Three markets - three evolutions (Score 1)

I live in Finland where true mobile phone penetration is 85% of the population. The number of cellular subscriptions is even higer. I also work for the telecom industry in a position where it helps to understand where the industry is going.

It seems that there are two different evolutions going on. One is the PDA market in the US. All of the US companies seem to have targeted their products and product development to PDA devices. There seems to be a huge request for PDA devices in the US markets.

In Europe PDAs are quite rare but almost every body has a mobile phone. Especially important for the development of the market is that the mobile network in europe is digital and supports packet switched data (GPRS).

These two markets are quite different. European IT and telecom companies have very good understanding how the mobile business works and what are common problems in the field. They don't understand much of the PDA markets.

On the other hand US companies are developing web technologies and PDA software and have very poor understanding of the requirements of the mobile industry and the mobile consumers. Even Microsoft seem to have no understanding at all what the mobile business is all about.

Japan is more advanced is the mobile services that Europe. Anyhow, Japanese companies have a history to build quite advanced services on proprietary methods. European companies are relying on standards.

As a result it seems that there will be three evolutions with similar functionality. First in US PDA market is developing to have mobile functionality. These will still be PDAs and not phones. It is propable that MS will win the war in PDA OS. In Europe mobile phone markets will develop towards open platform smart phones (symbian / MS smartphone). For me it seems that Nokia will win this war, MS still is far too much behind in understanding the requirements of mobile customers. MS has though an advantage of being able to build end-to-end solutions integrating Windows and Smartphone operating systems. Japanese market is practically closed from other players. Japanese companies will be techologically advaced but will not get global market dominance.

After the evolution phase these three segments will eventually combine. It is hard to predict which segment will be in leading position by the time which is about 4-5 years from now. I beleave it will be European way because the demand for phones exceeds the demand for mobile internet devices. This gives European companies larger market share by the time the combination happens.

We are now fighting agains MS and hoping Nokia to win the fight. I myself would like to see the market to fragment to smaller players and also to MS. Otherwise it can be that Nokia will be MS of 2010, having practically a monopoly in the field of portable computing.