Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

found here : bLaugh » Archive » Cell Phone Overkill

Really this is happening…our customer (phone manufacturers) are asking for features that even us, as geeky as we are, don’t know how to use! (found again via the Kathy Sierra: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/ )

This shows also that voice is and continue to be the “killer app”…of a phone (how bizarre how bizarre). The industry is truggling to find a new one (camera is a good idea, I like the concept of “personal data gatherer”).

My guess is that a “one fit all user device” (as in the PC land) is really simply irrelevant : see the latest SonyEricsson offering, see how many segments you have for cell phones, opposed to the PC market:

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…or how to use wizely your accelerator sensor in your notebook:
see here for the full article.

Look at this one from BumpTop…amazing: how to use physics to mimic a real desktop

Look at that video amazing! how could they do that??? look at the movements, coordination,etc … stunning.

Here is another video of the same robot…but be sure to check the first one also.

Here is a high level presentation of the mobile handset industry channel….from what I’ve understood, and from my own Open-Plug/Texas Instrument perspective.
This is by no way a yet-again-prediction-about-the-mobile-phones-market: no I won’t say here that the next big thing are Ultra Low Cost handsets …more than very high end smartphones

First the main actors of this drama (ok, I do my best to mimic the gfx of the great schemas from the Kathy Sierra’s blog):

In nearly square boxes, the companies that are part of the flow, from the handset idea till the real device in customer hands:

• OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer: wikipedia definition): In this industry the OEM term is perverted a little, the OEM are the companies with Brand Name (in fact value added reseller or VAR), like Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Siemens, Philips etc. More and more they are outsourcing handset design to ODMs and production to an EMS (that can be the selected ODM itself).
• ODM (Original Design Manufacturer: wikipedia definition): Design House that are technically creating the device, based on OEM requirements, or in other models directly from operators requirements, or from their own to sell their design to OEM/operators. Well known ODM are HTC, Compal, Wiz4com, Cellon, Foxconn, BenQ (Chinese and Taiwanese companies for the most).
• EMS (Electronics Manufacturing Services: wikipedia definition): The factories that are actually building the devices…and and we are in a 400 millions units market… those are BIG factories.
• Operator/Carrier (did you say telco?): Another kind of beast for the handset part of the mobile industry equation. They can be either the key driver for handset specification (see Docomo), or a simple distributor.
• Distributor : retail shops that can sell “unbranded/unlocked” headsets that can be used with any service provider (operator), or directly resell operator branded phones with a service plan.

On the supplier part of the flow:

• Platform Vendors : Here is the main hardware supplier of the chain (Ok I’ve intentionally omitted all the zillion of different other hardware suppliers involved: flash, screen, boards, plastic, etc), the one that sells the heart of an headset, its chipset. This chip is comprised of the CPU and the associated RF/Analog baseband/Digital Baseband. In this area the undisputed leader is Texas Instrument (used a lot by Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola and many ODM), followed by Philips Semi Conductor (main client: Samsung, and many other OEM/ODM). Many other platforms like ADI, Infineon, etc. are also represented. Nearly all those platforms are now backed by an ARM CPU.

And now the most interesting (hehe, ok at least for me) SOFTWARE! which is now the undisputed … bottleneck of the industry. Traditionally the Platform Vendor were integrating all the needed parts of the software…without making any money from it. But with the explosion of the number of functionalities, software actors are becoming more and more prevalent.

• Integration House: A first answer to those integration issues was to outsource it to other companies with large and dedicated software resources.
• IP vendors: We spoke about features…Here are the backers of those features. Need a Java VM? asks Esmertec, a wap browser? Openwave, Jataayu, Teleca, An predictive input text method? AOL/T9 or Izi.
• OS/FWK vendors : The hardware part being so heteroclite, and the time to market so hampered by software IP integration, this new kind of players are emerging, becoming a key enabler for IP vendors by reducing their integration and porting efforts, thus the time to market. On the OS side, Symbian, Microsoft and Palm are the leaders of the … little market of the smartphones (forecast are, in the best case, around 15% of the market). On the framework side (for all the other phones) key players here are TTPcom, OpenWave, Teleca (obigo) plus some new comers like SkyMobile Media … and of course Open-Plug .

