Wireless Watch: LiMO supports operator software drive, but Vodafone 360 will be litmus test Mar 3, 2010 – By Rethink Research
It is clear that the defining theme of the mobile industry in 2010 will be
the operators’ bid to retain control of the user. Carriers need to be
the primary guardian of the customer relationship and user experience, or
risk being squeezed out of the mobile content value chain, between the
integrated solutions and strong brands of the device makers, and the open
access of the internet brigade. This is not new in itself – cellcos
have always fought brand and power wars with phonemakers – but the
entry of the web giants like Google and the proliferation of mobile apps have
shifted the goal posts. The operators have been assembling their weapons over
the past couple of years, and key among these are the new Wireless
Applications Community (WAC) and the LiMO white label software platform. It
is no surprise, then, that these two initiatives should be coming closer
together, and could even converge completely. But frameworks are one thing,
and real results quite another, as previous operator-driven collaborations
have shown (remember the bid for a global base for DoCoMo’s iMode?)
It’s early days, but the attention will certainly be on Vodafone
– its activities with LiMO and WAC, and the progress of its ambitious
360 mobile platform – as the first barometer of the carriers’
success against the bitpipe.
The most striking announcement at the recent Mobile World Congress in
Barcelona was the formation of the WAC by 24 major operators, sounding a loud
clarion call against the threat of Google and the bitpipe role. It was clear
that this initiative tied in ideally with the LiMO mobile platform –
both looking to create a white label software platform with a common
developer base, to support operator branded apps and user experiences. The
LiMO Foundation welcomed the move at the time, but is now seeking closer
ties, which could build up a real head of carrier steam behind its Linux
oriented efforts.
The Foundation’s executive director, Morgan Gillis, has sent an open
letter to WAC, expressing support and offering “immediate practical
assistance”. He said he has received a “warm response” and
expects a more specific response later this week. This could outline how the
two groups could work together, and of course there is speculation that they
would eventually merge altogether, given that they share many prominent
members, notably Vodafone, DoCoMo, SKT and Telefonica (LiMO’s carrier
board members). They also tap into several of the same industry efforts and
standards, such as the Open Mobile Terminal Platform’s Bondi
interfaces.
As Gillis puts it, “a complementary industry logic links LiMO to the
new grouping. Together they provide a complete white label solution to
distribute applications and media via a wholesale channel to operators and
retailers, and a white label device platform.”
There is sure to be skepticism around any initiative that involves as many
large and egotistical organizations as WAC, in terms of whether they will
succeed in cooperating long enough to deliver practical results. This is
where Gillis thinks LiMO can provide its “practical assistance”,
having been through three years of sometimes painful experiences of
establishing governance and bye-laws, and addressing the thorny issue of IPR
sharing.
And it is very much in LiMO’s interest that the WAC gets moving quickly
and makes a real industry impact, before other systems like open Symbian and
Android gain unstoppable momentum, along with their related ecosystems and
app platforms. These are not just OS alternatives of course – they
represent the models that threaten the LiMO/WAC approach of putting the
cellco at the pivotal point of the value chain (the vertically integrated
vendor branded device/experience; or the open web/bitpipe).
The letter reads: “I am very pleased to write this open letter to the
initiators of the Wholesale Applications Community on behalf of the Board of
LiMo Foundation offering a) our full support, b) our committed participation,
and c) our immediate practical assistance in a spirit of whole-industry
cooperation. It is clear to us that the highly complementary areas of focus,
shared belief in true openness and common industry vision create an
exceptional opportunity for deep and long term collaboration between LiMo
Foundation and the Wholesale Applications Community to release unfettered
innovation across the industry and fully ignite the mobile internet in a way
that is compelling and life enhancing to consumers everywhere.”
The overall aim of LiMO is that “commercial innovation can freely
thrive without brand or business model conflict with the underlying platform.
But Gillis admits western cellcos have a lot to learn about creating brands
and user experiences that can resonate with consumers to the same degree as
those of vendors (or Asian carriers). And this will not be an overnight
process. “If operators prove to be unable to create these brands theyu
will be pushed towards the dumb pipe. And it took DoCoMo two years to get its
FOMA brand right,” he commented.
