Kevin commented on my "Why Java?"  post below, saying: 'I dunno. Several of the big software pundits think PHP "will outstrip Java" dontcha know.' 

Kevin is quite right - that's what a number of pundits are saying.   But I suspect they're wrong in the long-term - whether they're talking about web-apps accessed via desktop PCs, or apps accessed by mobile phones.   The reason why people are making these predictions is that PHP is incredibly popular at the moment. The wrinkle here is that I think they're basing their predictions on momentum rather than on the fundamentals. My bet is that the momentum behind PHP will prove only temporary.

Why do I think that?  Two reasons: first, I look at the fundamentals; and second, I've seen it all before.

In the late nineties, I remember pundits saying that this "new thing" called Perl (a programming language beginning with "P") was going to outstrip Java.   What the pundits didn't know was that those of us who'd been around in the very beginning of the Web, trying to make it easy for early web browsers to interact with programs running on a server, had actually started out using Perl.   Back then, it was actually the best way to go (C or C++ was a sub-optimal choice for reasons I won't go into).  But, then Java came along.  And it was what great developers had been waiting for... 

A few years later... lots of mediocre developers were having problems with Java... "Java doesn't work. It's too slow...It uses too much memory...Right once, test everywhere... you can't build serious GUIs with Swing" were the recurring bleats.  And then, people "discovered" a "cool new technology" that was going to change everything. It was called...  err... "Perl" - and it was going to overtake Java.  And off they went.  Building buggy, poorly designed, mediocre applications.  It didn't get them where they needed to go. So the momentum behind Perl proved temporary, and legions switched from Perl to PHP.

And the same problems will hit PHP that hit Perl... it's fundamental.

So, what about the fundamentals? Well, it's all about designing and build great software. The first thing to realise is that since the dawn of programming, many people have hoped that a programming language would come along that would be so easy to use, anyone could design and build great software.   But the truth is, this is fundamentally impossible given the current state of computer hardware/OS platforms we have to work with.  So now, and for the foreseeable future, great software will be made by people with a deep understanding of how to design great software. Great software will not be designed by code monkeys.  The choice of programming language is, in some ways, incidental.  A great developer could design and build great software in Java, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, C, C++, FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, Basic or C#.  A mediocre developer simply cannot design great software. Period.

Programming languages and related software and platform technolgies are just tools to help you get where you need to go.  What I call "programming languages beginning with the letter P" (like PHP, Perl, or Python) tend to be favoured by developers who have an incomplete understanding of the issues surrounding building great software.  That's not exclusively the case, but it's pretty much a true statement.  Designing and building great software is hard. Always has been. Possibly always will be.  You need all the help you can get from the technologies you use to help you along the way.  And languages like PHP don't really give you the help you need.  Languages like PHP help people build mediocre software fast.  Java helps people build great software fast.

You'll notice that implicit in the above, is an assertion that software needs to be great.  I think it does (most of the time, at least), but the reasons why will have to be the subject of another post...

A consortium of major players (Philips, Sony, Nokia, Samsung and the credit card company Visa) has come together in an attempt to turn mobile phones in a new type of purchasing device.  The way it will work is that you'll place your phone against an item, and press a button on the phone to purchase it.    The idea seems to be that it could eliminate the bottleneck of the checkouts at stores.  There’s more on this story at The Inquirer.

There are two pieces of technology that underpin this: first, the incorporation of Radio Frequency ID tag readers (the occasionally controversial replacement for barcodes), and the technology from Chip and Pin credit/debit cards.

If this takes off, it could really change the way people shop.  But in order for it to work, the purchasing experience is going to have to better than the current checkouts we have now.  But I think it just might work. The trends are there already. For people, that are confident with technology, self-service checkouts are already a preferred choice…because these checkouts tend not to have long queues.  The devil is in the detail though; we’ll need great software on the phones to make purchasing super easy.

I guess that most of us in the industry know that the whole 3G consumer experience still has a way to go before it becomes genuinely compelling.  Whilst out and about shopping last Sunday afternoon, I decided to do a little spur-of-the-moment market research, to see how well Vodafone was doing (I think they have the best 3G phone of the moment – the Sony Ericsson V800).

