Developing captive applications for mobile devices, like drilling for oil in Texas and a number of other things, is a way to make a small fortune out of a large one. The market is huge – just look at all those cell phones. In an earlier time a comparable refrain was imagined for shoes in China. But, just maybe, the WWW was really made for mobile devices and shoes or no, the market is still huge.

Plain and simple, the market for captive mobile applications will always be limited. And the major reasons for this are also plain and simple. The most salient ones are: 1) the telco carriers have a very long history and very deep experience with gate keeping and bottleneck maintenance. 2) The distribution costs are extremely high, affordable by a very small number of companies who can afford the long term capital investments, and who also know about bottleneck maintenance. 3) It is impossible to have a unified code base that encompasses more than a few mobile devices.

Regardless of the carriers, or distributors, or software environments, there is one technology that is common and accessible to all mobile devices: The WWW. The few mobile devices that don’t have a web browser will either have one soon, or be gone. The carriers and distributors will get their monopoly rents for some time to come, and there’s nothing that can be done about that.

The nature of knowledge work is changing, branching into varying specialized activities, much of it relatively recently. These will tend to be more transaction oriented, workflow driven, much more granular than typical knowledge work. The need for decision support will be mitigated, eliminating large local hardware resource requirements.

Games for small displays have done quite well, and clearly demonstrate effective and often intuitive ways of presenting information. Apple’s iPhone has shown that a very powerful, and highly responsive, user interface does not need massive hardware horsepower.

Business processes are evolving that exploit the mobile devices’ capabilities, no longer needing mile wide and ocean deep spreadsheets that all too often are static. Perhaps the most striking aspect of these is the distributed nature of information flow, much like the WWW itself.

And what better way to accomplish this by centralizing the applications, leveraging existing tools and programming assets. Not surprisingly, this opens new pricing opportunities, with interesting tethering possibilities that can reclaim, repurpose and incrementally extend application investments.

I’d like to say something like I knew it all along, but the reality is that the pieces only came into sharp focus of late, and surely must be old stuff for everyone else. Slow out of gate, FutureWare now has some interesting projects in the oven based on these.

© Copyright 2009 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG

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Tags: business processes, cell phone programs, distributed processing, handheld games, mobile applications, tethered systems

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