Cook’s Collaborative Edge

In Amsterdam yesterday at the Open Source in Mobile Conference, First International Computer (FIC) - a Taiwanese components manufacturer announced that OpenMoko is the platform of choice for their next generation smartphones.

So far you might yawn. Well pay attention. Accordining to a piece by Charlie Demerjian: “THERE HAVE BEEN a lot of phones claiming to be ‘Linux phones’ and those that do run a Linux kernel, but they all miss the point of Linux: to be open. FIC is about to change that in a big way with a truly open phone, the OpenMoko.”

The later half of the article is most interesting because it links in with an open source oriented world view of John Waclawsky who is software architect at Motorola and who I interviewed last week. John would like to spend more time on interconnecting various network architectures and making them seemlessly inter operate than on the traditional vertical silos of the telco world.

What we are looking at here is a very fascinating shifting of mindset as to where economic value is to be found. John has published a fascinating series of articles in Business Communications Review in October 2004, March 2005, June 2005, October 2005, and the most recent in October 2006. I will be writing more about these articles. Right now only the June 2005 article is on the web. It’s a shame - they deserve a wider audience.

At any rate here are a few more paragraphs from Charlie Demerjian’s piece. My January and February 2007 COOK Reports will continue my explorations in search of sustainable economics in this area. Hint - they are to be found outside the vertical silos of the carriers.

The Rationale for Open Moko Software

Demerjian writes: “With the hardware out of the way, that brings us back to the software, philosophy and the question of why. Why is the most important one, why would any vendor want to adopt a commodity part that any of their competitors can pick up just as easily? Why would you want to write for this? Why would you want to buy it?”

“For vendors it is simple, lowered cost. Each generation of cell phone is mostly new, there are huge software costs to write the most basic things for any new phone. In six months it is replaced again, and the cycle repeats. It is a huge pain for vendors of all sorts, not to mention expensive.”

“If the hardware was common, the vendors could reuse the software and concentrate on what makes them money, fashion and services. Fashion is the simple one, phones sell on the skin, not nearly so much on what is below it. Common hardware lets vendors concentrate time and money on that part, wrapping it around the commodity electronics.”

“The services market is much more important to the carriers, that is where they make the do or die margins. Ringtones bring in billions of dollars, and for every new phone you have to write a ringtone downloader, manager, player and billing system. When the hardware is outdated in 6 months, you do it all again. If you stop and think about it, you need to do this for every bit of functionality, a daunting task at best.”

“The OpenMoko is aimed directly at this problem. You write it all for Linux once, and then you recompile for every new phone. If the APIs stay constant you may not even have to do that. The vendors end up putting their dev dollars where it makes them money and differentiates them from their competition, not toward reinventing the wheel.”

Charlie’s full article is here.

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