The Great Mobile Market Shift

by Eric March on April 5, 2008 at 4:02 am

In 1958, an MIT physicist named Willy Higginbotham, by all accounts a pretty dry fellow who worked on radar displays during World War II, brought something to the world that would ultimately change the way it amused itself. He invented the video game. It wasn’t much, really. A simple tennis game he called Tennis for Two that he designed using a couple of potentiometers for control and an oscilloscope for the display, to show off to people during MIT’s annual Visitor’s Day. This gave rise to video games played on expensive mainframes in universities and labs across the country. (Anyone remember Space War?)

In 1966, Ralph Baer, an engineer for TV maker Loral, and then for Sanders Associates, invented The Brown Box based on an idea he had for years but which he could not convince his bosses of the time to do anything with. The Brown Box would become the world’s first home video game, which also played a tennis game. Ralph would go on to make the Odyssey series of home video game consoles released through Philips-Magnavox, as well as the electronic Simon video game.

In 1970, Nolan Bushnell, under the auspices of Nutting Associates, would bring Space War to the arcades, and it would fail. That failure would cause him to leave Nutting, go back and, with the help of partners Al Alcorn and Ted Dabney, form Atari and create the seminal arcade game: Pong. Its success would skyrocket Atari to untold success and bring about the video arcade revolution, and home versions of Pong would popularize that which Baer started.

In 1977, Atari would again revolutionize the world of home entertainment when the fruits of a project known as Stella would be realized as the Video Computer System, better known as the VCS or 2600. From that point on, the face of video games would never be the same.

Atari didn’t invent the video game. They didn’t even invent the home video game console. What they did was make them popular — insanely so. In Atari’s own words, they “reinvented the video game.” They changed the way we entertained ourselves when out and about and at home. They did what was done before, but they did it right. It was a heady time to be alive and a geek, and in retrospect it seemed like such a time would never come again.

But in a very real way, it is coming again, only this time it’s happening to the mobile market. I thought it was coming again when personal digital assistants turned up on the scene, and it did, sort of, but PDAs were never mainstream, and never really made it too far outside the niche they catered to until the whole concept of convergence took hold in the form of smartphones. But even smartphones couldn’t bring a renaissance to the PDA, and they remained merely a handy adjunct to the cell phone.

Up until now, PDAs and the smartphones they became hopelessly enmeshed with were fairly dry, staid things. Oh, they worked, they had a bit of flash and pizazz here and there, but on the whole they were still built with utility foremost in mind, and entertainment only as an afterthought. Not even flashy veneers and gimmicky features could hide or mitigate the stolid and twitchy underpinnings of the existing operating systems they were married to. They never worked the way you truly wished they would deep down, and it’s always been a case of too many cooks: One makes the hardware, another does the operating system, a third picks and chooses the features to add or exclude, and a fourth slaps on some funky UI that invariably looks awkward and contrived.

That all changed with the release of the iPhone. For the first time, one company with the experience and the tools to do everything did exactly that: The hardware, the operating system, software that ran on it, and the distribution system. For once, the operating system, UI, and hardware were all designed concurrently by the same people such that everything fit together perfectly. Furthermore, it was designed from the perspective of a user experience, not simply a device of utility. It’s a phone, it’s an iPod, it’s a PDA, it’s a game console — and it was intended and designed to be all of these things — to excel at all of these things — from the ground up. Sure, it wasn’t initially, but it was built with the joss to be able to do these things quite handily should the time ever come that it needs to.

In releasing the iPhone, Apple has finally given the PDA and the smartphone its renaissance. They tackled the technology from a completely different perspective, and the resulting device is revolutionizing the way smartphones are regarded and used. The UI is simple, clean and intuitive, the applications work beyond expectation, and even further, all of the little notions and niceties you wanted in a device — plus things you probably never even considered — have been thought out and included.

Further even to that, Google has leapt into the fray with Android, which is shaping up to be something that isn’t an iPhone, but has a slew of its own advantages, and features its own slick user experience, topped off with an open architecture for anyone to pound out anything on.

This isn’t like a new generation of video game consoles. This is closer to the kind of show-them-how-it’s-done revolution that Atari brought to market back in 1977. Apple didn’t invent anything here. What they did is take a bunch of existing, complimentary, and sometimes disparate technologies, and combined them into a device that does just about everything right.

2008 is turning out to be a real changing of the guard in the mobile device market. The stodgy, cigar-chomping Old Boys Club (Blackberry, PalmOS, Windows Mobile and Symbian) have spent too many days following the same unwinding path and never really exploring much in the way of anything truly new and innovative. Palm in particular has been a study in getting it all right, sitting on their widening laurels, and then donating it all to another episode of Will It Blend?. Heck, even Motorola has mostly screwed itself out of the phone market thanks to tragic mismanagement and trying to squeeze every last ounce of face time from that dead horse named RAZR.

Apple and Google have placed themselves in a perfect position at the perfect time: A stale, moldering, fractured market ripe for change, populated by mobile operating systems that outdated themselves in 2004 and which can’t become what the iPhone already is without a complete ground-up retooling of everything they’ve done. Even then, they would still be far too late to be fashionable and simply end up becoming an also-ran in a market already shoved into a dramatic state of flux by Apple, further reinforced by Google.

Apple has a very real chance to become the dominant force in the mobile market, potentially sharing some of the spotlight with Google. Both of them are very large companies who are excellent marketeers and who have all sorts of great ideas that they have put to effective use. They both now have a very solid foundation upon which to build a mobile empire, and every indication so far shows that they have the momentum to make it happen.

As always, time (and not Bush) will be the decider, but you might want to consider soaking in all of the sights this year, because like 1977, this is going to be a year of great change. 2008 may very well be the year of the great mobile market shift. If nothing else, it is once again a great time to be alive and a geek.

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