Interoperability

Interoperability - We've been there before. The expectation of new, innovative functionality to wow! the consumer. Wether it's on-line gaming with J2ME, or mobile picture messaging with MMS, the danger is the same. That the urge for handset manufacturers and operators to be first with the new functionality is too big to resist.
When the technology is ready, and the consumers are waiting for the newest functionality, it's tempting to launch a new product early and milk the market. But when the focus of your business is inter-person communication, it's also dangerous for the market as a whole. Imagine the effect on widespread use of picture-messaging if Nokia launches a camera-enhanced phone on the European market, before the manufacturers get a chance to settle on the final details of the MMS standard.
If the phone that some youngster spent his savings on, turns out to only be able to send and receive pictures to other Nokia phones because the interoperability hasn't been tested and guaranteed.

There are 2 effects that could possibly have. The Microsoft effect occurs if the new features are interesting enough, the marketing is strong enough and the time-to-market advantage large enough for the feature to become broadly accepted as necessary. In that case, Nokia's market cap will continue to grow, until other operators have no choice but to copy their format, or accept a niche role. Not that one dominating player is necessarily stifling to innovation, but if, much as has happened in the MS Office space, any competitor is forced to spend large sums keeping up with updates in a non-public specification, and the resulting format is driven by the need for technological obscurity rather than superiority, that is most definitely stifling to competition and innovation.

The other possible result of course, is that the market for this particular feature gets a serious dent, as consumers have annoying and limiting experiences in their first meeting with a new technology. The continuous failure to have your friend see the picture you have just spent time, and paid money to send him/her, and the difficulties with actual applications of the technology can seriously hurt the market-adoption, without necessarily indicating lack of demand.

That's more or less what happened with WAP. In the race to get out there as early as possible, Nokia launched their probably worst mobile phone yet, the infamous 7110. With following launches from their competitors not much better, and with serious interoperability issues between different browser versions, as well as different gateways, the technology died before it could find a place in the market. The recent use of WAP as an effective carrier for other services, such as downloading screensavers to Motorola-phones, corporate e-mail integration and machine surveillance, tell me that there is nothing wrong with the idea behind WAP, and nothing wrong with the technology as such, but the rush to market was too much to bear.

The question remains whether there is a solution in interoperability, or whether the only reasonable solution is serious market domination by one party, followed by the adoption of that parties implementation as a de facto standard. Different markets seem to indicate different things. The huge success of GSM is a case in point of the potential for forced (or voluntary) interoperability. The recent success of i-mode and related technologies on the Japanese market is the opposite. An indication that a dominant player in a market, can drive innovation towards consumers, by using their dominant position to create effective interoperability.

In the case of J2ME there is no doubt in my mind that the standard must be the winner. That device manufacturers need to take very serious the challenge of implementing the standard faithfully, and using the profile provisions in the standard to differentiate between handset capabilities.

In the case of camera-enhanced phones, with MMS capability, I have a little bit more doubt. Frankly, Nokia has a large enough market share to drive this stuff to market, implementing whatever standard they see fit and forcing their competitors to abdicate that segment of the market, or follow suit. Only, of course if Nokia are willing to Open their design standards, as they have promised before this years 3GSM conference in Cannes.

Whatever happens, in this market interoperability is king.