Batelle's Prediction

I’m with Jeff Jarvis on year-end lists: they annoy me. But many smart people have been making smart predictions about “oh, the places we’ll go”, so I’ve been reading those over with some interest.

John Battelle posted about how AIMbots were going to change mobile content “stuff.” I wrote my two-cents in the comments, then decided they were probably worth re-posting. I also think it would be worth mentioning that I don’t mean just cell phones - I mean all mobile devices.

Anyways, this is what I said:

The biggest issues with this type of innovation are clearly going to be on the side of “consumer electronics.” Fred Wilson posted about consumer electronics being extremely closed off, and I don’t think cell phones are an exception.

While many phones do have AIM on them, I know that my plan personally charges me a “text message” for every outgoing and incoming IM, which basically makes it ridiculously, financially impractical.

I would love to be able to get standard RSS and content on my phone via AIMbots, but I don’t think that cell service companies are going to let go their stranglehold anytime soon. For that to happen, we’re going to need to see a lot of SF-like wireless networks show up, followed by widespread skype-phone consumer electronics. Once that type of “open” competition forces the market to change, I’m not sure we’ll see significant progress.

That’s probably not going to be 2005 or 2006. Of course I’d love to be wrong.