Archive for the 'The Law' Category

Revolutions and Time Telling

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

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?

Recent Research: June 2009

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Research is good. Free highlights from expensive research reports are great. Here are some recent headlines:

Happy Birthday to the Walkman!

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

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.

Psst … MiFi now available at Sprint.com

Monday, June 1st, 2009

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…)

Guy’s MiFi

Friday, May 15th, 2009

I love this tweet from Guy Kawasaki:

@GuyKawasaki The Sprint MIFi gadget is lifechanging. Now my iPhone is fast! And I can Skype from anywhere.

It says so much…

Recent Research: April 2009

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

Research is good. Free highlights from expensive research reports are great. Here are some recent headlines:

McGuire’s Law featured in Telephony cover story

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

I’ve mentioned a couple of articles from Telephony stemming from an interview I did with Kevin Fitchard. Well that interview specifically was for a much larger piece Kevin was developing for the cover story of the print edition of Telephony that was released in time for CTIA, the industry’s largest annual event.

Obviously, all of that was a couple of weeks ago, but I just got around to reading the whole piece. I was pleasantly surprised that the article was largely built around my interview. You can check out the entire piece here: Wireless 2025: A look at wireless in the year 2025.

Here are some of my highlights:

  • Kevin opens the piece by repeating two of the five trends I called out to him (plus a reference to the drive to 4G, which obviously we are leading at Sprint): “Today we’re witnessing a new revolution in which wireless has come to signify data services as much as voice. Over the next two years, the first 4G networks will emerge, pairing mobility with true broadband for the first time. The handset has begun to evolve from a mere phone into a miniature multimedia computer, and portable and mobile devices with no voice capabilities to speak of have started connecting to the wide-area cellular network.”
  • My comments are the first and most extensively used in the piece. About half of the article is directly taken from the engaged discussion Kevin and I had several weeks ago.
  • Kevin almost perfectly quotes McGuire’s Law of Mobility in introducing me: “the value of any object, application or idea increases relative to its mobility.”
  • He goes on to provide examples as proof (I didn’t provide him with these): “The principle can be applied to almost any scenario: A famous work of art that is moved from one museum to another can be viewed by more people, thus increasing its aesthetic value to the whole world. A computer, a phone, even a business becomes more useful the less it is physically constrained.”
  • The article also benefits from great insights from others prominent in the industry including my old friend and Sprint co-worker Matthew Oommen, Vish Nandlall, carrier group chief technology officer and distinguished member of the technical staff for Nortel Networks, Henry Tirri, head of the Nokia Research Center, Håkan Eriksson, chief technology officer for Ericsson, Vanu Bose, CEO and founder of Vanu, a pioneer in SDR base stations, Prabakhar Chitrapu, principal engineer for Interdigital Communications, and Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility.

It really is an interesting read. I recommend you check it out.

“Frolicking in the Social Grass”

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

Telephony magazine just published a fun interview senior editor Kevin Fitchard did with me a couple of weeks ago. Titled “Sprint’s McGuire on Frolicking in the Social Grass,” the subtitle of which is “Sprint strategy chief lays out his vision of an interconnected world, in which context is just as important as wireless connectivity” (free registration required). The basic question I was asked to answer is “how will the world be different in 2025, thanks to wireless technology?”

You can read the whole interview online, but basically I tie my answer back to five trends that are well underway today, but which I believe will take decades to be fully integrated with each other and with the lives of everyday citizens:

  1. Increasingly capable mobile devices
  2. Radios embedded in specialty devices
  3. All of our data in the cloud
  4. Automatic synchronization across cloud and devices
  5. Context awareness

If you’re wondering about the title, so was I until I got the third page of the interview. Apparently, along the way I coined a new term. I kind of like the imagery, the grass roots, the weaving together, the blowing in the wind… But maybe I just need to work on my enunciation. :)

Love this Table

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

Tomi Ahonen has observed that Nokia is now the world’s largest computer manufacturer. He has also provided more details behind the justification for calling smartphones computers and I love this summary table. Read his full post to understand his definitions and enjoy his commentary on it.

Now, tell me again why you don’t think we’re in the Mobility Age?

Tomi Ahonen on McGuire’s Law at 7th Mass Media

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

Tomi has a nice brief write up on the Law of Mobility at his blog, 7th Mass MediaCheck it out.