Nick Jones

European Symposium finished yesterday and I have a few days free before heading out to Sydney for APAC Symposium. So this seems a good moment to reflect on  some of the mobile themes from Cannes.

I noticed a real difference in sentiment between Cannes and Orlando. In the USA there was a lot of buzz and activity around mobile. People had projects under way and a lot of discussion was about implementation as well as strategy. In Cannes the Europeans were less advanced than the Americans, more discussions were about strategy than implementation. Partly this reflects a fundamental difference in attitude between Europeans and Americans. Europeans tend towards interminable analysis before action, which can be frustrating if you’re a vendor trying to sell things to them. This isn’t altogether surprising, Europe includes nations such as France whose primary export for the past few hundred years has been philosophers, so we can hardly blame them for intellectualising. Americans lean towards action before analysis, sometimes followed by action in a different direction if the first action failed to deliver as expected. In the long term things probably even out, the Europeans make less mistakes, but the Americans get places faster. The Europeans in Cannes also seemed less positive and optimistic than the Americans in Orlando, but much of that could be explained by national attitudes; Europe after all includes traditionally miserable and undemonstrative nations such as we Brits. Overall, I think it could be 6 months or so before the Europeans catch up with American mobile optimism.

While I’m on the subject of undemonstrative Brits, Reuters reports a survey from T-Mobile showing the rise of the British metrotextual. Apparently 22 percent of British men are signing SMSs to male friends with a kiss (x). Some of my colleagues think this is positive indication that the Brits are getting in touch with their feminine side and maybe soon grown British men will actually embrace male friends in public as the French and Italians do. I think it’s a sign of serious degeneration of British moral fibre.

Symposium this year has moved up-market and we have a lot more CIOs attending than in the past. As I chat with them I’m seeing a number of different attitudes towards mobility and consumerisation. So here are a few (very slightly exaggerated) samples of CIO opinions from the US and Europe.

The only safe place for users is jail. This is the attitude of unreformed hard-line CIOs who want to be in charge. They love platforms like Blackberry because they can lock users down and control everything they do. They’re particularly keen on stopping those pesky users from downloading applications from dubious app stores.

Death to iPhone!  The most frequent cause of CIO mobile pain is iPhone; because the fashion-obsessed early adopters demanding it be supported are often on the board of directors and can’t be stopped by conventional stalling tactics like cost or security. These CIOs resent all the aggravation iPhone has caused and wish it had never been invented. They’re trembling at the thought that Apple might open up a second front by releasing a tablet.

It’s already too late; anarchy reigns. Some CIOs have lost control and can’t squeeze the mobile genie back into the bottle  Users are playing with unsanctioned devices in creative and probably dangerous ways. These CIOs – often through no fault of their own – have no effective sanctions against out-of-control users and about the best they can hope for is to avoid blame when something blows up.

I’ve got better things to do than manage mobile devices.  Some of the more forward-looking CIOs believe that providing, supporting and managing mobiles and laptops is a thankless low-value activity. Most of their users already have their own mobiles or netbooks which are more fashionable and functional than the approved corporate device. So they’re looking at approaches like “bring your own” IT funded by stipends or expenses.

Caring but concerned. Contrary to popular belief CIOs aren’t all power crazed dictators who think the main role of users is to disrupt the smooth running of IT services. Many believe it’s reasonable for employees to have a greater choice of devices, and that a lot of interesting innovation will emerge from consumerisation. But they are also responsible enough to worry about the security risks implied by a more laissez-faire attitude and are looking for ways to manage them.

If you were a CIO what sort of CIO would you be?

One of the themes emerging from attendees here in Cannes is the growing problem of employee-owned devices. An informal poll of the audience at yesterday’s mobile scenario presentation showed around 50 percent who expected they’d have to support more employee-owned mobiles accessing corporate systems in the future. User demand for consumer devices like iPhone is a problem, but at least if the enterprise owns the device it can maintain some delusions of control. (Even if its an iPhone which is intrinsically pretty unmanageable because Apple don’t really care about corporate management; and they haven’t yet opened up the platform enough to permit 3rd parties to fill the gaps). However, once the device is owned by an employee the challenges double. You can’t install management software on devices you don’t own, so any control has to be via policies or software in the cloud. Technologically there are some approaches such as Network Access Control (NAC) which work pretty well for PCs, but they struggle with non-Intel devices like smartphones and some netbooks.

