Mobile OS Players - Growth Approach

In the backdrop of high incidence of CEO turnover in the mobile OS space – Mike Masnick writes, The smartphone market seems to have suffered from delusions of grandeur too early in the process. "The next big thing" is often crowned well before the market is actually developed. This leads to companies making decisions as if their new offering was already widely accepted, rather than recognizing the need to cultivate and build a new market. Mike prescribes that there are a few things that a CEO should be doing.
- Recognising that the market is unsure – growth would come out educating customers about smartphone capabilities vis-à-vis the regular mobile phones. In essence move smartphones for the hype zone to the reality zone.
- As operators do the marketing , the mobile OS providers are handicapped – but they need to learn from Intel to drive end-user demand on a "component" of an overall system with smart end-user focused marketing.
- Mobile operators need to be pushed to support the mobile ecosystem as is being done by the recording industry.
The trick, the new CEO’s need to note though, is to focus on building the market from below, rather than waiting for the marketing to come to them. That means doing away with the hype, but focusing in on ways to really develop and sell the really useful features of new smartphones.I agree - Mobile OS players need to have the mindshare with end customers and force operators to align more closely with them. The balance of influence between handset makers, OS players and mobile service operators seem to be skewed in favour of mobile service providers - this may need to change to accomodate more equitable arrangement to help in advancement of the mobile industry and facilitate the growth of the mobile ecosystem.