In less than 10 years the smartphone game has eclipsed its humble beginnings of combining a PDA with a phone. The App-ing Generation T who communicate and share across technologies can have an ice cream sandwich in their operating system or a mountain lion or faster graphics performance with ivy. Poorer consumers across the developing world simply want a phone to curve with messaging and FM radio and a 2 mega pixel camera. But do you remember where you were in 1992 when we witnessed the planting of the seed of the smartphone tree with the inaugural launch of the IBM Simon? Do you care? How many remember the first smartphone, the Ericsson GS88 with the open OS Symbian? That was 1997. By the time it had re-launched in 2000 as R380, the Palm Kyocera 6035 enabled you to phone a friend from your PDA contact list. So cool! How many remember the Palm Kyocera 6035? That was 2001. In 2012 Generation T eagerly await the global launch of Apple iPhone5 and the Samsung Galaxy S3. Analysts are reporting that Apple and Samsung could account for 30% of volume and 52% of sales in the global smartphone game. The game is less about the device or product – it is more about the ecosystem, the operating system in the game of smartphones. We are observing a battle of OS standards through the lens of a convergence in technology that will end the game because time available to the key players, young and old, from Apple to Samsung, from MS to Nokia, from HTC to Sony Ericsson to RIM, to make a decision is diminishing in time itself. In others words the game is en-cycling to an end point as spherical competitors from anywhere at any time are entering the game: the Nokia-MS alliance with Lumia platforms powered by Win8 and supported by Intel and AT&T, MS-Facebook alliance to challenge Google in social media and in search with a new search engine, a possible MS-Nokia-RIM-Dell alliance, emergence of Huawei and ZTE, of China Mobile and Data Wind. Who? The game started with Simon in 1992 and will end with the must-have small and thin, SMIN, the outcome that Generation T, the customer, wants rather than the device that produces it. Think on to 2022 and the Blog reader asks: who was Apple? But who is SMIN? Ref back to early Blog entries: The Brontosaurus paradox
RETIRED+ Former academic and consultant
CONTINUING WITH RESEARCH
Emphasis on game and thought experiments
CONTINUING WITH RESEARCH
Emphasis on game and thought experiments
Author Archive
nano iPhone now or lose the game!
It could be time in the smartphone game for a nano iPhone from Apple Inc as spherical competitors, ie from anywhere at anytime enter the game,…with Huawei and Qualcomm new chip spec in low cost low price with multi-functionality and the emergent DataWind in India with the $35 phone and promised $100 tablet……already we see the convergence of technology at Samsung Galaxy with the telephony function in the tablet….whither?….the iPad converges to the iPhone or the iPhone converges to the iPad….the SMIN [introduced in Game Embedded Strategy] is launched like a pheonix rising from the ashes and it may not be with Apple Inc!..game on..so launch the nano iPhione now or risk losing the smartphone market-as-a-game….patrick
EU as ‘off-shore’ hub for RMB
The search for a financial engineering solution in the EU is taking its toll on the European economy, creating a debt-deflation cycle that will suppress EU demand into the future and relegate the relative importance of the Euro as a credible currency in the global markets. EU policy makers should play the game not to lose – that is they should champion a resolution of the EU crisis linked with the internalization of RMB and currency misalignments into a managed exchange rate regime – in order to bring greater stability to world financial markets.
One likely scenario is the internationalization of the RMB by providing an off-shore hub for RMB in Frankfurt; such a solution must include fiscal union and the political will to march forward as a United States of Europe. It will be a long term objective. It could provide part of a solution to the EU debt crisis. Such a strategy would warrant the creation of an EU-China bond reversed engineered by China and thus outside the domain of the EU political hegemony.
It is the only rational institutional response within the democratic deficit of the European treaties is a response that provides for the EFSF ‘walking forward’ as a conduit bank for the ECB providing a package of catastrophic bonds to refinance defaulting sovereign states. Some of the arguments in ‘dark strategy’ – vide Chapter 7 of my book Game Embedded Strategy – wherein one player in a game influences the belief system of another player, EU policy-makers need to visualize today the outcome of their action tomorrow. To adapt Bob Dylan – so much older then (we should be) younger than that now’. This ‘thief of Nature’ strategy, providing an ‘off-shore’ hub for the RMB, should prevail because the time is now or never for EU as an economy, for Europeans and for the Euro as an international reserve currency in a global economy.