However, employee-owned devices aren’t only a problem, they’re an opportunity too. Smartphones will become the default device in Europe; by 2013 we expect around 80 percent of handsets shipped here to be smartphones. So if someone already has a smartphone, why should the enterprise provide another one? Not only can you not prevent employees using their own devices, you may even want to encourage it as a cost-saving opportunity. So better start looking at technologies such as NAC today.

I’m back in Cannes for Euro Symposium, and in a few ways it’s just like last year. It’s pouring with rain again, and the hotel Martinez still can’t make a decent cup of tea for my wife. However, some things are very different. This year Symposium is operating a  much higher level with far more CxOs than ever before; and looking at my appointments for today I can already see a good selection of topics related to mobile projects which are already under way. So perhaps some of last week’s US optimism will be apparent here too. If you’re attending Cannes Symposium and want to meet up with me, today and Tuesday are pretty much booked up, but there are still some slots on Wednesday. I’ll report in detail on how the Europeans are feeling about mobility in a day or so when I’ve given some presentations and talked with more people.

An interesting working draft just emerged from W3C for something called EmotionML- Emotion Markup Language. The goal is to provide a framework for annotating information with human emotions. There is a clear need for some form of EmotionML, especially in the area of context where future mobile devices will provide lots of clues to our emotional state. E.g. the camera can see our expression, maybe the microphone can deduce our respiration rate, and future biometric sensors may provide information about skin conductivity, heart rate and so on. Emotional understanding will be vital for successful contextual systems. Inappropriate contextual advertising could aggravate me instead of informing me, and have a negative impact on your brand. So if you can identify that grimace on my face and feed it back in time to abort the ad with a polite apology then I’m much more likely to think you’re the sort of caring company I’d be prepared to do business with.

However, the authors of the EmotionML draft admit that they are providing a framework rather than a complete solution. They allow you to tag information with emotions, but stop short of defining the units and scales to measure them. The problem is that emotions are subjective; we can all agree what being scared feels like, but what units should we use to measure terror? If you’re a vampire maybe your unit of scariness is the Buffy, but for for guys who remember that era the same unit might measure levels of unachievable pulchritude. Years back I read a book about a UK government weapons development department who used a unit called the Pouter to measure bureaucratic obstruction, named after a particularly obdurate Navy commander. In practice they found the millipouter more appropriate for everyday use. But seriously, if we’re ever going to make context work we have to agree on at least a few common units to measure emotional response values that can be shared between applications.

So your mission for today, should you choose to accept it, is to propose some universal units for the measurement of key emotions. When you do I may be able to communicate exactly how happy I’m feeling about EmotionML.

I needed a Windows 7 PC, but like many home CIOs I’d refused to let Vista into my house so had no upgrade path for any of the existing machines. So I begged the home CFO (aka wife) who reluctantly allowed me to go and buy the parts to build a new PC. I don’t usually go down the self-assembly route with hardware because I realised decades ago that assembling software is a lot more fun. But occasionally my masochistic streak comes to the surface; so yesterday I bought a bare bones case, plugged in a few drives and a graphics adapter, installed Win7 and amazingly it all works wonderfully. It was my least painful Windows installation ever, and I now have a shiny new quad core desktop running Win7 and Aero for a very modest price. However networking is a mega-pain, I can’t find an 11n network adapter (card or USB) that has 64 bit drivers. I’m reduced to wired networking which is an embarrassment for an analyst who covers wireless, not to mention a huge inconvenience.

So although I like Win7, in the wireless area it doesn’t yet seem ready for enterprise adoption.

UPDATE – Good news, I was being a little harsh to Win7 there. My colleague Steve Kleynhans has pointed me at some products that can do the job. Part of the problem here in the UK is that the online retailers haven’t got up to date information on their web sites, many don’t admit that the 11n cards they stock support Win7, let alone 64 bit Win7. So when you’re browsing the site it’s impossible to tell if the product will work, which tends to give a poor impression of the availability of 64 bit drivers and 11n cards. Now my only challenge is to get a card delivered despite the postal strike that’s going on in the UK.

