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So far this year I have flown over a hundred thousand miles. I am therefore a frequent consumer of airport security services. It occurred to me today at New York’s Kennedy Airport that airport security could be staffed entirely by Oompa Loompas and there would be no appreciable decrease in service. In fact, efficiency would most definitely increase, and it would be a hell of a lot more entertaining. Imagine instead of the indifferent automatons you are used to, a staff of energetic, orange-toned little people processing your bags through security with their characteristic snappy work ethic: While you are dutifully discarding your semi-solid deodorant into the trash bin, you watch in fascination as Veruca Salt is fed into the x-ray machine and irradiated into a glowing mound of toxic sludge while the Oompa Loompas break into a well-choreographed and insightful song and dance about carry-on deception and resultant consequences. I am being totally serious – the Oompa Loompas would work perfectly for airport security. People would genuinely enjoy their wacky antics, and best of all, our government could pay them in chocolate.

While it may be true that ex-fast food workers are ill-suited for the job of “last line of defense in our great nation’s war on terror,” they are ultimately just people like you and me, hopefully the best of the crop, and so they are more or less forgiven, but I must say that as a consumer of their services I am unimpressed.

More importantly, I am thoroughly unhappy with the rules surrounding the process of getting through airport security. Today my less than 1 oz of clear deodorant in its 4 oz clear dispenser was confiscated. An argument ensued:
“This is over the limit for liquids,” he said.
“Well, you can see that the package says four ounces, and so if there was half of it left, that would be two ounces, which is less than the allowed three ounces per item. But you can see that there is less than even half of it left.” I said.
“We have to go by what it says on the package.”
“So if I carried an empty four ounce bottle on board you would confiscate it?”
“No, because it would be empty.”
“But if there was one ounce of liquid in it, you would confiscate it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s the rule.”

Tonight when I get home I am going to scratch the quantities off of all of my personal care products and see what happens.

It turns out that the rule is arbitrary, and so enforcing it is twice as annoying to me as a consumer of airport security services. There was no study that said a 3 ounce liquid bomb is insufficient to blow up a plane, but 3.1 ounces would do the trick. The rule used to be that liquids of any quantity were allowed in the airplane cabin. Then someone tried to board a plane with the liquid ingredients to create a binary explosive device, and the rule changed to no liquids on the plane. This was bad for consumers, so they changed the rule to allow liquids, but in containers of 3 ounces or less, and no more than can fit in a 1-quart clear plastic ziplock bag. This was bad for non-US citizens, who buy their personal care products in milliliters instead of ounces, with the standard size for “smallish” being 100 milliliters, which is 3.4 ounces. So the rule was changed to allow liquids in containers of 3.4 ounces or less, but everything still has to fit in a clear plastic 1-quart ziplock bag.

Logically speaking, if the goal of creating the rule was to make sure nobody brings enough liquid on a plane to potentially blow it up, the best rule would be to disallow all liquids. But when the consumer was considered, the rule was changed. Now we have a rule that is largely ineffectual at achieving its intended purpose and does not go far enough to accommodate most consumers. I don’t feel any safer, but I sure as hell feel a lot more inconvenienced. I am forced to conform to a standard that has been put in place arbitrarily that doesn’t really help me. When I look around at my fellow travelers in line at airport security, I see unhappy consumers forced into unnatural behavior. Mostly I see a certain confusion and consternation on their faces.

What this has to do with mobile handsets
My user interface to airport security differs from what I want it to be, which would be more useful. My airport security interface is 3.4 ounce plastic bottles, but I want to interface with personal care products in a very different way. Specifically, I just want to buy what I want regardless of package size and I want that interface to work everywhere I go. Just as I don’t want my product selections to be dictated by package size, I don’t want my communication options to be dictated by my handset’s user interface. I want what I want, and I should be able to get it, but the rules surrounding the delivery of my mobile communications are so lame that I simply cannot. Even if my device was capable of accessing my information and tools the way I want, my network operator may not have enabled access at all.

Also today I decided that I am done with my Windows Mobile handset. The device itself is great. It is the Cingular 2125 made by HTC. It has great industrial design, the screen size is nice and the speaker quality is good. Overall it is a very dense piece of technology, so far impervious to my abuse. But the operating system just sucks. I actually have to reboot my phone frequently. WTF is up with that? I have used Nokia, Moto, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Kyocera handsets and never had to reboot them. The only thing all of my many handsets have in common is that they don’t use Windows Mobile. It occurred to me quite violently that putting any form of Windows on a mobile phone is an exceedingly bad idea. I am ready to move beyond 1970s technology. I feel like my handset is the restrictive equivalent of a 3 ounce plastic bottle, but what I really want is 12 ounces.

As my deodorant was being confiscated today, I had an epiphany about handset operating systems in general: On some level, they all suck. They all suck because they are being applied in a way that they should not be. It is like airport security – the idea is sound, but the execution is flawed. The OS is also one of the key elements that could be changed to bring mobile consumers an improved communication experience.

