|
Letters To The Editor
Justin Khoo wrote in to ask about my
favorite gadget at TECHXPO and what I consider the ideal mini
device.
Hi Amy, Glad to see that you've seen the latest
and greatest gadgets at the TECHXPO. You've brought up some good
points, but I would have loved your opinion on which was your
favorite gadget and what would you consider your ideal "mini
device". Personally, I think clamshells offer a
good alternative to the laptop (I think pen-based handhelds are
only good for two things: as a PIM and as a toy). The main
problems of clamshells are the availability of software and
keyboard size. The new Nokia Communicator looks interesting, but I
think they're shooting themselves in the foot trying to straddle
the "cell phone/PDA" form-factor. It’s too big for a
cellphone and too small for a PDA. Nevertheless clamshells provide a
compelling alternative to laptops because:
The biggest drawback to these devices is
the lack of full productivity applications like MS Office. With
the current processing power and memory of these devices, they
should be able to run full office application suites, and when MS
or Sun releases a version for Windows CE, I believe this sector
will begin to see some traction. Cheers,
Justin: Personally, I think Windows CE may turn
out to be a false trail. I've had a good look at the Transmeta
chip-based devices which let you run Windows XP (and have any
software you want) on much smaller and lighter weight devices. You
pick the size and weight by who you're trying to sell them to for
what. As for the really small stuff, I think we're going to see
most vendors going with embedded Linux or Palm OS or something
other than Windows which has its own software community. By the way, I saw lots of clamshell
devices (small notebooks, really) based on Transmeta and running
XP that could give you 4-6 hours with a very nice color display
and up. Amy
More On IM Last week’s correspondent on Instant
Messaging as a Mobile Application, Richard Stillman, is back with
more, much more, to say. If this is an interest area for you, you’ll want to read
it.
Amy, Thanks for printing my note, and for
your comments. I agree that most people who are using IM in
business have come to it through personal use, generally through
exposure by their children. But I really do believe that it is a
different animal than email, and the presence information you are
concerned about is a big reason why. For the sender of a message,
presence provides an indication that the recipient is both
available and willing to receive the message immediately. For a
potential recipient, careful use of presence status permits
control over availability. An advanced IM client with multiple
buddy lists can make you appear available to family only, or
personal contacts only, or business contacts only, or any group
you choose to define. Unlike a ringing phone, there is no
requirement or expectation that an IM be answered immediately,
even if you've advertised that you're available. And the UI of
instant messaging leads to a different kind of exchange than that
of email. The ideas we're passing back and forth through this
series of email messages, for example, would be very different if
we were having this conversation via IM. Different content would
be exchanged, and our ideas would likely build on each other's in
a more gradual and collaborative way than they are through this
series of emails. But let's talk mobile. The features of
IM, if integrated into cell phones, can have a significant effect
on mobile communication. Presence advertising by itself can
improve the lot of the typical cell phone user. Without it, we
dial all our phone calls blindly. The person we're trying to reach
could be away, or out of range, or in a meeting with their phone
turned off, or on the highway about to be cut off by a bus. A
phone-based buddy list, especially if integrated with the phone's
address book, can allow for more efficient placement of voice
calls and less voice mail phone tag, which means less wasted time,
less air time used by both sender and recipient, and smaller
bills. Short text messages - even just "is this a good time
to call?" - would make many voice calls unnecessary, and the
remaining ones far more welcome. Unlike voice, short messages
could be processed by the recipient at his or her convenience,
rather than at the sender's. This is the major advantage of IM -
it provides much of the immediacy of voice conversation, but
returns to the recipient some measure of the control over
interruptions that traditional voice communication puts almost
completely in the hands of the initiator. The use of IM in business, and on mobile
devices, is so new that no social conventions have yet been
developed for its proper use. If business IM develops in a way
that respects the value of time for both the sender and receiver
of messages, it could fundamentally change the way we communicate. The user of a telephone gives up far
more control over privacy and time than the user of instant
messaging. When the phone rings, our choices are limited. We can
stop what we're doing and pick it up right now, based on imperfect
or nonexistent information about the caller's identity and reason
for calling. We can listen to the caller's voice mail message in
real time later. Or we can call the other party back at some time
in the future that is potentially inconvenient for them,
continuing the cycle of wasted time and interruption. I firmly
believe that we accept this situation today only because we grew
up with the telephone and its shortcomings. Short messaging and
presence advertising, particularly when combined with the advanced
address book features of cell phones, can vastly improve the lives
of mobile voice users and provide a bridge between phones and the
text-based world. It truly can be the killer app for mobile. Rich Stillman
Rich, thanks for your long and thoughtful explication. Again, I can understand you intellectually, but not personally. I have never gotten in the habit of
letting people reach me on my cell phone.