UPDATE 2 – THE SAGA CONTINUES – I drove to a local electronics store to buy a WiFi adapter, because I’m basically too impatient to order from the web and risk postal delays. Instant gratification beats waiting any day. Nothing on the shelf in the store actually admitted to working with Win 7, but that doesn’t matter because Netgear helpfully put a 24 hour tech support number on the side of the box. This is what mobile phones are for, so I called it. I got through to someone in a call centre somewhere and asked the simple question: “I’m holding a box containing your xxx WiFi adapter, does it have drivers to work with 64 bit Windows 7”. And he didn’t know the answer. So I still don’t have WiFi on my Win 7 system and am feeling that some retailers and hardware manufacturers need a few lessons in customer service.

One of my colleagues just commented that people are frequently telling him to act his age. Another Californian colleague once remarked that one of the great things about growing up was that you could roller blade around your kitchen without anyone complaining. This started me thinking about age; we do a lot of surveys looking at how mobile behaviour changes with age, but the problem is – which age? It seems to me that we all have several ages:

Chronological age – the tragic number you reluctantly admit to when filling in forms.

Physical age – the age you appear, which depends on how hard you’re trying on any particular day, and the amount of botox and plastic surgery you can afford.

Subjective mental age – how old do you think you are? Most of us seem to freeze in our teens or twenties which explains why I still fantasise about becoming a rock star.

Objective mental age – how old do you seem to external observers? The colleague whose comment triggered this thought seems to be under-achieving here.

Technological age – it used to be that techno-habits such as IM and social networking were the prerogative of youth, but now they’ve spread way beyond their early adopter age groups. We see silver surfers, tweeting grannies, middle-aged fashion-phone users, and 10 year olds playing games on their parent’s iPhones. Anyone who’s been a parent will remember those times when you’d risk your treasured technology just to get a few minutes of peace. There’s still a lot of technological ageism however, a while back I was depressed by one of our young focus group subjects who remarked that “mobile email is for middle-aged men”.

What fascinates me are the massive mismatches between these different ages. I can think of people with a chronological age of 50, a physical age in their 30s, a self-image frozen in their teens, an early-adopter technology mentality, and an apparent mental age that oscillates between 10 and 60. So I guess the message is that you need to be cautious when interpreting the results of surveys that correlate mobile habits with age. And as for me, I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

I spent several hours roaming around the London Symbian show SEE 2009 yesterday. SEE is a rather unfocussed event, the exhibitors range from companies selling mobile virtualisation and low level touch screen IP through testing tools all the way up to consultancies wanting to build high level applications. SEE really needs to decide whether it’s a show for handset manufacturers or software developers, at the moment it’s aiming at both audiences and not doing a good job for either. SEE was also a disappointingly small show, given that Symbian is the dominant smartphone OS by a large margin. There are more Apple engineers at Apple WWDC than attendees at SEE. So there’s still a lot of work to do. However, I had some interesting discussions about both Symbian and mobile development.

Immersion the haptics company, had a stand showing lots of handsets using their technology. One of the most interesting ideas we talked about was “pre-location haptics”. This is a technology for touch screens; as you slide your finger across the screen the haptic vibration changes to indicate when your finger is aligned over an active area such as a virtual key. So you get feedback before you press the key. I have a good feeling about this technology; or more precisely I hope that I will soon have a good feeling about it, once it starts emerging in handsets.

How sophisticated can Symbian become? Symbian gets a lot of bad press for not being competitive with iPhone, so I had several discussions about where Symbian could go in the future. There are two schools of thought here. The Symbian foundation view enthusiastically articulated by Lee Williams is that Symbian is a platform that can easily power winning high end devices to compete with iPhone. Lee points to handsets such as the SE Satio to illustrate that Symbian is evolving in this direction. The other side of this debate is illustrated by Nokia themselves who recently built a Maemo Linux handset, the N900. I believe that what drove this project was Nokia’s view that Symbian is held back by a lot of historical baggage plus the need to support a very wide range of handset capabilities and price points. Therefore it can’t provide the features and user experience needed at the very top end of the market where iPhone plays, so a new platform is needed to power the next generation of handsets.

