[Following the uninspiring announcements at the annual MWC show, Research Director Andreas Constantinou looks at the Megatrends that are shaping the mobile industry in 2009]
After many months in the making, we ‘ve just released our annual Mobile Megatrends 2009. Last year’s Megatrends covered 15 trends for 2008 and got over 40,000 views at slideshare – we have no lesser expectations for this year’s edition.
In this 2009 edition we ‘ve focused on fewer trends with deeper analysis. These are trends which over-arch the many micro-announcements which took place during the MWC week in Barcelona. The bigger picture that emerges in 2009 is not this or that App Store, this or that open source effort, or a new developer portal; these were just meta-effects set in motion by some tectonic shifts which started in 2008.
[slideshare id=1071449&doc=mobilemegatrends2009visionmobilenew-090226011714-phpapp01]
So what are the overarching trends of mobile in 2009? We ‘ve covered 8 core themes:
– Eight Centres of Gravity, the New Rules of Mobile: how Google, LiMo, Nokia, Qualcomm, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and Intel are consolidating power in mobile around complete vertical stacks (from hardware to services), essentially forming virtual centers of gravity and attracting mini-ecosystems around them.
– Market Gravity, The Rise and Fall of Market Value: we explore how all market sectors (from App Stores and widgets to ringtones and location services) move across the lifecycle of market value: from novelty to differention and finally to commodity. We also discuss the concept of gravity accelerators or decelerators, forces which determine how fast each market transitions through this lifecycle.
– The Software Industry is Consolidating: how Android and S60 are the remaining two choices for smartphone operating systems, what caused Linux to fade out, the landscape of today’s Linux market and Qt, WebKit, Flash Lite, Java ME, the four service delivery environments that are set to dominate.
– Mapping Revenue Model Innovation – Value Quadrants: an evolution of a strategy tool we introduced back in early 2008, which explains how revenue models are changing, where the handset software value is migrating and what are some of the untapped opportunities in value creation in mobile.
– Open is the New Closed: why ‘open’ is one of the most overstated terms of 2009, and how in practice open source is used to drive ‘closed’ commercial agendas in LiMo, Symbian Foundation and Android. The analysis also explains how open source licenses are almost orthogonal to governance models, and how source code control fundamentally differs from product control in this new era of openness.
– The Mobile Application Store Phenomenon: digging beneath the often superficial coverage, this analysis explains what is the 5-ingredient recipe for a succesful Mobile App Store (MAS), why Apple and Qualcomm have been the only two that got it right, and why handset OEMs stand to succeed in developing MAS solutions, contrary to operators/carriers.
– NaaS: Network as a Service: we discuss how operators/carriers are opening up their networks to third parties (Betavine, Orange Partner, Litmus, etc), and why the current offerings are currently too little too late.
– Mobile Service Analytics: the Most Underhyped Opportunity: Last but certainly not least, we explain why service analytics present the most underhyped opportunity today, how mobile phones and networks are beehives of information with unprecedented richness and how startups are exploiting the opportunity today.
We ‘ll be updating the Mobile Megatrends as new announcements are made during 2009, so new trends and information will be included over time.
Comments welcome as always.
– Andreas twitter: @andreascon
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