Mobile devices suffer from the following problems:
- They are built for the voice world, but are expected to work in the data world. Those clearly built for data are terrible at voice, though consumers desire data and voice in one device.
- They treat consumers as homogenous, inflexibly disallowing personalization and customization.
- The user interface evolved from a voice-centric use case.
- The user interface evolved from a circuit-switched world. What the hell is the numeric keypad for? I don’t know numbers anymore – I know names. Aren’t phone numbers a relic of a non-packet-based world where the technology was so primitive that it couldn’t understand anything more complicated than DTMF tones?
- Size limits HMI. The Human Machine Interface of a device that is 2×3 inches can only be so robust.
- Intended use case limits HMI. A communication tool meant to enable a mobile consumer can only be so complicated.
- Human capability limits HMI. Humans have only three senses that can be contemplated in design, and we can only think so fast.
- State of technology limits HMI. Even if the best communication tool is an implanted extension of your conscious thought, enabling a sort of computer-assisted telepathy, that doesn’t exist yet.
- WORST OF ALL, mobile devices are largely seen as the intersection of telephones (100-year old technology, the basic user interface of which has not changed at all since its original inception) and personal computers (30-year old technology, the basic user interface of which has not changed at all since Bill and Steve took it from Xerox PARC.)

That last part is important. The mouse-based point-and-click user interface developed by Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center was so advanced compared to the direction in which computers were evolving from their origins that it might as well have been created by an advanced alien race and bestowed upon humanity. And now we see an entire information infrastructure being built around that user interface. The internet browser is a point-and-click environment, and the mass of information contained within has been optimized for that UI. Now we see browsers on mobile phones attempting to take internet pages built for 18-inch computer screens and present them on 2-inch screens. We see the 5-direction button becoming standard on mobile phones in an attempt to enable consumers to point and click at little pages on their little screens where there will eventually be little banner ads to click on that will take consumers to more little pages. We consume repackaged content from the broadcast world in a version that is less compelling that its original counterpart because our best minds are devoid of original thoughts and so default to media distribution models that already worked even though the channel is completely different. Instead of creating communication tools optimized for the mobile environment, we torture web-based constructs into sub-optimal and watered down versions of themselves to the collective yawn of a mobile consumer base the nature of which we are dumbfounded about as an industry as to why we cannot entice anyone beyond the early adopter segment.

Come on, man. Really? No, what we need is to empower consumers to contextualize their communication by combining the media capabilities of their mobile devices with their desired communication modes. We need to recognize that the upstream flow is as important as the downstream flow as the line is blurred between media and communication. We need to provide consumers with a basic UI construct built around an externalized service layer that liberates functions and data stores currently locked to the device, network or service provider. Consumers should be able to then customize their preferences, communicate in their chosen context, make their profile portable across any network or communication service provider and define content consumption preferences in a mobile relevant context. They should own their content, their identity and their clickstream and be able to transact it in a marketplace to their benefit and the benefit of the network of communication nodes that every consumer will eventually become, creating an information cloud of user-generated and user-distributed value as transparently as pointing their camera at a sunset or calling for a pizza to be delivered. Just as the user interface of the telephone is immediately apparent – you put one end of the user interface to your ear and speak into the other end – so must our data communication tools become elegantly simple but not simplified from some other familiar construct.

If mobile communication is a network-based application, then the intelligence should be baked into the network, not the device. If complexity is required, it is in the network where it can serve consumers transparently and not at the device where all it can do is confound them. Devices should be blank canvases, the conceptual equivalent to the internet browser, onto which consumers can paint their communication preferences regardless of network, device manufacturer, geographic location or carrier technology. No OEM, even the ones with no possibility of winning in the current paradigm, has the guts to make a revolutionary device like the one I am talking about. Even the much-anticipated iPhone from Apple will still be just an iPod with a wireless connection, locking consumers into a different kind of hell in which all mobile media comes from iTunes and all communication tools conform to the over-designed minimalist aesthetic that characterizes all things Apple.

I sure would like to see it though, as I believe it is the required stepping stone to revolutionizing personal communication.

So, long time no post, but I was gone for most of November getting married and then there was the honeymoon, etc. (We are registered at Williams Sonoma. Please go buy us something. Since receiving the panini grill, ordinary sandwiches are a thing of the past in our house.)

So I got back last weekend and plugged back into the world and I saw moconews’ James Pearce’s mention of a ZD Net UK article citing Google’s fundamental misunderstanding of an industry in which they are not the gatekeeper:

This is probably going to cause more controversy than needed: Chris Sacca, head of special initiatives at Google, said on a panel this week that operators have lobbied the search giant, asking it to stop people accessing Google Mobile Maps,” reports ZDNET UK.
He said this at an Oxford University event on a panel…”They’re inserting themselves in between you and an application that you want. I think that has scary, scary implications,” said Sacca.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the value of Google in the mobile space. I think people are looking for a big success story in the mobile space, and I think they think that if we could have a success story as big as Google’s success story on the web, then that would be great.