I use it for placing calls.
People who want to reach me call my office and leave a
message there for me. I
don't want to be interrupted and I have found a cell phone a
highly imperfect mechanism for guaranteeing that a message will
actually be delivered. My
office staff works really well. Obviously there are some people who have
my cell phone number (my assistant for one; my husband, for
another). When I have
my cell phone turned on (or when I leave it on by prearrangement),
they may call me. I have a wireless email device so I can
get email on the fly if I choose to.
As I said, with most of my close correspondents --
experienced and old-time e-mailers all -- we use email much like
you use IM, sending brief, frequent emails back and forth.
One of those correspondents and I have had eight back and
forth messages in the last few hours. I think IM could work fine for people
who live on their cell phones (just as I live on my email), I'm
just not sure that this is the killer business application that is
going to make the telcos and other SPs rich. Amy
Amy, I think we're largely in agreement about
how we approach incoming contacts. I don't have a cell phone, and
I never have, but I've been carrying a portable email device
(various models from Motorola, using SkyTel's service) since 1997.
When dealing with incoming phone calls, I often rely on caller ID
and voicemail screening. And I generally launch IM clients only
when I want to get in contact with someone else, which is
typically only a couple of days a week. So I don't fit the profile
of a typical IM user either. My interest in IM is more academic
than practical - I've studied and written about it, from both
technical and social viewpoints. In doing so, I've used it enough
to get an idea of its potential. When integrated well into an
overall communications system, IM can provide the bridge between
traditionally text-based computer communications and voice-based
phone systems. But it can also make the world of person-to-person
communication more civilized by allowing people to control their
availability to others. Both of these opportunities have
killer-app potential. Presence advertising and short text
messaging can allow the restoration of some pre-telephone social
conventions. Before the telephone, the closest thing to a call was
a personal visit - Tennessee Williams' gentleman caller didn't
pick up the phone, he showed up at the door. Calling cards and
parlors at home, business cards and receptionists at work, and
written correspondence in general allowed people to engage in an
elaborate social dance to make the case for being seen and to
decide who they wanted to see, and on what terms. The telephone gradually changed all
that. Particularly after the departure of the human operator,
telephones allowed people to contact anyone they wanted, at any
time. This gave the initiator of a contact far more control over
access than his or her subject. This shift was slow and not
completely unopposed - Mark Twain refused to have a phone
installed in his house unless its bell was removed. Today, the
fact that virtually everybody leaves their wireline phones on
around the clock - and even the importance of late-night prank
calling as an expression of rebellion by children - are
indications of how universally this change has been accepted, and
the strength of the social contract against inappropriate use of
the telephone. Hardly anyone alive today remembers when it was any
other way. Today, we deal with a high number of
incoming calls, especially unsolicited ones coming from people
taking unfair advantage of that social contract. This flood has
forced people to improvise new barriers to unwanted contacts. An
office staff that filters calls is effective, but not an option
available to most people. Even in business settings, central
switchboards have largely vanished and direct-dial phone numbers
are the norm. At home, caller ID and answering machines are about
the only tools widely available for filtering calls. The
information that the caller ID service provides is generally
pretty bad, and answering machines, like corporate voicemail,
still exact a cost in the time required to listen to messages. No
one as far as I know has analyzed the value to consumers of the
time lost to these interruptions, but at least one group has
expressed their opinion in a most explicit way - the customers who
bought the TeleZapper for $50 in an attempt to eliminate the
problem at its source. IM is a more effective approach to
re-erecting the old, and now even more necessary, social filters.
