All posts in Intermittent Signal

A review of Samsung’s hero device – will the new iPhone steal its thunder?

by admin on September 14, 2012 in Intermittent Signal with No comments

By Mark Watson

Despite its recent, hugely damaging, defeat in the smartphone patent wars (to a jury made up of people living within 10 miles of Apple’s global HQ), Samsung has been riding high of late – thanks to the success of the Galaxy S3. Its new Android-powered handset has been purchased by more than 20 million consumers—including yours truly—in the past 100 days, and the South Korean company claims to be shifting 200,000 units a day at present. The question is, will it be able to keep the momentum going now that the new iPhone has launched? Based on my experience of switching from an iPhone 4S to an S3, I think the answer is…maybe. What? You weren’t really expecting me to risk making a concrete prediction, were you? 

The S3’s 4.8” HD screen is its best feature – it frees you up in a way that’s difficult to express. It’s so good I’ve been able to switch to using Flipboard to bring together my Twitter and Google+ streams, RSS feeds, and a number of other social channels. The handset’s screen is also just about suitable for reading Kindle books on, and certainly complements the device’s cameras (both of which are far superior to those on the iPhone 4S). The browsing experience on the S3 is also very good, provided you have Chrome, and all in all it feels more like a ‘data device’ than a glowing iPod, which is exactly what I want (if only because it makes me feel important).

On the flip side, the S3’s non-Gmail email client is a thing of extreme ugliness, not to mention buggy, and I have yet to find an alternative client that doesn’t give amateur a bad name. The speech recognition is as disappointingly unintelligent as Siri (the Galaxy actually allows you to use the same engine that Apple licenses for Siri if you want to) and is far less intuitive – e.g. if you ask it to call someone while you’re driving and it comes up with multiple matches from your address book, it’s difficult to confirm/clarify your request with another voice command – practically, you have to switch to the touchscreen. Frustratingly, the Samsung server is permanently overloaded for upgrade services, and often returns requests those services with a message which I can only translate as, “To get a software upgrade, you need to get in line. This upgrade service doesn’t support lines. Goodbye.” Worse still, Bluetooth on the S3 is either cripplingly buggy or impossible to configure correctly (I haven’t bothered to take the time to work out which it is) and often makes random connections to my in-car Bluetooth, interrupting music and news just to say…nothing in particular. I’ve got so used to hanging up on false positives that I occasionally hang up on legitimate callers. And the Galaxy is so bad at synchronising media with a Mac that it feels almost like deliberate sabotage on Samsung’s part. On a personal note, apps including Hipstamatic and Cardmunch are sorely missed – but these are small gripes which are certain to be rectified in time.

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Siri-ous problems down in the Valley

by admin on July 13, 2012 in Intermittent Signal with 2 Comments

By Mark Watson

Siri (Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface) is a technology which Apple acquired and then used to sell the iPhone 4S to the public. 

When the 4S launched, in August 2011, Apple’s advertising campaign ensured that there was widespread consumer interest in the product in addition to the usual chorus of pre-destined fanboy approval. There were also a lot of people in the mobile and computer technology industries who felt that Apple were probably about to do it again – i.e. take an existing ‘meh’ technology, integrate it, and popularise it so successfully that no-one would remember who actually invented it (iCloud, anyone?).

Anyway, the launch took place, the months passed, and the great expectations of the media and the public faded away to be replaced by dark mutterings about Siri’s shortcomings. First came the gripes from users outside the US. Then came the class-action lawsuits: one, two – count ‘em. Only last month, IBM banned Siri from the workplace on the basis that its usage poses a risk to sensitive information (every Siri query is processed by Apple’s servers, something we’ll come onto in a moment), and all the while the voices—including Steve Wozniak’s—insisting that Siri has gotten stupider were growing louder, more insistent.