First the good news.  I was really pleased to see a large “self-service” demo display, where potential customers can try out a 3G phone (the afore-mentioned V800).  Before people can appreciate just how fabulous 3G is (or is going to be), they have to try it for themselves. So, we gave the demo a try.  We followed the instructions to press the right buttons to access Vodafone live.   It all seemed so promising.

Now for the bad news.  We scrolled down to access the Video/DVD/Movie Trailers option.  We pressed the “select” button… and… were hit with an error message saying something like, “Error connecting to network. Please contact your service provider”.   My response was. “No. I don’t so. I can think of better things to do, than stand in-line to inform someone that their demo doesn’t work”… and we walked out of the store.  Had I been a potential customer, I’d have been left with a really terrible impression of 3G.

If there’s one thing that I learned in years of demonstrating complex networked software applications to important potential customers, it was to make sure the demos always, and I mean always work.  And if you’ve done everything you can, and they don’t work, you need to use a little humour to diffuse the situation.  Customers can be very unforgiving (just as I was in the Vodafone store), especially if you’re not trying to sell to early adopters. Of course, it’s not at all easy to make sure that software demos – especially networked software demos – work.   The rule is: if something can go wrong, it will.  So, I’m not saying that what  Vodafone is trying to do with its in-store demos isn’t hard. It is. But, you really do have to go the extra mile to succeed in making a positive impression.  That means planning for different scenarios, and even writing special additional software, if that’s what it takes. I’m not sure that Vodafone have done this (yet). Check out a recent example of Microsoft demo’ing Media Center at CES 2005, to see a great example of what I mean by a team going the extra mile.  If the demo team is anything to go by, Media Center deserves to succeed.

 

We’re in the process of putting together a database of content for a mobile phone software product we’re working on.  What’s interesting about this category of applications i.e. “database-based” apps, is that it’s not the quality of the programming that’s the most important differentiator amongst competitors; rather, it’s the content that’s most important.

That’s not to say that software quality isn’t important – it is.  But, there’s no doubt about it.  Content is king.  And truly understanding the category and ensuring you have genuinely fabulous content isn’t a trivial undertaking.  Knowledge (or, dare I say it, wisdom) isn’t something that is necessarily soluble in cash; this is a good thing from a business point of view, because it creates barriers to entry and builds value.

It’s also good for the customer. I’m a firm believer that, in this new era of the Internet, quality (at the right price) has never been more important in any kind of product; forums and blogs are major influences on peoples’ decisions to buy products, and these provide a level of information that has hitherto been impossible for consumers to access.  And I think this will be increasingly seen to be true for mobile phone software.

Samsung looks like it might be lining up its ducks for a really serious assault on the global mobile handset market. The company hasn’t been to only develop what are reported to be some very nice new handsets, on show at the 2005 CES.

Today the company announced the release of what it says is the first eight-die multi-chip package (MCP) for mobile phones.

 

MCPs are all about packaging a device's functionality into the smallest physical space, and so are massively important for mobile phone designers; consumers are quite rightly demanding that form-factors on advanced phones shrink.  The new Samsung MCP is 1.4mm thick.

When trying to predict the future of networked products and services, I’ve always found a little thought experiment useful: what if bandwidth was infinite and free? The recent signing of an agreement  to develop even higher bandwidth wireless mobile technologies than the currently emerging 3G, makes it a good time to ask that question with mobile phones in mind.

To start with, then, let’s begin with the question: what are more convenient to people: wired networks or wireless networks?   I think the current success of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth attest to the fact that people would find a world without wires is far preferable to one with.  So, if people have a choice between two networks of equal capability (infinite bandwidth, zero latency) and equal cost (free), they’re likely to choose the one that’s most convenient to them.  The wireless one.

