Mobile World Congress – Two Good, Two Bad

I’m still trying to sort my thoughts about the Mobile World Congress. To start with, here’s my Match of the Day style summary of the two best things I saw at MWC and the two worst things I saw at MWC…

I liked: Ubuntu Tablet

Ubuntu is best known as a server O/S, but they also offer a smartphone and now a tablet version of the open source O/S. The tablet version is extremely slick and easy to navigate: apparently they have some partners ready to launch hardware for it this year (although it installs seamlessly on a Google Nexus tablet). I know it won’t catch on, but it was still really nice to see some innovation in interface design.

I didn’t like: the way the industry is missing the point

Mobile is the hot topic in many industries, particularly when it comes to providing very localized sales, marketing and other services. The cellular industry is in a prime place to enable this sort of new commerce market. So why was it nowhere to be seen at MWC? Because it seems that the success of pure web businesses as brokers and market places has got the mobile carriers thinking the same way.

So this year it was all connected cars and healthcare. Interesting, but way on the horizon for the mass market. Local commerce is now. I was expecting more. Now I’ll have to make it up for myself. Annoying.

I liked: the $50 smart phone

A lot was made of the Mozilla smartphone at $25, but I thought it was a bit crap. At $50, Nokia’s new full screen Asha is an incredible device for the price and carries a brand that is well respected in the emerging markets where people are trading up to smart devices. I hope it sells well for them.

I didn’t like: Huawei’s ‘friendly image’

Huawei do seem to delight in behaving like the bad guys. Not content with acting as the signals intelligence department of the Chinese government (this is a joke, before y’all get started!), this MWC they went on a charm offensive, sponsoring the lanyards and taking over a quarter of Hall 2 with a massive corporate entertainment area… into which they only allowed important dignitaries and turned everyone else away with the largest, most aggressive bouncers I’ve ever seen. Excellent for the brand image.

Impacts of a handset leasing model on mobile telcos

Following yesterday's post, here's some related thinking on the impacts on operators of handset leasing. Handset sales represent around 25% of operator revenues in a typical European market, but generate only around 5% of margin. It may therefore be the case that the scenario described would lead operators to a more profitable structural model than exists today. Oil companies are consistently and acceptably profitable, despite being (literally in some cases) the ‘dumb pipe’ that operators are so desperate to avoid becoming. One of the reasons for the oil majors sustained profitability is clear focus on their role in the value chain – to supply the fuel that enables transportation, relying primarily on location, then brand and finally product innovation to compete. BP or Shell do not need to subsidise the purchase of a car in order to drive consumption of fuel because consumers are ‘hooked’ on it (it gets them from place to place) and there are many credible car manufacturers an...

Differences between Industrial and Digital businesses

Since I'm stuck on a Eurostar crawling through western France I thought I'd use the downtime to share this table I've made on the differences between Industrial and Digital companies across the main business functions. A strange insight into how my mind works... but hopeful a useful summary!

Value drivers for telecoms retail

I've been doing a really large number of driver trees recently - we've taken to using them on every project to get really into the guts of value creation for businesses and thus decide where to focus initiative development (How To Win, if you're keeping score). Anyhow, I had to pause for thought recently to work out how to represent the subscription aspect of telecoms retail for a client. Since it took me a minute, I thought I'd share... its lack of elegance suggests that its not quite right, although it was enough to demonstrate that there was a certain lack of coverage in the initiatives that my client was pursuing and thus spark a debate. Enjoy.

Versatile Amphibian

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