Reality Check: Current and future platform dynamics

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
Over the past three years there has been an irreversible shift towards open platforms in the mobile marketplace. With this rapid adoption of openness and collaboration, mobile has yet again proven that it is one of the fastest paced industries with the highest capacity to embrace change. While there is very little doubt as to the rationale or benefits of this movement, there are still some legitimate questions around the key criteria that qualify a mobile platform as an “industry platform” and perhaps more importantly, how the mobile OS landscape is going to evolve in the future.
For a very long time, the value line has resided at the bottom of the mobile software stack as many stakeholders originally believed that this was where true differentiation could be achieved. This line of thinking is still very much alive in certain quarters and therefore, the mobile market is still seeded with a number of proprietary in-house platforms. While these platforms are addressing certain market niches, they will never become a truly universal mass market solution that will unlock innovation for the 3 billion mobile subscribers across the globe.
Amongst the various flavors of industry platforms that have emerged, there are a few subtle but crucial differences that should be highlighted as they can impact the bottom lines of companies taking part and/or supporting these initiatives. The essence of an industry platform is open and equitable collaboration: collaborative strategic planning, collaborative development, and collaborative decision making. This type of shared stewardship can only be realized via a well structured and completely independent governance model.
What we are noticing is that various industry platform initiatives have varying levels of collaboration. Ditto for governance, which goes from being completely absent in certain cases, to being skewed in favor of certain stakeholders. Governance should enable releasing of control points so that platform participants can be fully involved in choosing their leadership team and influencing the strategic direction, architecture, roadmap and components of an industry platform. The lack of equitable collaboration and well-considered governance will hinder innovation and will limit opportunity to a select few stakeholders.
One of the fundamental factors that drove the mobile industry towards platformization was the high levels of fragmentation that restrained its advancement. While there is widespread consensus that future industry platforms should endeavor to dispel fragmentation while protecting commercial innovation, the mechanisms that are being employed to achieve this often are lacking. Devising a strong and sophisticated IPR policy to tackle the afore-mentioned issues is no easy feat but it is equally not an option. An IPR policy should ensure that all fixes and optimizations are shared while disallowing stakeholders to assert their patents on each other. The end goal should be both to protect the guys in the garages that are developing long tail applications while giving larger organizations peace of mind so that they can spend their energy on future innovations rather than trying to protect former ones.
The mobile marketplace is rightfully recognized for being one of the most competitive industries, which will naturally create challenges in balancing platform collaboration with platform innovation and competition. A key to striking this balance is ensuring that the industry platform does not insert itself in the middle of an operator or device vendor’s customer relationships. The industry platform should adopt a white label strategy and be brand and business model agnostic so as to offer stakeholders the ability to undertake deep customization on top of the platform.
Technology, be it at the foundation of a platform or at the perimeters of the value line, plays an essential role in determining the scalability and potential of an industry platform. In this age of digital convergence and seamless connectivity, the dexterity with which a platform lends itself to multiple device types, form factors, development environments, is a true indication of how future-proof it will be. This is especially an important decision for developers who would like extend their services beyond mobile to adjacent devices and markets. Technology that forms the basis of the platform (the kernel) determines its adaptability to various types of devices, hence its suitability for a convergence strategy whilst support for multiple development environments and runtimes makes a platform accessible to a wide range of developer communities and ensures portability of applications as well as the broadest possible reach.
As the value line moves further up the mobile stack, the mobile industry is rapidly moving towards open, collaborative handset platforms in order to enable advanced service delivery models. Various consortia are defining and implementing these industry platforms in a variety of ways; however, the key underpinnings remain governance, IPR policy, collaboration, brand and business model neutrality, core technology sustainability and support for a broad range of standardised runtimes and development environments.
2010 stands to be a year where industry platforms see massive adoption and deployment by some of the world’s largest mobile operators and device manufacturers. Likewise, the underlying governance constructs and independence of these platforms (or the lack thereof) will become increasingly evident this year – identifiable by the business models that are facilitated by these emerging devices. “Open” platforms that disproportionately favor select stakeholders may see short-term success, but strategies will most certainly evolve based on returns from these initial deployments – and will naturally turn towards true industry platforms that afford the greatest level innovation and opportunity for all participants in the mobile ecosystem.
As Director of Global Marketing for LiMo Foundation, Andrew Shikiar is responsible for helping develop and articulate LiMo’s vision and market strategy. Shikiar possesses significant strategic marketing and business development expertise in cutting-edge technologies and market-shifting industry initiatives.He served as Membership Director for industry consortia the Liberty Alliance Project and Blade.org. At Sun Microsystems he helped drive the company’s Java and Liberty Alliance launch initiatives. In addition, he was a founding executive at Radical Communication, where he helped raise nearly $20 million in venture financing and drove market adoption of interactive video and email marketing technology solutions.