iWhatever: Mobile H/W doesn’t matter

 

Image by KhE 龙 via Flickr

We’ve all been through the mobile phone hysteria.  Car phones, DynaTACs (if you don’t remember them, be glad), flip phones, color screens, cameras, keyboards, and on it goes.

 

I read an article by Mike Elgan in CIO.com with some joy and relief.  To say he drags the iPhone through a bit of muck would be appropriate, but the iPhone hardware hype isn’t his real target.  His premise is concise, simple and inarguably true:

What’s important now is software. And networks.

 

Image by marcopako  via Flickr

If the clarity of his message doesn’t ring true, perhaps knowing that even Apple seems squarely in agreement might sway your opinion.  We have all been subjected to that phrase so closely associated with the iPhone, “there’s an app for that.”  That’s Apple’s own words…see the connection?  Even they get it.

 

I’m not saying Mike is a seer or he is heralding a new age of mobile computing enlightenment, but his message effectively parallels the maturation of the consumer-level market.  If you’ve been around the block long enough, you easily remember the days of hardware obssession (yes, I was once king of the world because I had a whoppingly massive 20 MB of disk storage, a 2.4 modem and enough RAM to host a Wildcat BBS site).  Computer hardware is still important, but the consumer has matured to see PC hardware as an enablement feature, not as the end game.  Eventually we will stop seeing our mobile devices as phones that can do other things and see them just as part of a converged network of services (voice, video and data).