A few weeks ago, Apple convened its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Jose, California (an economic vote of support, perhaps, for a city being slowly bankrupted by its civil service pension commitments?). At its WWDC, Apple announced that the iOS 6 version of Siri will be available on the new iPad, that it will be able to recognise requests for sports scores and stats, movie reviews, directory inquiries, restaurant reservations, and access to Twitter, and that at least nine car manufacturers are planning to include a button on the steering wheels of their cars to allow drivers to activate it without having to root around for their handsets. Siri on iOS 6 will also be capable of launching apps, bringing to mind a scenario in which we’ll all, finally, be able to play Angry Birds while driving (“You, the yellow one, aim at the dynamite under that second pig. Yes the one wearing the tin helmet. Now jump! Boost! Boost!”). Needless to say, Apple did not address the performance and security issues which have dogged the service since last August. So I thought I’d give it a go myself…

Steve Jobs liked to say that, at Apple, things were ‘done right’. Multi-tasking in iOS was ‘multi-tasking done right’, for example. Jobs didn’t come up with the phrase, of course, but he probably helped turn it into the cliché it is today. Anyway, it’s hard—even laughable—to imagine him using it to describe Siri, which is voice recognition done completely wrong. Here are some of the problems with Siri (most of which were touched on in the articles linked to above):
• Siri doesn’t work without a network connection
• Siri invades privacy by sending every verbal query to Apple servers for processing
• Siri doesn’t recognise different pronunciations of words
• Siri doesn’t recognise ‘difficult’ names

No wonder the New York man who’s launched a class action suit against Apple has described the adverts the company used to promote Siri as ‘misleading and deceptive’.

If you were designing speech recognition ‘done right’ for a mobile phone, you’d recognise that the place you most needed it was in a hands-free environment – i.e. a car when you’re driving it. A car is in constant movement, and that makes it more likely to lose an internet connection. So priority one would be to make it as independent of a network connection as possible. Where the information you’re trying to allow access to is already on the phone, you wouldn’t require your speech recognition assistant to access a network to get at it. For example, if you wanted to enable access to your phonebook (which is also necessarily private and secure), you’d ensure that the system being used to access it is wouldn’t need to dial up to retrieve anything and is also private and secure. Your second priority would be to make your voice recognition assistant customisable. Siri doesn’t allow me to record a voice tag in my address book so that it understands how I (attempt to) pronounce (real example) Przybylo, and that’s a problem, because I have 200+ contacts in my address book in Poland alone.

In a broader sense, I’d say software is increasingly being designed to run in Silicon Valley on the assumption that the world is running, for example, metropolitan WiFi. It isn’t. The other day, I had a VC analyst tell me that apps no longer need offline sync. It sounded like the kind of thing Siri would say.

 

Mark Watson the former EVP of Technology & Engineering at Antenna and former CEO of Volantis Systems, during which time he blogged frequently for Mobile Masters. 

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Microsoft’s marketing strategy tells you what’s going on under the Surface

by admin on June 22, 2012 in Intermittent Signal with No comments

By Mark Watson

Microsoft has just launched a new keyboard. And you can get it in different colours!

Okay, they did launch a new Redmond-engineered tablet computer along with the keyboard. But you might not have been able to work that out from their marketing of the Microsoft Surface range. 

Take the video trailer they released to promote it, for example – 5 million YouTubers and counting have now seen it and are probably licking their fingertips at the prospect of typing on the 3mm ‘Touch Cover’ (and subsequently medicating themselves to assuage the neck and back pain that comes as standard with the regular usage of any near-flat keyboard). The media, no less(!), also seem to have taken their cues from Microsoft’s press office: a quick Google News search brings up scores of articles which focus almost solely on the Surface’s ‘innovative’ keyboard-integrating covers.

The thing is, they’re not that innovative. Users of the iPad have been able to buy covers with built-in keyboards for years. They’ve even been able to buy them in different colours (I know, I know). It’s just that, in the case of the iPad, those covers have been developed and distributed by third-party hardware manufacturers. In other words, Microsoft’s differentiator for its great flat hope is that they’ve built an accessory for it themselves rather than…not bothering to do so. The Touch Cover and Type Cover are sold separately by the way. They also require an independent battery and use Bluetooth, which means that they’re not suitable for frequent flyers, at least until airlines relax a bit.

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Portal to Another Bureaucracy: An Operator’s Tale

by admin on May 17, 2012 in Intermittent Signal with No comments

By Mark Watson

It seems the best way to bury bad news is not to release it on a Friday evening; it’s to release it through an official company blog. Just ask Telefonica – a couple of weeks ago they used their BlueVia developer blog to announce that they’re closing their app stores in Germany, Spain, and Argentina. And the tactic seems to have worked: only a few outlets picked up on the news. One of those outlets was Mobile Entertainment, whose editor, Tim Green, sub-headed his piece with the question, ‘Is this the final death throe of the operator portal?’ and summarised the announcement in the following wise: “we’re handing you [i.e. consumers] over to Google and Apple. And maybe Amazon.”