First, presence: If your lights aren't on, or you've hung out the
"do not disturb" sign, I won't ring the bell. The fact
that I can check the presence of many people at once is, to me, a
far more benign technological improvement than the telephone's
traditional ability to permit me to wake you up at 9PM when you've
gone to bed early with the flu. Second, text messaging: I can ask
you if it's OK to call. You can say no, or refuse to answer, or
wait to read my message until you have a moment, or shunt the
messages of people not on your "watch list" to email
where you can deal with them later. Again, a vast improvement over
the fifteen second decision window, with imperfect information,
that a ringing telephone allows. Filtering tools become far more
important for mobile phones than for wireline, if only because
mobility vastly increases people's availability. Many corporate
cultures already expect to have constant access to their
employees. Ignore a ringing phone during work hours - or sometimes
even on personal time - and you may have some 'splaining to do
when you get back to the office. Even more companies have a
well-established voicemail culture, and many studies have
demonstrated that a substantial part of an employee's workday is
spent just listening to voicemail. The cost of air time, when
checking voicemail during business hours from a cellular phone, is
also substantial, and more tangible and easier to measure than
lost productivity. Email offers a different set of problems
and solutions. As critical as email has become, most people are
unreachable when they walk away from their network-attached
computer. This has forced companies to adopt voicemail solutions,
which are far less efficient but which offer one overriding
advantage - universal access from any telephone. It has also
caused companies to spend small fortunes buying their traveling
workers laptops, many of which are used for only one thing -
checking email - and only a few times a day, reducing the value of
email by delaying its delivery. Integrating IM into a voice network
addresses so many of these problems that simple ROI analysis
should make it a no-brainer for many corporations. Important voice
calls are acted upon; less important ones are prioritized; junk
calls are ignored. Text messages can be queued if the phone is
turned off, and require far less worker time to process than
voicemail. These advantages alone make IM worth considering for
corporations. Agents that can check and forward email based on
filtering rules, like BlackBerry Enterprise Server or Wolfetech's
beta service, can mobilize email much as cellular mobilized voice,
giving email much of the immediacy of voice - and that would be
big news. You
mentioned that you use this solution yourself, so I assume you
have gotten some value from it. For carriers, IM offers several possible
new revenue sources. The first and easiest is the corporate
service described above. But the larger, more long-term
opportunity is the mobilization of Internet-based email and IM
services. Instant messaging, currently in its infancy compared to
email, would be a far more viable service if every cell phone and
textpager in America could become a peer in an IM conversation.
The corporate IM providers, like Lotus and Groove, should be very
interested, as should the traditional IM service providers. Of
course, the wireless carriers stand to profit by charging for
every message sent. Given the likely acceptance of IM as part of
corporate communications in the future, this will also be a big
deal. (EDITORIAL NOTE:
Now Rich goes back to the NTT DoCoMo argument, which as you
know, I don’t buy. But he makes his case well, so you may want to follow his
reasoning.) As far as making the telcos rich, we
might actually pay attention to the example of the Europeans and
Japanese. In the beginning, NTT DoCoMo believed that they'd make a
killing by serving web pages to mobile phone customers, and that
has turned out to be true. But relatively few companies initially
provided i-mode services, and to DoCoMo's surprise, their first
runaway success was messaging. I-mode messaging started out as a
teenage Phenomenon, but spread to corporations
as the value was recognized, and as the oldest of the
early-adopter teens grew up and entered the work force. In Europe,
SMS was added to the GSM standard to give phone companies a way of
broadcasting messages to their customers, and then only because
the bandwidth existed and couldn't be used for anything else.
Today, consumer use of this accidental feature generates as much
revenue as voice for European mobile phone companies. Yes,
the United States is different from Europe and Japan, as the
differences in adoption of the Internet has shown. But for
something as fundamental as person-to-person communication, I
think we're far more similar. Comparing our adoption rates for
cellular voice with those of Europe and Japan will show that. The question is, is mobile text more
like mobile voice or like wireline text? I believe there's a
continuum, and that text applications that come closer to the
person-to-person functions of voice - IM, email forwarding,
presence advertising - have a far better chance of repeating the
acceptance history of cellular phones than those, like WAP and
information services, that attempt to duplicate the wireline
Internet. There is nothing more fundamental than
person-to-person communication. Cell phones became a massive
success by mobilizing voice communication. Shouldn't there be
similar opportunity in mobilizing text communication? Rich Stillman P.S. I do apologize for the length of these messages. I now consider the dead horse thoroughly beaten.
Comments or Questions: Send Email to
opinions@wohl.com
|