Now, which of the several wireless networks has the best coverage in your home today: mobile phone wireless networks; your own Wi-Fi network; or Bluetooth?   Be honest.  Bluetooth has very poor range.  Yes, I know it’s supposed to be a personal network – but not everybody knows that.  I feel sorry for the customers of electronics companies who’ve bought Bluetooth-driven Chip and Pin credit card validation units, so they can supposedly take the unit to their customers (e.g. in restaurants).  Or the future customers of the not-to-be-named electronics giant that’s about to release a wireless home media server, streaming content over… Bluetooth! Of course these don’t/won’t work.  But the poor consumers of this equipment will have to find out the hard (and expensive) way.  And what about Wi-Fi?  If you have anything larger than a small home, you’re in for a bit of disappointment.  The signal strength drops of pretty dramatically with the number of intervening walls.  That means if you want to site your wireless access point in your home office, and use your laptop in the conservatory, forget it.  And if you live in a smaller home, you’re increasingly likely to suffer the opposite problem of interference from your neighbours Wi-Fi network.

So, if the mobile phone network has the best coverage in your house already, what’s wrong with using it for everything now?  Well, it’s too slow, and too expensive for data-intensive applications at the moment.  But in our future world of infinite, free bandwidth that won’t be a problem.  And that creates massive opportunities for mobile phone network operators; and developers and publishers of mobile phone software.  And of course… for network applications that are light on data, some of these opportunities exist today…

 

As we approach the end of the year, it seems as good a time as any to take stock of the current state of the mobile phone software market, and where we're heading in 2005 beyond. Today, the total annual market for mobile phone software stands at around $1B per year; and high-quality venture capital groups such as Apax continue to make major investments in developers and publishers of mobile phone software. For example, Digital Bridges based in London, UK, successfully closed their $18M third round in November this year - they're doing a fabulous job in the mobile games space. It's great to see mobile phone software companies competing so successfully for capital - that's a real testament to the potential of our industry. In case you don't undersand the investment rationales of medium and large venture capital groups in start-up software companies (mobile or otherwise), a successful exit requires that a portfolio company achieve a valuation in the low hundreds of millions of dollars.

Over the next five years, then, many people believe that the market for mobile phone software will grow to around $8B per year, with the fastest growing segment being mobile entertainment software. And I'm confident that the overall market will be much bigger than this, with many analysts massively underestimating what mobile phones are going to do in the Enterprise... but mobile phones and the Enterprise is a subject for another day.

I can't tell you, yet, what our plans are in the mobile entertainment space, but I can say I'm pretty excited about them! We've known exactly where we are going in mobile entertainment software for the last couple of years, and have been biding our time for the market to move in our direction, which it is now. So... roll on 2005... it's going to be an exciting year!

The last couple of years have seen the emergence of a new type of mobile phone - the so-called smart phone which combines phone with hand-held computing functionality. Sales of these devices are growing at a rate of about 40% per year, outpacing PDA growth. Currently, around two million smart phones are sold per quarter. In all the devices available today, there are compromises to be made in terms of usability - but some of the best are made by Nokia and RIM.

My favourite smart phone of 2004, however, is the Sony Ercisson P910.  With the flip closed...

'Twas a couple of afternoons before Christmas, and as I'm sitting here, realising I'm rapidly running out of time to get my remaining Christmas shopping done, I find my mind wandering to the subject of my hopes and wishes for developments in mobile phone technology.   One thing's for sure - 2005 is set to be the year of the 3G mobile phone.   It's only a matter of time now before nice 3G smart phones (with great Java support!) begin to appear.

So I don't need to wish for that.  If I could ask Santa for one thing, it would be a good solution to the problem of data entry on mobile phones.  I don't want SMS style T-9 predictive input.  I don't really want hand-writing recognition (as impressive as it sometimes is).  And I don't even want fiddly little QWERTY keyboards, even though this is the probably the best solution we have right now.

No, what I want is something that lets people be as productive entering data on their phones, as they are at entering data on their PCs.   So... I wish... that this kind of technology (a full-size virtual keyboard, where an image of a keyboard is projected onto a flat surface by a laser, and you simply type on the image as you would a real keyboard)...




... is improved, minituriased, and integrated nicely into a Java-enabled Smart Phone.  Then we'd be cooking!


But enough of all that. Time for me to start really thinking about Christmas now.  I wish everyone out there a wonderful Christmas, and a prosperous New Year.  'Tis the season to be jolly, tra-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la...

I'm often asked why our main technology focus area is Java (J2ME for mobile devices).   One word. Volume. And volume wins. There are hundreds of millions of Java-enabled mobile phones out there already. And almost two BILLION Java-enabled devices in general.