Administração de Dados

Creative, convergent, and social:
prospects for mobile computing

The mobile computing industry, more than most, suffers a constant obsession with the future. Commoditization, market saturation, and technology and service convergence render the mobile communications business one of the most volatile and precarious in terms of cycle time, customer churn, and obsolete investments. At the core of the industry’s preoccupation with prospective market trends is the question of what technologies and services users will demand in the future — a question that has proven to be notoriously difficult to answer.

The first thing to notice about the current state of the mobile industry is that it is becoming increasingly commoditized. It is growing difficult to sustain competitive edge on handset differentiation alone. Mobile phones, like toasters and microwave ovens, are all now stylishly designed and contain similar chipsets and functionality. Although it would be wrong to suggest that consumers see all handsets as equally attractive — aesthetic qualities will surely continue to matter for such personal and visible devices, just as they do for, say, wrist watches — the large handset manufactures anticipate difficulty relying on high-margin luxury production models. As an alternative, they turn toward the idea that services can help differentiate their offerings. Recent movements in related industries to define a revitalized science of services (IBM, 25 2008) have emphasized that interaction with the physical device is to a large extent governed or defined by the service or application layer that resides on top of the physical artifact (Spohrer et al., 2007). The appeal of a device depends, therefore, on the way in which it integrates into a larger system of services (Austin and Beyersdorfer, 2007); the locus of competition, whether through functionality or aesthetics, thus moves to a more diffuse realm where appeal depends on nuances of interaction between service components. The industry’s perceptive but imperfect comprehension of this shift has led to a sometimes comic frenzy, a quest for the next perfect service or killer application that can be successfully monetized — a service or application users will actually pay for.

Internet: <www.palgrave-journals.com> (adapted).

Judge the following item according to the text above.

The text highlights themes salient in the rapidly converging mobile computing industry.