BigMother.dk

Go read show number 1453 in the Apple iPhone sequel (and the responses) – if you care. Nothing new there. My interests in this is not merely due to a personal hope of owning a decent mobile phone in this life. Rather, it’s the very widespread futuro-sentimental complaint about the miserable state of current mobile phone design and the standard response to it. “I don’t NEED a friggin camera, video-calling, or crappy games” most people I know say. Yet that is what producers seem to focus on.

What’s most fascinating to witness is how a whole breed of digi-cool commentators being so unanimously fed up of bloated mobile phones. And whom does everybody turn to? Apple of course, the company that gave us macs and iPods with their ‘feminine’ design ideology of beauty, intuitive appeal and friendly usability rather than horsepower, features and techno-logic. (I know, it’s not quite that simple, it just sounds better). For computers, if you get depressed by the windows feeling (as I actually do), you can always get a mac. But with phones you can’t. There’s only bad (Nokia), worse (Sony-Ericsson) and horrible (LG, Samsung, Motorola and smartphones). Note, this is a very intuitive and probably unfair judgment, not based on much hands on analysis.

But the reality is that Apple haven’t been able to create the same user experience with a phone. If they had, they were probably already shipping. What if designing decent phone just is very hard? What if these huge market players actually have a firm analytical grip on the true desires of customers? Well, I just don’t believe that before I see an honest attempt of getting rid of the 85% features you don’t use everyday and wrapped in nice simple hardware. Don’t tell me it’s only the problem of controlling the whole value chain/experience (service provision etc.) that stops Apple and others for creating the phone for the iPod-gen? Is it really that hard to provide a service (with sound quality, coverage, etc)? No, it cannot be. So what is it?

Whatever the answer to this mystery, all this gossip about an iPhone says something about the general state of mobile phone design I guess. But also something about a new techno-folklore on the white knight Sir Apple coming to rescue us. Any thoughts on that?

It’s becoming common sense that Google owns a lot of information about our interests, outlook, web-whereabouts, history and more through an ever-growing list of powerful web-services and applications (see for instance Michael Zimmer’s take on this). So much that this issue – which is at the very core of Google’s business model and thus not just something they can spin their way out of – is becoming a concern that many associate with the Google brand. Yesterday, I received a mail about a wiki software that we use in Actics which have been acquired by Google. One fourth of the mail reads:

What about security and privacy?

Your data is yours — that doesn’t change at Google. We will continue to work to ensure the privacy and security of your data. Furthermore, Google is as committed to privacy and security as we are. Since the user information you provided to JotSpot will soon be transferred to Google as part of their acquisition of JotSpot, we want to provide you with the opportunity to retrieve your user information and cease usage of the JotSpot service before the transition. If you do not wish to continue using JotSpot, send an email to privacy@jot.com in the next sixty days and we will reply with instructions for retrieving your user information.

Are you convinced by this? Doesn’t it rather concern you that they feel the need to tell you?

In a greater perspective the question is if Google’s successful growth will simply undermine them in the end? Can an information handling brand survive getting this kind of concern associated to it? Can Google credibly convince us that such massive ownership of peoples data is not an even more concerning monopoly than Microsoft’s production software hegemony?