Of course, DoCoMo, along with the Korean and other Japanese cellcos, is every
mobile operator’s gold standard for control of the user experience and
the customer’s loyalty and dollars. The Japanese leader exerts iron
control over its supply chain, codeveloping devices right down to chip level,
and its user interface, apps and brand dominate over those of software or
phone partners. But even DoCoMo’s grip is loosening a little under
attack from the open internet, especially as Japanese consumers rely on the
phone, as opposed to the notebook, for web access far more than users in most
other developed countries. This is a bonus because it makes the cellco the
primary vehicle for internet usage, but also makes phone subscribers very
demanding in terms of data volumes and access to the full range of web
choices. In recent times, DoCoMo has increasingly been working with
international handset brands, and with peer group cellcos, to enhance its
appeal in its saturated home market. Where once it sought to leverage its
superior expertise in mobile apps to lead others round the world, notably by
establishing a community of carriers around its iMode platform – the
first viable web/development ecosystem for the phone – now it has to
tap into the greater scale and reach of its partners. This was seen in its
partnership with Telefonica, which focuses on mutual procurement and
influence in handsets, roaming, shared experience in services and other areas
– indicating the need for scale and cost efficiency as well as
international reach.
DoCoMo was also a founder member of LiMO, though arguably it was compatriot
Softbank that scored the real coup in terms of international partnerships,
creating the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) with Vodafone, Verizon and China
Mobile. This would draw on standards and open interfaces to create a common
developer platform to underpin the web experiences of all four carriers,
offering software partners a huge base to address. JIL is now one of the key
components of WAC, which of course extends the addressable base for apps and
content still further and brings in DoCoMo and most of the other developed
market majors.
Leadership of JIL automatically gives its founders a hugely influential
position in WAC, and Vodafone is most clearly turning this to advantage in
product terms. Along with DoCoMo, the UK-based multinational has been the
most active cellco in recent years in driving carrier cooperation and
standards efforts. Many of these activities are starting to converge to
create a hugely wide-ranging set of initiative in which operators use their
combined weight to dictate terms to the device and software industries. For
instance, an important Vodafone inspired grouping, the Open Mobile Terminal
Platform (OMTP), was set up in 2004 to create common handset specifications,
particularly in software – an early sign of the carriers seeking
control of the norms of the mobile platform, as well as reducing
fragmentation. The initial objectives were ambitious and have certainly not
all been realized – the first projects were “platform definition
and realization, specification of a Java core software platform,
specification of a technology agnostic core software platform, identification
of hardware requirements and defragmentation, and specification of a user
experience platform”. But some of the results, notably the Bondi set of
APIs, have been important, and are now key elements in WAC, as well as
influential on LiMO. Bondi provides a consistent set of web APIs that enable
apps and widgets to access capabilities provided by the underlying terminal,
such as camera or address book, regardless of the device’s vendor or
operator. Bondi also provides a common underlying security framework. LiMO
supports Bondi elements such as its browser and runtime frameworks.
How will all this influence translate into real services for Vodafone? The
answer, at least in its western European heartlands, is the 360 web services
platform, which is likely to be emulated to some degree by Verizon Wireless
as it revamps its own carrier-branded mobile internet strategy during 2010.
Eventually, in the WAC vision, carrier specific platforms like 360 will be
just overlays for a standardized set of underlying frameworks, as defined by
WAC, LiMO, OMTP and, in time, web standards bodies like W3C. This will give
developers a vast base that single vendors, even Nokia or Google, cannot
match for numbers.
However, there will be many obstacles on the road to such a carrier driven
vision, and 360 will be the testing ground for many of the issues – and
its success or otherwise may influence how deep an active commitment the WAC
members make to the approach. There is the obvious question mark over how far
so many interest groups can respond nimbly to real user requirements and
agree in reasonable time frames on standards. And even if a united platform
is created in short order, how it will be governed to maintain fairness and
developer support - the key issue where LiMO Foundation believes it can
contribute, having adopted probably the most politically neutral and
transparent governance of any of the major mobile platforms.
