Letter to the editor: Open access is solution to fragmentation

Tracy,
I saw your article on RCRNews.com (Mobile Content & Culture Aug. 14) and wanted to offer a different point of view. I founded one successful mobile developer, Vindigo, and recently started another, Skydeck. I testified to Congress in favor of open access and together with 14 other entrepreneurs wrote to Kevin Martin in support of the principle.
You made two claims: first that there are 700 models of phone for sale in the U.S. but only 200 in the U.K., so consumers have lots of choice even without open access, and second that open access may be bad for developers like Skydeck because it would increase fragmentation-the problem of having to build versions of our applications for many different phones.
The first claim-700 phones for sale in the U.S.-doesn’t pass the smell test. What store can I visit to see 700 phones?
Amazon.com has the largest selection that I know of: 200 listings for phones with service across every major carrier and MVNO, and almost 200 more without service. But that’s not 400 unique phones. For example, Amazon lists 29 versions of the RAZR V3-CDMA and GSM variants in multiple colors for different carriers or unlocked.
If every OEM in the world sold exactly the same phones in the U.S. as in the U.K., there would still be twice as many SKUs in the U.S., because every phone would have a CDMA and GSM flavor. But that’s not twice the choice of handsets.
All this double-counting still doesn’t get you to 700. Are you counting every single unlocked GSM phones available in the U.S.?
Almost all of these phones are designed first for the European or Asian markets and then brought here in the hope of securing carrier distribution. Most are only for sale in boutique retail stores in cities like Miami, New York, or L.A., or online from sites like MobilePlanet. But almost all of them work in the U.K. and many other countries-better than they do in the U.S. since they usually lack the 850 band-and they are typically easier to find there, since many more retailers sell them.
So even if there are 700 different phones for sale in the U.S., it’s a side benefit of open access and innovation in other countries. It’s not because we have a more efficient market here.
Your second claim-that more phones means more work for developers-misses a key issue. We don’t care how many phones there are. We care how many different development platforms they use.
To keep it simple, let’s focus on mobile Web sites. Ten years after the first WAP phones came out, it’s still difficult for developers to build mobile web sites that render correctly on every handset in the market because there are so many different phone browsers out there: multiple versions from Openwave and Access and smaller companies, proprietary browsers from some of the OEMs, mobile versions of IE, Opera, and now Safari.
Why hasn’t the market picked a winner? Because, quite rationally, the carriers don’t want to see any one browser vendor dominate the market. They insist on using multiple vendors, just as they use multiple vendors for everything else in their business. (As a colleague of mine once said, if Alcatel and Lucent did not exist, the carriers would have invented them.)
The consumer can’t change the default browser on her phone after purchase, except on the most expensive handsets. And she’s not about to choose a phone based on the browser it uses, given all her other priorities and the limited selection of phones. So the browser market stays fragmented.
If consumers were free to change the default browser, we’d see dozens of new vendors come to market, complicating things for a while. But consumers and content providers would quickly pick a winner or two, as they did on the desktop-reducing fragmentation. The same applies to application development environments like Flash, Java, BREW, and all the widget frameworks now emerging, as well as novel user interaces like the keyboard you described.
Open access is the solution to fragmentation, not the problem.
Yours sincerely,
Jason Devitt
CEO, Skydeck