Telefonica’s retreat is the latest action in the ongoing battle for the ownership of mobile content and a share of the profits that come with selling that content to consumers. It is also part of a gradual retrenchment by the mobile network operators, who spent most of the last decade repeating the mantra, “We will be more than just a bit-pipe”, and vowing to recoup their investment in 3G licenses acquired at the turn of the Millennium (in extortionate and counter-productive government auctions) or die trying. Unfortunately, there are more examples of the latter than the former.

Faced with declining voice revenues and chronic failure in the mobile content space, operators have been forced to accept and embrace their bit-pipe status and rally around increasing data revenues. Doing so has even allowed them to continue making a decent living, thanks to two factors: firstly, they’ve reduced their costs by consolidating their operations, and secondly, they’ve secured high data revenues through ‘regulation by negotiation’ (i.e. they’ve set the price of data ridiculously high, then waited for the regulator to roll it back to a slightly less ridiculous position). It’s worth noting that this second strategy isn’t going to be effective for much longer: the regulators continue to roll back the boundaries of what the operators can ask for data, especially where their highest-margin-generating international roaming victims are concerned.

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King Kong vs. Mozilla

by admin on March 21, 2012 in Intermittent Signal with No comments

By Mark Watson

I think it’s fair to say that Microsoft’s stand at Mobile World Congress 2012 did not reflect their mobile ambitions. For the benefit of those of you who weren’t there or couldn’t be bothered looking for it (or were distracted by the dancing girls nearby), I can tell you that it was small relative to those of the other mobile OS players, sparsely furnished, and very, very blue. There were a few handsets—running the low-spec-friendly Tango version of Windows Phone—on display, but most of the stand was given over to a kind of stage. Microsoft’s Barnum, Balmer and Bailey-esque strategy for drawing a crowd and getting some good PR for Windows Phone at the show was to challenge delegates to see if they could perform certain tasks on their handsets faster than a Microsoft representative could perform the equivalent tasks on a handset running Windows Phone. Microsoft have given the challenge, which they also ran at CES in January, a Twitter hashtag inspired title: #SmokedByWindowsPhone (I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that the phrasing could, with a little effort from determined campaigners, be made to backfire on them). Users able to outpace Windows Phone in front of the small-ish crowds at the MWC stand were rewarded with €100 for their skills/hardware.

While Microsoft was busy smoking most (but not all) comers with its about-to-be-abandoned OS of fury down in Hall 1, Mozilla—they of Firefox fame—were demonstrating their own mobile operating system in Hall 7 (aka the ‘App Planet’). The interesting thing about Mozilla’s Gecko OS is that it is built in a way that makes it odds-on favourite to smoke Windows Phone in every single department. Here’s why (this is the science bit):

Traditionally, operating systems have been founded on a layer of code which maps software to hardware; this layer is made up of a core (or ‘kernel’) and a bank of APIs. On top of this layer of code is another layer which generates the user interface – any applications run on top of this graphical layer. Both Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS, and the Mac’s OSX are based around a UNIX kernel called Mach, which came out of Carnegie Mellon in the ‘80s and which was previously used by NeXT (ironically, the primary designer of MACH, Rick Rashid, ended up in charge of research  at Microsoft). Google’s Android OS has a Linux kernel. iOS is essentially a bunch of APIs on top of a proprietary version of UNIX, an operating system which dates back to the ‘70s. Android is essentially a bunch of fairly sparse/joyless UI capabilities on top of Linux (itself a ‘reinterpretation’ of UNIX).

Click on the image to see a demo of Mozilla's Boot To Gecko Complete Demo

Gecko also has a Linux kernel, but Mozilla have made the user interface layer out of Firefox, the standards-based web browser which brought them to prominence in 2004 (and which would itself usually live in the app layer). The Firefox-based environment has been created using HTML5, Javascript and CSS and supports apps also written in these popular programming languages. That makes for a Windows Phone-smokingly fast OS experience (Engadget’s reporter saw the device boot in 2 seconds) as there’s no bloated UI layer arbitrating every process. In terms of looks, the video at the end of this link suggests that the visuals are a lot better than those offered by Android and on a par with those offered by Windows Phone and iOS. More importantly, the fact that Mozilla has managed to create an entire user interface replete with high-functioning app and media capabilities in HTML5 suggests that ‘web’ and ‘native’ implementations are closer in terms of benefits and functionality than has ever been apparent before.

