I’d like to refer to a couple of articles that help to illustrate that the smart phone wave is more than just a cool new gadget, but the collision of powerful empires.

Source: Wikipedia Commons

War of the Worlds: RIM invented the smart phone market, and we’re proud as Canadians that a Canadian company is an innovative leader in this space.  Blackberries were a boom for  telecommunications carriers, who now had another source of traffic for their wireless networks, email.  This made business more mobile, lengthened the work day and added more traffic, more importantly, lucrative business traffic to the wireless carriers.  But the Blackberry as an email device (now also the home to more IT services, allowing road warriors to even review and edit documents and update CRM systems) is also firmly part of the enterprise IT domain.  These are two very different worlds, and they are at war.  Carriers try to lock you in with cheap phones to their service plans, and like to charge for both information bit transport as well as voice transport.  Carriers have in many cases tried to block IT based voice services like Skype, as it is a threat to voice, and more lucratively, long distance voice revenues.  The integration of Cisco VoIP services (an enterprise IT commercial voice offering) with the Blackberries WiFi connectivity, see RIM ties … ,  is a interesting strategy, but it threatens the carriers revenue by diverting it to enterprise networks.  With RIM selling arms to both warring camps, it should be very interesting to see how this plays out.

source: ipmawards

Perfect Storm:  But there are more that two worlds colliding here, the third is that of consumer devices.  RIM is moving it’s Blackberry down market to the consumer space to grow its business and protect smart phone market share.  Apple took its immensely lucrative iPod, and moved it up market to first the iphone, initially for the consumer world, but also increasingly for the corporate world attacking RIM’s market, and now the iPad to attack the laptop market as well.  Add players like Google with their Android operating system that runs on smart phones and tablets, HP’s acquisition of Palm, and so on.  I see three worlds colliding:  The communications world, the computational world, and the consumer or community world; all converging in the smart phone.  It is a world where the rules are changing and even super-stars like Google are making mistakes, like the classic channel sales versus direct sales conflict.  Vendors, intoxicated by the volume of the combined consumer and enterprise markets are introducing a myriad of multipurpose hand held devices, incorporating phones, web browsers and cameras, enabling voice services, information services and socialization on a single device.  These devices are adding location based services and are beginning to be used to manage financial transactions as well, taking on banking services.

We are observing technological change in our society at a pace unprecedented in history.  It should be a block buster drama, and we in the IT business, have a front row seat.  Hold on to your seat, we’re in for a wild ride!