Mobile industry looks forward to spanking Apple
The dancing girls are back
MWC 2011 The mobile industry has got its confidence back, and it's spending money again while drawing up the ranks to take on Apple.
Last year‘s Mobile World Congress was subdued in comparison to this year's, as operators held back on spending in an uncertain economy and Apple seemed to be holding all the cards. Not much has actually changed, but one can‘t hold back spending forever, and while Google, Nokia, Microsoft and the WAC present a considerable defence against Apple, there's still a lot of ground to make up. So the industry seems to have walked out of the shower and discovered that the last twelve months might not have been a dream, but it wasn't the nightmare some had predicted either.
A good part of the new-found confidence comes from the operators' willingness to start writing cheques again. They couldn't hold off forever and while the economic situation is still uncertain it is consistently uncertain and that's good enough. That puts everyone in a better mood, and invites more innovation as companies compete to be the name on those cheques, which in turn leads to dancing girls:
Nobody knows what CBOSS makes or does, but they do have dancing girls
But it's not all dancing girls. There are aliens too. And a (fire)fox who was too cunning to be photographed:
Even the alien was giving jolly waves
We don't have the exact attendance figures yet, but there are clearly more people in Barcelona than turned up last year - and where in 2010 visitors shuffled around watching their shoes, this year there's a palpable sense that things are OK, and probably not going to get any worse, so people are smiling. Well, most of them are:
They were chanting for more fiber, so could be working for the cable companies
But brain-melting radiation aside it's an exciting time to be in mobile again, and this year's Mobile World Congress reflects that admirably. ®
COMMENTS
"Take on Apple"
From what I'm hearing from mobile developers, the phone manufacturers are not only going to take on Apple, it looks like more than half these companies are going to be at risk of also being killed in the stamped!. Apparently there's around 170 different Android phones already on the market or just entering the market!. That's nuts, I don't see them all surviving that kind of gold rush, but then Google have also said 300000 new Android phones are being activated per day! So maybe its just a case of them not earning much per phone model, but still earning a lot of money.
It also doesn't look like its going to stop any time soon, as the hardware companies are releasing some amazing next generation chip news. Some of these chips in the next 18 months will be bloody fast.
The frantic rate of change in mobile is making desktop hardware development look like its asleep by comparison. I'm sure Apple will also up its game as well to keep up, but they are going to have one hell of a battle to stay in front. I don't see how one company (no matter how big) can compete with so many other companies all rushing in the same (Android) direction.
If CBOSS did something interesting
They wouldn't need the girls.
so what?
Who cares? They have dancing girls.
Where's Paris when we need her?
Wow
My attention had disolved into a thousand yard stare before the end of the first paragraph. There's something about that horrible corporate bollocks speak (that never means anything anyway) that I just can't focus on. Who they think they're impressing with it is beyond me.
Re: CBOSS
How did you get "prints out phone bills" out of that little lot? I don't see anything in there that ties 'em down to actually doing anything specific at all.
If there were a world championship for Wankword Bingo they'd be gold medallists though...
I reckon that Bill looked 'em up and read that before writing "Nobody knows what CBOSS makes or does"[1], which would seem to be a pretty accurate summation of that guff to me.
[1] Including themselves by the look of it.