HTML5 is being engineered with a view to retaining the ease-of-implementation and relatively low costs associated with web development while increasing the potential functionality/capabilities of apps delivered via the language. The launch of Gecko shows that this is a viable ambition. Mozilla’s OS has a long way to go if it wants to grab market-share, nurture a vibrant content ecosystem, and do all those things which grown-up platforms do, but its appearance at MWC 2012 is an ominous sign for the enterprise app providers out there who have put all of their eggs into the ‘native’ basket.

N.B. The Linux ancestry which Gecko shares with Android means that tech-savvy, devil-may-care Android users “with unlocked bootloaders” are already able to install it on their handsets; the rest of us will have to wait for Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom to release their phones based on the new OS later this year/in Q1 2013.

 

 

Mark Watson the former EVP of Technology & Engineering at Antenna and former CEO of Volantis Systems, during which time he blogged frequently for Mobile Masters. 

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Apple – Think Normal

by admin on March 8, 2012 in Intermittent Signal with No comments

By Mark Watson

Over the last few weeks the rumour mill has been in a fast spin cycle with speculation on what the Apple’s grand iPad announcement would bring; yesterday we got our answer. For many, it was a bit underwhelming, especially the lack of surprise at the end of the presentation – a staple in the Steve Jobs’ days of Apple.   

The features that Apple has chosen to install on the new iPad (as well as the decision to stop enumerating the device versions – this is the new iPad, not the iPad 3) indicate to me that the platform has ‘normalised’ and suggests that future iPad releases will be continue to be iterative rather than revolutionary. The fact that Tim Cook didn’t seem to feel obliged to save any really big surprises for the end of the presentation (and maybe in the processed annoyed some of the global audience, willing to forgive any overrun in the hope of a grand finale) may mean that, under Cook, Apple itself has finally normalised as a company – albeit into an industry behemoth (think IBM in the 70s or Microsoft in the 90s) rather than a game changer.

Stocks fell just slightly after the announcement, indicating that a slightly better announcement was priced in, but nothing major to shock the company or to put Cook in fear for his job. But something has definitely changed. With Steve, Apple had magic, and the magic brought in the business. Now it’s just about the business (which brings extraordinary pressure). It’s not just a question of presentation (and the evidence is that Cook is no showman) but of Jobs’ focus on producing products he could effectively present.

Apple at this point doesn’t have to change the game; the rules of the tablet game are already stacked in its favour: keep several steps ahead of the competition on hardware and user experience, and keep the price point compelling. There’s not much else to do. The iPad iOS user experience is still well ahead of that on Android (and hasn’t changed much since the iPad 1); Apple moved the hardware forward a couple of notches with its screen announcements and kept the pricing the same as the previous generation. Job done. The 4G/LTE thing is a bit of a distraction: it’s significant for Apple’s U.S. carrier relationships, which are important to device market economics (the carriers continue to subsidise the devices). Where I live, in the UK, we don’t have 4G and won’t have it for a while.

The only enumerated product that Apple still has is the iPhone. Everything else has been, to use my term, normalised. If the next iPhone is the iPhone 5, maybe we can hope for a little magic there (and surely some hardware innovation, and some software update, in a far more competitive market than that for tablets). If it’s just “the new iPhone,” then it may be that Apple is heading for a more difficult phase, as Cook struggles with meeting the market expectations and pressures for ultra high growth.

 

Mark Watson the former EVP of Technology & Engineering at Antenna and former CEO of Volantis Systems, during which time he blogged frequently for Mobile Masters. 

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Windows Phone 7: Will Microsoft Pull the Football Away Again?

by admin on December 12, 2011 in Intermittent Signal with 1 Comment

By Mark Watson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charlie Brown, Lucy and the Football

Its fame is not what it once was, but most of you will probably still know what I’m talking about when I say that my relationship with Microsoft’s operating systems is best summed up by the interaction between Charlie Brown and Lucy in Charles Schultz’ classic comic strip, Peanuts.

For those of you whose lives weren’t touched by its 50-year run, it’s enough to know that a recurring gag in Peanuts sees Charlie trying and failing to kick an American football, which Lucy always sweeps away at the last second, leaving him flat on his back in the grass. Fortunately for fans of Schultz’ gentle humour, Lucy is always able to convince Charlie to take another run at it – no matter how many times she’s tricked him in the past.

