Vodafone's 360 man walks Pieter Knook, Vodafone's Director of Internet Services, has walked, after tweeting his anticipation of his "freedom" last week and leaving the operator with little in the way of internet services. Pieter Knook was nicked from Microsoft in 2008, and made head of the newly-formed Vodafone Internet Services Division. Those …
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Or so I reckon.
If you look at what's going on in the mobile industry, and compare it to the general purpose computing industry, the whole thing is a train wreck.
There's Apple vs Android vs Symbian vs Meegoo vs Microsoft vs etc. But even in Android, Symbian (& Meegoo?) there's the variations imposed by the handset manufacturers, and then the variations imposed by the network operators on top of that, thus VF's 360.
Now, how the hell is Joe Public supposed to pick a platform that's going to have longevity, stability, reliability, flexibility, openness? Well, you can't. There isn't one. I can't think of a single mobile platform that isn't plagued by problems of some sort or another. Apple's is inflexible - you can do what Jobs will let you, an no more. Android is suffering massive upgrade issues because of the fragmentation. Symbian, whilst good under the hood, fails to be good enough in the UI department, and suffers from fragementation too. What's Microsoft WP7???
Compare that to the desktop / laptop world. My Windows PC generally updates no problems at all. Macs are reasonably useful and do a half decent job for their users. Linux - a bit specialist - but it upgrades too, software seems to work, etc. etc.
All the companies are desparately trying to become the owner of the mobile world. Apple comes closest, but is a massive disappointment in that they're trying to corner the content provision too and screw as much cash as possible out of their walled garden. Google have let loose the beast Android and let everyone else (handest manufactureres and networks and app developers alike) screw it up. Nokia have let Symbian wither, and sadly its nearly dead. I say sadly because it's the only mobile OS out there the core of which focuses properly on the most important aspect of battery powered devices - power consumption. Just a shame about everything else Nokia have placed on top of it. The result is that the industry as a whole performing very badly so far as us the public are concerned.
What we want is handsets that conform to a standard of sorts - much like PCs are, well, PCs. Then we want a smallish choice of OSes that we, the general public, can buy independently and install on our handset. Then we want to be able to acquire (maybe even buy!!!) apps and install them. And then we want to be able to connect it to a network of our choice. That's what we really want.
The industry doesn't want that though, oh no. It means the end of large profits for the handset manufacturers. The network operators become mere providers of data pipes. The OS manufacturers lose control of the content provision side of things, but will end up selling more copies of their OS. The App developers gain massively because at last there's only one or two platforms to have to develop for, so they can reach a larger audience. This in turn benefits the content providers.
Someone like Google could make it happen - produce a hardware spec, and a closed OS with dev tools and then just put it out there, start selling it to all and sundry. Much like IBM / MS did in the 1980s with the PC. But it's too late for Google now. Apple nearly did that, but are greedy for short term gains so have closed off the content / app provision.
Rant over. Grrr.
...shot humanly and burred next to the rose bush.
Its a pile of crap. I'm stuck with the Samsung H1 again as my Nokia is being fixed again (as they didn't fix my screen last time). Its all about 360 and hard to use as a phone. I can't see everyone I know dumping their phone provider and moving to vodafone so they can catch me on 360 instead of Facebook, where the world can reach me.
Vodafone, and the other providers, stop thinking you can make phones and sell the ones make by the people with the experience. And with the money they aren't wasting on that crap, they can provide a better service or think up better price deals.
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