.P.) because the traditional network model has really been dismantled, with intelligence moving out of the core of the network and to the edge where lots of innovation can happen.  But the Internet era has still been all goodness for Intel, because all that innovation at the edge is running on servers, many of which consume Intel processors.

Now, as we move into the Mobility age, we wait to see who the big winners and big losers will be, but we can count on chip makers like Intel continuing to be winners as mobility (requiring chips) gets built into all products and all processes.

I stole the title of this post from an article by the same name by Steve Kroening at Business Reform.  The article is short and to the point and calls out one of the challenges to mobility being built into everything - the government’s desire to pile taxes on anything that looks or smells like “telecommunications” (whatever that means these days).

Steve points to MyWireless.org as one place you can cast your vote and join the battle to keep taxes from killing the potential for mobility to increase value in our products, our businesses, and our lives.