And so to Microsoft, the Lucy of the software world. Every time I encounter a new version of Windows I am gulled into thinking it has genuinely improved, only to take a run at it and find myself sprawled on the metaphorical turf in a matter of minutes. Microsoft’s operating systems have long seemed to me to consist of a cat’s cradle of half-executed ideas, alive with the possibility of spectacular failure. Call me cynical, but I have always felt the assumption underlying Windows is that the user will manage to convince him or herself that it is they who are at fault when catastrophe strikes – as long as the software looks and feels reasonably impressive for the first 15 minutes. In corporate IT they are often assisted in this by the person who imposed the systems on the end users – i.e. the IT administrator. The systems admin went through the same joy/dismay cycle, is indeed convinced it was his/her own fault, but also knows from experience that they can successfully cover it up because the same effect will apply to the end user. Welcome to the maze of twisty little all alike passages that is the Microsoft death spiral of dwindling self-esteem.

Needless to say, when Windows Phone 7 came out I vowed not to fall for Lucy’s tricks again, but with the much hyped release of the first Nokia-Windows device, and analysts predicting that WP7 will be the second most popular platform by 2015, I felt that I could hardly avoid taking a trial-look at the fatal football on here.

The first thing to say is that as far as the enterprise is concerned, Windows Phone 7 is going to have as much impact as the New York earthquake. Lots of field service teams are using Windows Mobile 6.5 (strange but true – it’s because the only ruggedised handsets you can buy in any volume utilise the platform) but this is unlikely to count as an advantage to its predecessor because of what Chris Hazelton calls “the lack of a clear migration path from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone 7.” In the last year, the number of enterprises issuing/catering for Windows Phone 7 fell from 6 percent to 4 percent (Hazelton/ChangeWave Research again), and the downward trend is not likely to reverse unless the number of consumers taking up the OS rises dramatically, forcing IT departments to cater for it as they are now catering for Android and iOS.

According to IDC and Gartner there’s a decent chance that that reversal will be felt by the time 2015 rolls around. Their thinking seems to be that WP will pick up a lot of the current Symbian user-base as well as a decent chunk of migrants from RIM’s Blackberry platform. Only time will tell if that presumes a little too much on the brand loyalty commanded by Nokia and too little on the wooing power of future iterations of Android and iOS.

As far as the software goes (*lining up to kick the football*)…first impressions are good. Microsoft has obviously taken a look at Android, said “we can do better than that” (correct) and, unusually, looked at Apple and thought “we need to make it different enough to matter” (again, correct). Although knowing what you need to do is not the same as knowing how to do it, there’s much to improve. The integration of Office goes beyond the tokenistic (but not by much) and the inclusion of an XBOX Live ‘hub’ takes advantage of what is currently Microsoft’s most exciting asset. The Zune software makes iTunes look like the painful fait accompli most of us know it to be and Bing Maps deserves the wider audience that integration with the platform should give it. I won’t go into further detail here – for those looking for a fuller review of the software, this is a good place to start.

Of course, even if Microsoft doesn’t pull the football out from under their users this time round, how far it flies will depend upon a factor that we haven’t even brought into the equation thus far: the vibrancy of the ecosystem. In other words, if nobody is making apps for WP7, it hardly matters how well the platform stands up and we can revise those 2015 estimates down to zero. As of July this year, the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace held 25,000 apps, against 350,000 for the App Store, and 150,000 for the Android Marketplace (numbers via CNET). Incomparable – but not insignificant.

Microsoft has an expensive road ahead of it in 2012. It will need to spend a lot on wooing both consumers and developers, even as it pushes towards Windows Phone 8 (which is looking like an unnecessary distraction at this point) or the take-up of the platform will sputter and die. And with desktop computing in not-that-long-term decline, that is unthinkable.

 

Mark Watson the former EVP of Technology & Engineering at Antenna and former CEO of Volantis Systems, during which time he blogged frequently for Mobile Masters. 

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Intermittent Signal: Whither Apple Now?

by admin on October 21, 2011 in Intermittent Signal with No comments

By Mark Watson

“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;”

~Richard II, Act III, Scene ii, by William Shakespeare

Will Apple

The demise of leaders makes for great literature. And timeless quotes.