So after the presentation of the actors…here are their interactions!

We will present here some of the main channels that are best describing the process of designing and selling a mobile phone.

• OEM oriented: the OEM is pushing its ideas/designs till the distribution channel.
• ODM oriented: ODM are selling their designs to OEMs.
• Operator oriented: Operator is defining the device design/requirements.

• A: The “historical” channel. An OEM is making its devices form A to Z, from design to production, using only platform vendors for their silicon factories, providing their own hardware design and not using “standard” platforms. Nokia is perhaps one of the last of its kind (but recently outsourced some handset to Foxlink if I remember well).
• B: An OEM specifies a handset and then go shopping to get an ODM which will be able to design the handset an produce it (perhaps via an EMS).
• C: In that case an ODM designs an handset and sells the design to an OEM that will simply stamps its brand on it (HTC is working like that).

In those channels the operator is only seen as a distribution channel, only able to validate or not an handset. Anyway more and more Carriers are asking for branding and customization…and it’s not so easy to convince Nokia to replace its brand by a Vodaphone or Orange one.

• D: Very similar to B, but this time the carrier specifies itself the handset and is feeling strong enough to get ride of and replace a big handset brand name (OEM), see the HTC operator branded phones (orange, O2).
• E: The Operator is “fully” specifying the handset, like in D but will associate its branding with an OEM one (that itself will most of the time outsource the design and production to an ODM/EMS).

Keeping all that in mind, a next post will describe the software flow and what are the impact and implications of those channels, the eco-systems around hardware platforms, and the various software strategies deployed in the industry

Micromanagement dangers is again a fairly good read from Kathy Sierra, complemented by this great post about motivation by reputation. Those posts led me to think about management practice, what I liked when I’m managed … and what I do when I manage myself.

Communication

• How do you feel when you miss information, how should you react? / What Info a manager have to pass on to the team? where is the thresold to retain info to not add pressure to your team versus frustration to not being aware of the big picture?
• Reputation/Image given by little words : other’s work is only known by collegues/management team through his manager words: be really carefull with that: longer term carrier issues may depend on the image of an employee …image given by his manager.

Initiatives, creativity vs workforce/efficiency?

• How to leverage your team creativity potential while not loosing efficiency? This one is a hard one I think, strongly correlated with the first one: a manager should be able to lower enough the corporate pressure to let its team a certain freedom of movement…hum not a simple task.

Responsabilities and ownership

• This one is a key part: when a resposibility is given, it must be the full scope: good and bad, reward and pain.

Motivation: corolary to the previous points.

• Never uderstimate the power of fun … In that regard creating blogs to present what ones are really proud of, in an informal way can be a really good tool.
• Saying when things are done and well done… with a little “thank you” and “good job”, it’s free and efficient, and corporate culture tends to only raise the “bad done things” … not a good culture to say the least.

What this guy is doing is amazing, look at that video (found here):

(if it is not displaying, you can look directly here).

Really really our old mouse/keyboard combo is aging …to say the least. On the mobility front the new flewible OLED screens annouced lately or this mini video projector, coupled with those kind of interactions will bring back the fun to simply use a gadget/computer….

Here is an old article I’ve written when I was a student about software metrics/efforts… As I need for my day to day job to have rough estimates of software projects at an early stage, I’ve begun to train myself on it and resurected this old essay.

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This great post asks the good question, “does mobile OS matters?”.

A solid, robust OS is only a tool to achieve “function”: ok it helps to achieve that, but do you know the OS in your iPod/Blackberry/phone/car etc? Having a big OS HAS drawbacks, like CPU overload, memory consumption … for nothing related to the device “function”. The only real advantage is that an OS offers a common developpement framework, that is a clear abstraction to the hardware and allows easy developement for a wide range of devices … but after all is that the role of an OS? Take a look at Java: it offers such a development abstraction, and relegates the underlying OS to a mere commodity (hum, … ok sort of), it also has a BIG drawback : this hardware abstraction is too strong/big/too generic for mobile devices (performance issues, used RAM and above all access to device hardware functions). After all, what is “really” needed for mobile device?