A lot of money has been spent to build wireless networks that are not generating enough data revenue to justify their expense. It feels like the roaring 1999’s on the internet, doesn’t it? A lot of infrastructure is built but it isn’t quite mature yet, people are sort of using it, some companies are doing some interesting things, there isn’t a well-established set of rules and there is a sense that the best is yet to come. So who better to architect a success story in the mobile space than someone who has already done it on the web?

Well, maybe Google is well positioned to be massively successful in the mobile space, but comments like the one from Chris Sacca at Google indicate an apparent fundamental lack of understanding of the mobile data space. To put it simply, the carriers are not “inserting” themselves between consumers and the applications they want as Chris says, rather, Google is inserting itself into a relationship that the carrier already has with the consumer. I think based on his quote that Chris sees the mobile phone as a little internet-connected PC and the “scary, scary implications” of a carrier inserting itself between a consumer and what they want is some kind of control that shouldn’t be there in that it has the ability to limit consumer choice.

I talked to three people at carriers this week who thought Chris’ comment was an indication of Google’s arrogance. (The first guy brought it up unsolicited, like, “Hey – did you see that Google guy’s comment?” The other two I asked what they thought about it, and both had seen it via moconews.) I can understand the carriers’ point of view and I can understand Google’s point of view and I don’t think Google is arrogant and this is why:

The carriers have a direct relationship with their customers and they make a lot of money on those relationships. They would like to make more, and that means offering their customers 3rd-party content and services. The 3rd-party content and service providers would also like to have a direct relationship with the carriers’ customers, but there is the pesky carrier trying to make sure it doesn’t happen, and in a relatively closed network environment such as a proprietary wireless network, the carriers have the ability to protect that customer relationship. And they should, not just from a competitive standpoint, but because spectrum costs a lot of money. The 3rd-party content and service providers calling for the carriers to open their networks and be dumb pipes should consider the effect of flooding such a network with unmetered access to broadband content. It’s not like you can just light up more dark fiber whenever you want. Google just doesn’t understand what it means to operate in a closed network environment.

Google made its mark in an open network environment and competed on the basis of their superior consumer offering and won fairly and squarely. It is no wonder that they would like to see every network open because they reasonably believe they can win if given the chance to compete for consumers’ attention.

The problem is about business models. Let me use some made-up numbers to make my point: The cost for Google to deliver Google Maps over the internet approaches zero, so let’s say <$.01 per map served. Each delivery of a Google Map can be monetized via an ad-based model for a market-determined rate above Google’s cost to deliver it, so let’s say something like $.03. So a $30 CPM grosses them $20. Not bad.

What a very relevant application for mobile phones. And they built it and it was good. The problem is that the cost to Google to deliver the product is essentially unchanged, but they create additional cost on the value chain – in this case for the network operator.

Here is a real-life indication of carrier cost from Virgin Mobile’s Website: Web Browsing - Get 24 hours of access and up to 500KB of use (that’s about 50 average Web pages, but sizes vary) for only $1.

Based on this, each average web page is costing the consumer $.02 through Virgin Mobile. I’ll assume the data cap is at 500KB because somewhere around twice that, Virgin Mobile starts losing money. Every other carrier also either meters access, restricts it, or both.

The problem is that in this example, Google’s CPM is market-determined at $30 for a web-based product. Can it simply be put into the mobile space? Adding the $.02 the carrier needs to cover their data cost, there is nothing left over for Google.

I don’t think Virgin Mobile wants to IP-block Google Maps, but I think at some point they would argue that they would HAVE to block Google Maps because it is just too costly to provision in the manner in which Google would like to have it provisioned.

Now, if Google would like to sit down with the carriers and build a product offering that directly monetized Google Maps in which the carriers received a non-trivial share of revenue for sharing their network and very valuable customer relationship, that would be fine, I think. But again we have a clash of business models: Google, like most web-based companies, believes that most services should be free and ad-supported.

But what about Instant Messaging? That is free and ad-supported on the web but directly monetized in the mobile space, and it is a hugely valuable mobile product. Why should any other web-based service in the mobile space be any different? The fear of trying will slow innovation.

The bottom line is that, believe it or not, Google needs the carriers more than the carriers need Google. Yes, Verizon Wireless would like to see higher data ARPU, but let’s not forget that regardless of data revenue, they throw off well in excess of $6 billion in free cash flow, and it isn’t coming from ringtones, games and Google Maps. As such, the carriers are in a position to dictate the terms by which they will have Google on their networks. Google isn’t being arrogant by asserting their point of view, which btw happens to be completely accurate. But the carriers are an important part of the equation for a reason. Yes, Google and every other 3rd-party content or service provider should continue their quest to disintermediate the carriers. Similarly, the carriers should continue to defend their very valuable positions. In the meantime, though, understanding the carrier business models and working within those constraints would be a smart move.