I started my last blog entry with a quote from Blade Runner. It triggered a memory and a train of thought. (This train takes the scenic route, so you’ll have to bear with me.) The first stop on this journey is at something called the Blade Runner Curse.

The 1982 film included a number of prominent brands which form part of the film’s assumed futuristic backdrop ( made in 1982, it was set in 2019). The product placements included Atari, Cuisinart, Pan Am, Bell and Coca Cola. In real life, over the next few years, the first three went bankrupt; Bell was broken up and Coke went through the failed introduction of “New Coke,” though this last was only a brief setback.

Pan Am, though, is newly fashionable, due to the new American series of the same name. In case you haven’t seen it, think Mad Men meets the peculiar 1950′s and 1960′s glamour of civil air travel – a winning combination. A couple of recent articles introducing this series in the UK in turn referenced an older movie, the 1965 comedy, “Boeing Boeing.”

Never seen it? You’re missing out. The plot is simple: Tony Curtis is a playboy living in Paris (obviously). He conducts a series of affairs with a number of airline stewardesses, all mutually oblivious to one another. He can do this by meticulously managing his shenanigans according to the airline timetables, so that as one paramour leaves, another one arrives. But suddenly, all the airlines upgrade to faster jets. The schedules change. Farce ensues. Add to that his predatory best friend, Jerry Lewis (who presumably arrives in France with an honor guard), and the typecast sarcastic housekeeper, Thelma Ritter, a fixture of this kind of 1960s movie.

How is this relevant?

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Intermittent Signal: How Steve Jobs Didn’t Impact My Life. Until He Did

by admin on October 19, 2011 in Intermittent Signal with No comments

By Mark Watson

“The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long – and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy.”

~From “Blade Runner”, 1982. The film’s director, Ridley Scott, would go on to make the famous “1984” commercial, used to launch the Apple Macintosh in January 1984.

I was asked to write something about Steve Jobs.

Now, I never knew Steve Jobs. And not knowing him, I didn’t think of him as “Steve.” Still don’t. And he never “burned so very, very brightly,” on my radar screen in 1984. I’m guessing I wouldn’t have liked him, personally. Too abrupt. Too sure of himself. Too American. Too much (apart from the last part) like me.

Had no interest in an Apple II in 1984...

Not fundamentally like me, though, really, the only great product-manager CEO. I’d never, ever, call myself great; Steve Jobs, I think, was great. A CEO who ran his company through running the product plan, in the belief that everything else—if it could be reliably tethered to the product plan, if he could control the hardware, the software, the content chain, if all of that was tied irrevocably to his vision—could and would be a success.

Unlike my colleague Dan Zeck, I never had an Apple II. The Apple II barely entered my consciousness. The great innovator in UK home computing was Sir Clive Sinclair, with the ZX-81 and the ZX Spectrum.

When I finally bought a decent home computer to replace the Sinclair, it was a Commodore Amiga. I loved that computer – everything about it. But I won’t be holding a candlelit vigil outside the house of Commodore’s CEO, when he passes away (if he hasn’t already). By that stage of the mid-80s, Personal Computer World (the UK equivalent of Byte Magazine), was a kind of Burgess Shale of half-formed, half-thought-out, could-be computers – and the Apple II was as obsolete as the trilobite.

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Intermittent Signal: HTML5 Frustration Comes as Standard

by admin on October 7, 2011 in Intermittent Signal with No comments

By Mark Watson

Hell hath no fury like a self-appointed regulatory body scorned. A little while ago the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA)—an august institution dedicated to developing standards within the mobile device industry—sent me an angry letter because we were still displaying their logo, but had stopped paying our dues. Fair enough, I suppose. But a nerve was definitely touched.

Why? Because the letter reminded me that regulators, like the OMA, are much better at self-promotion than whatever it is they’re supposed to be supporting. In this case,“the leading industry forum for developing market driven, interoperable mobile service enablers.” (I should also note these life-enhancing words are copyright © OMA 2010.) When I was CEO of Volantis (back in the high-blood-pressure years) we participated in many open standards initiatives, and our reward was…our reward was…was…you know, I’ve got no idea what our reward was.

However, I learned to be wary of standards body culture. Did you know, for example, that most (I’m saying most, it’s probably all) large IT suppliers have standards body professionals who make their entire careers out of turning up at standardization events and venturing their opinions?

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