The other glaring issue is that of the operators’ poor record in making
their brands compelling. Time and again, in their ongoing battle with the
handset makers to grab the balance of power, they have lost out – at
least outside east Asia – because they could not make their brands as
strong as those of Nokia. And now they are fighting the battle on many
fronts, against the brands of content owners and internet services players
too. A new survey of consumers in the UK, one of the most competitive mobile
data markets, shows that almost 25% of customers now feel their primary
loyalty is to a software brand,
about the same percentage as those who are mainly influenced by carrier
brand. However, according to research firm TNS, the handset brands remain
dominant despite the rise of Google, driving 51% of consumer choices.
The single most important factor in handset choice, TNS found, is still look
and feel (29%), which embraces the hardware design and the user interface. In
twin second place come choice of apps/content, and handset brand. The
priority for Vodafone is to show the world how the carriers can deliver the
first two of these elements, and neutralize the third by making their own
brands more important to subscribers – and subscribers at the premium
end of the market, not just the low end consumers at whom carrier branded
offerings and devices have usually been targeted.
Vodafone launched 360 in several key markets last November and results in
these early days have been mixed. The platform is very much a work in
progress but 2010 will be its make or break year, and the operator is already
extending it significantly in terms of applications reach and handset
partners. Two of the new additions epitomize the changing nature of
Vodafone’s relationships with the device community – a 360
version of the X6 from Nokia, its old adversary and representative of the
traditional love-hate bond between cellcos and their suppliers; and a 360
implementation of the HTC Legend. The former represents a step forward for
Vodafone, with Nokia abandoning its old stance of refusing to co-brand with
cellcos or dilute its own user interfaces. The latter indicates a more modern
collaboration, with a handset maker accustomed to working in white label
environments – but whose own user experience, HTC Sense, is widely
applauded as the best overlay for Android and Windows Mobile. Here is the
crux of the cellco dilemma – both Sense and 360 variants of HTC
handsets will sit in the Vodafone portfolio, differentiated by their UI and
app stores but not by hardware (though pricing may vary). It will offer Sense
as a free upgrade to current HTC Hero users, as well as both 360 and Sense
variants of the Android Legend. If the 360-fied version cannot outperform the
native HTC device, it will suggest that Vodafone still has far to go in
creating the first carrier user experience outside Japan and Korea that can
actually hold a candle to the vendors’ offerings.
The jury is very much out on that, though 360’s progress by year end
will be a key indicator, and will teach many lessons on how to present,
market and price carrier web offerings. Vodafone is certainly throwing plenty
of ammunition at 360. At Mobile World Congress, it promised a large number of
new phones for the platform, and followed up this week with the X6 and new
apps. The 360 implementation of the X6 marks an interesting shift in the
often stormy relationship between Vodafone and Nokia, which has so frequently
defined the changing balance of power between vendor and carrier brands on
the handset. For Nokia, it reflects a growing readiness to co-brand key
phones with operators in the quest for market share in the midmarket, where
carrier platforms tend to shine, and which is a key growth area this year.
For Vodafone, the deal sees 360 going multi-OS (Android options will also
come along), although clearly its preferred platform is LiMO, which
underpinned the first 360 handsets, the Samsung H1 and M1. LiMO is an
environment defined by operators, including Vodafone, and so gives them a far
greater measure of control than the vendor controlled choices.
Vodafone says it sold almost 300,000 of the H1 and M1 handsets between
November and January, and in Germany and the UK, these products were its
bestselling smartphones in the holiday quarter. There are now over 7,000 apps
available for download from the Vodafone 360 Apps Shop and by March these
will be supported by 50 handsets. The latest come from WIN, which has added
Pocket Doctor, a medical guide; an app to provide lottery information and a
lucky number generator; and Snow and Ski, which delivers information on ski
conditions at resorts all over the world. The first two are free while Snow
and Ski costs €0.99. The apps run on Symbian or LiMO. Exclusive content
is important too – Vodafone UK’s X6, for instance, comes
preloaded with the third series of the popular comedy Gavin and Stacey, and
this may prove a key tactic going forward.
Wireless Watch: LiMO supports operator software drive, but Vodafone 360 will be litmus test
