Maybe they call them smartphones because they have something to teach us.
Google's Android-powered phones jumped from 3% of the market to 26% versus the same quarter last year. iPhones now enjoy soaring sales at 17% of the market.
Buyers no longer favour traditional mobile phones from traditional makers like Nokia (once the formidable Number One, and now vulnerable), Blackberry (dropped to under 15% from 21% last year), and Motorola (who?)
Companies not even in the mobile market 5 years ago leap-frogged the contenders and now lead the market.
The lesson we should learn from the losers: if you fail to develop scenarios about how the market could expand and use existing customers as focus groups, you may miss the next tech wave and find yourself sinking instead of surfing.
That stands for AV as well as for telecom (remember we are now all digital brothers, connected by the same IP strands of DNA these days.)
But that scenario, where winners become losers overnight, keeps many CEOs awake at night...
Last month Bell Labs had a Grand Opening of its new Technology Showcase in New Jersey. I did some consulting there in the '80s. Bell Labs is one of the epicenters of modern technology, with numerous accredited achievements including the transistor, the laser, C programming language, UNIX and even radio astronomy.
(Did you know Bell Labs was founded with prize money awarded Alexander Graham Bell by the government of France? Which is kind of ironic when you consider it is now owned by Alcatel-Lucent.)
Bell Labs (who also brought us the Picturephone in the late 1960s) recently unveiled its newest application called "immersive communications" where it combines different types of communications: physical, virtual and augmented (superimposed with data, sound or graphics). The application runs on any device capable of sending and receiving video.
Alcatel-Lucent isn't committing to a market date for the Bell Labs application, but industry analysts think the first uses of gesture control and virtual conferencing on wireless networks/handsets will arrive late 2011.
For Alcatel-Lucent, this is a question of leap-frogging. While Cisco and Polycom focus on improving the current status of videoconferencing, Bell Labs' approach is more mixed reality, combining live video with user-created or virtual video.
If Bell Labs is right, immersive communications could leapfrog videoconferencing contenders. On the other side, the reason why the Nokia, the Blackberry, the Motorola failed to get ahead of the curve is that legacy is a heavy weight if you are trying to jump.
Historically, AT&T (the previous owners of Bell Lab) failed to capitalize on almost all the inventions that made Bell Lab famous for innovation. The commercial arm of AT&T used Bell Labs for reputation but generally didn't like the fact that its own innovation could often kill legacy business.
You can easily find smartphones, but smart executives are harder to find. What will Alcatel-Lucent do and when?