My view is that both sides of this dispute are partly right, but the problem is the UI not the platform. The underlying Symbian platform is very powerful and can do pretty much anything, but it’s being held back by an unexciting user experience. I don’t believe the visual experience needed by future high-end handsets will be achievable with the graphics and CPU of a low-end smartphone. If Symbian split the user experience layers into high-end and mid-range variants it could be more competitive.

One of the interesting things I can do as a Gartner analyst is to mine some of the data that we collect from our web site. I just trawled through the anonymised search strings for the July to September quarter and in the mobile / communications domain the topic people were searching for information on most frequently was ….. mobile devices. Adding together generic searches such as “mobile device” and “smartphone” with searches for specific devices such as “iphone” or “blackberry” shows me that mobile devices make up about 2x as many searches as the next most popular comms-related topic which was unified communications. This is only fair, mobile devices are much cooler and more interesting than unified comms which is a topic I detest because it misses the point about the real purpose of communications. The interest in devices also mirrors my experience at US symposium where many of my client meetings were about device selection, device vendors and platforms.

One of the joys of an analysts job is I get to play with a lot of mobile devices lent to me by kind-hearted vendors, and last week in the US the two handsets I used most were the Nokia E72 and the Motorola Blur. The E72 is a very worthy successor to the E71 and is the best Symbian business handset I’ve used to date. It looks good, has nice email software, and a good keyboard. About the only quibble I have with it, is that I wish the new optical sensor were a bit more sensitive. The Blur is also a good handset, if a bit chunky, and it makes me think that Moto may have turned the corner. The Blur also illustrates how fast  Android is maturing into a credible platform. I was less captivated by the social networking widgets all over the Blur’s main screen mostly because I don’t use them. I have a theory that you can either have a life or talk about your life. I choose the former so don’t use Facebook or twitter much.

I’ll be at the Symbian show tomorrow, and will likely have some thoughts to report on afterwards. Next week I’ll be at Gartner’s European Symposium in Cannes; hopefully I’ll see you there.

Symposium is over and it’s time to share a few of the impressions from my many discussions with clients and vendors.

Everyone is busy. In the wireless and mobile space my overwhelming impression was one of purposeful activity. Most people wanted to discuss projects that were either under way or imminent. Wireless technology hasn’t yet caught up with all the requirements; for example I talked with a CTO who wanted to stream high frame rate, high resolution video over wireless from a helicopter. I guess the best you can do today would involve running up a huge bill for satellite data, and even then the frame rate might not be enough.

There’s going to be more Apple indigestion. Lots of people were interested in how far they can go with iPhone as an enterprise device and application platform. Some had started to deploy a few iPhone apps internally, and some of those who’d done so were regretting it. Apple still isn’t an enterprise vendor. By that I mean the level of management and control necessary to support large iPhone handset and application deployments isn’t there. For example one client commented that she found it impossible to stop employees updating their iPhone OS when they plugged into iTunes to replicate music. She has no way to know which OS updates everyone has applied, and can’t choose to defer OS updates on her corporate devices until after she’s tested her apps against new OS versions. If I were a CIO I’d fight to limit iPhone to thin client and email and resist deploying native apps.

Consumerisation. I had several discussions about employee-owned handsets or laptops and also discovered some large deployments of consumer products such as microblogging tools. Consumerisation is also forcing companies to think very carefully about some of the implications of employee-owned devices. E.g. some lawyers worry about who owns the intellectual property if corporate information is created on a device which isn’t owned by the corporation.

Federal achievement. I chatted with a lot of US government clients this year and I hope they’ll forgive me for saying I am amazed how much they manage to achieve despite the impenetrable regulations which surround every action they take. As an outsider who’s spent his life in the private sector, government IT seems to me like trying to drive with both hands tied behind your back. For example I regularly advise clients to survey their customers to better understand which devices they own and what mobile habits they have. But federal organisations aren’t allowed to do surveys. Amazing.

The bottom line: a good symposium with lots of mobile activity and innovation. It will be interesting to compare attitudes in Cannes and Sydney with the positive outlook I’ve seen in the US.