The Myth of Device Diversity

There's that great part in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when Willy Wonka introduces the kids to his seductive candy forest with the oompa loompas and chocolate river. The fat kid's jaw drops and Veruca Salt's eyes bulge. Great scene. Contrast that with Henry Ford who famously said about the Model T in 1916: "You can have it any color -- so long as it's black." In the past year, enterprise device diversity has shifted from Willy Wonka to Henry Ford.

The intriguing thing is that while companies are retrenching around one or two primary devices everyone around them is doing just the opposite. Take for example the Open Mobile Exchange, an event hosted by O'Reilly I attended last week in Portland. A parade of developers representing open source mobile projects with funny names (Zembly?) proclaimed the supremacy of a dizzying variety of new (and some old) mobile platforms, frameworks, and operating systems. The community is abuzz with everything from the open sourcing of Symbian (recently acquired by Nokia) to the rise of Google's Android and the launch of mainstream LiMo (Linux Mobile) handsets by Motorola. Oh, what a time to be a mobile developer. The choices! The gadgets! The confusion! Two things are clear: 1) there’s no consensus about what devices/formats/features/networks will win and 2) everyone is trying to solve the same problem – how best to deliver a fast and feature-rich cross-platform user experience.

Which brings me back to today's enterprise device landscape - where "BlackBerry" is the new "Kleenex" and diversity means you can have a Pearl *or* (gasp!) a Curve. It’s a whole different universe from what I saw in Portland. For a variety of reasons ranging from security to availability to inertia, enterprises are increasingly standardizing on fewer models, carriers, and operating systems. As with many technology trends, however, it makes sense in historical context. By my calculation, it took five years for smartphones to become mainstream even though RIM shipped its first pager in '96. Similarly, it will be a year or two before new entrants to the market earn corporate IT's seal of approval. The point isn't that enterprises are laggards. It’s that mobile innovation isn't slowing down - on the contrary, it's speeding up. And as it does, adoption cycles get compressed. Case in point: the i(can’t live without)Phone. It took five years to make BlackBerry mainstream and 35% of the Fortune 500 are currently testing Apple’s lovechild less than a year after it launched. I’d say we’re looking at six months when Android handsets arrive. Hey, even Henry Ford eventually went techno-color.