1. Perform main function perfectly, with no compromise to second order functions: your phone has to be a great phone even if it also does PIM….
2. COST.
3. Design/Ease of use/ fun, again Never underestimate the power of fun.
4. Time to market.
5. Higher and higher function/features complexity, WITH NO SACRIFICE to the first, second and third rules.
6. Did I say COST?

To satisfy all, you need to make compromises (like market segmentation in function and cost).

So coming back with my point of interest: Mobile phone industry. Open Plug has been founded around this idea: “only Developpement tools and APIs matters”, and above all, as said in the article “only device function matters”.
…and this industry (devices, telepony…mobility) is so big that the today’s big player won’t allow a complete industry stole ala microsoft: the big guys there are Cell phone operators, phone manufacturer, content providers…
Nowadays software developement became the undisputed bottelneck (along with mass production) when building a cellphone. To help with that (and take the lion share of a billion device market), software houses are pushing high level OS adoption in cellphones: see efforts from microsoft, symbian, palm …. anyway it adds software and hardware cost (bigger CPU, even adding CPUs, more RAM, bigger battery) and in many case it really lowers ease of use, and the first rule is many times sacrificied.
Linux may be a great free alternative BUT Linux alone is only a kernel, you can’t do any application cause there is no FRAMEWORK on top of it: no sound, graphic, telephony handling, etc. You definitively need something: Motorolla has tried to do that, Trolltech (Qt/Qtopia) is doing that, and more recently PalmSource is doing that. This last, surprising move, really shows that the main PalmOS advantage was its APIs on top of which many applications have been written, on top of which you could really make a mobile phone with coooool features (see my treo650, ok there cost is fairly high). The underlying OS (who know the kada kernel???) was really a commodity, they even tried to make a new kernel but ultimatelly failed before selecting Linux: the kernel war is over, the big players are there, too late to compete.
Here at Open-Plug we have a similar approach than Palm: building a framework on top of …. a subset of the linux API and not really on Linux itself, so all the framework may run on Linux (for High-End Phones) or, porting this Linux API subset on top of low-end/ proprietary OS/platfrom. The whole thing, coupled with an efficent component based technology and powerfull development tools may seems very similar to java in fact … but in that case:

• No virtual machine, so no CPU penalty
• Using ASM/C/C++ : maximum RAM/CPU efficiency (if well coded )
• Direct access to harware
• Remotely deploy solutions on previously “closed” platforms.
• Use existing well tuned proprietary OS if needed, so no additional hardware cost to the platform.
• Allows a great customization by the players (Mobile Operator, OEM, ODM) that really NEED AND WANT to offer services/function: see how it is difficult to ask symbian, and so Nokia to add a little vodaphone live logo, not mentionning a complete user interface definition for a certain kind of device like full operator branding, phone specialization like music phone, kids phone, etc.

Sounds too good to be true ? Hey, ok I’m biaised and enthusiatic about what we are building here, but we are making progress and you will see our phones soon .

After few months of “Getting Things Done” practice I can began to draw some conclusions. First I’ve learn…what procrastination means, and how it may be, after all, really usefull to help time management.
Then I’ve adapted the GTD methodology to my needs, really simplifying it: for me small (and, ok, fun) is always beautiful.

After those months of practice here are summed up the concepts I daily use and rely on.

• Task list is your main tool.
• “If something takes less than 5 minutes, do it now”, it may sound stupid but it really helps to keep it in mind everytime.
• Delegate as much as possible, but delegation is the easy part: have a way to keep easily track of the follow up is a key point.
• Take the time to find and list your next actions to complete some higher level tasks: a task list with entries that can’t be done is pointless. If nn item is not actionable, cause it is too high level, or is simply a rough idea jotted quickly on paper or outlook, take the time to break it in piece and extract the things to do to achieve it.
• Tasks lists exists : DO NOT keep your todo’s in your brain, be confident in your system, else your mind will be cluttered with short term goals and actions, and you won’t be able to focus on longer term ideas/project etc…
• Make your system as simple as possible: the fewer the steps/concepts, the more you will be able to maintain it and … rely on it.

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