Ahonen on the future of mobile telecoms

Tomi Ahonen wrote recently about his vision of the future of mobile telecoms. Makes for interesting reading.

I contrasted this with Ray Kurzweil's essay The Law of Accelerating Returns, which I read recently. The two essays are comparable because, although Kurzweil provides much more detail, his essay essentially deals with the ways in which computational advances will change our future. So, very similar themes.

But the comparison doesn't really flatter Ahonen. His conclusions are all very interesting but what I would have been more interested to know is how he arrives at each of these ideas. After all, there is no way for us to verify any of this aside of waiting 20 years! Kurzweil does provide both empirical and theoretical bases for his ideas.

So, a better way, IMHO, for Ahonen to have presented and discussed ideas would have been to go through a logical set of arguments, with the final conclusion taking a relative backseat.

(NOTE: I'm not saying his conclusions are wrong! I'm no expert and he certainly is! All I'm cribbing about :-) is that his predictions seem to be driven by imagination, rather than reason. Not that imagination is a bad thing...)

That takes care of the more general criticism.

More specifically (and this is all shamelessly inspired by Kurzweil's essay), I don't quite agree with the thought process in some specific areas. For example, he writes:

I argued that in very rough terms and considering the performance and specifications, a mobile phone of today will be like a laptop computer 5 years ago; a desktop PC 10 years ago; a mainframe computer 15 years ago; and a supercomputer 20 years ago. With Moore's Law we can expect those trends to roughly hold true into the next 20 years. So to see roughly what kind of processing power we can expect from top-end "smart phones" of 2025, we can look at a supercomputer today - such as the IBM BlueGene/L, which as 16 Terabytes (=16,000 Gigabytes = 16 million megabytes) of memory and which runs at 70,000 Teraflops (=70 Trillion floating point operations per second) of speed.

In contrast, Kurzweil's main thesis is that technological progress is inherently non-linear. It grows not just exponentially but "double-exponentially". (Read his essay for details.) If one were to accept Kurzweil's thinking--and it is difficult not to given the amount of background he provides--then Ahonen's simple extrapolation doesn't work. The amount of progress that we achieved over the past 20 years will be much, much lower than the amount of progress we will achieve over the next 20 years. Kurzweil goes so far as to say (and "prove") that the 100 years of the 21st century will see 20,000 years of progress as measured at today's rate of progress.

I wonder what Ahonen and others think.

Link: Ottawa and 20 year future of mobile telecoms: My most challenging conference presentation ever.

Comments

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Murli,

Thank you for the posting and I take on board that my web posting did not have the depth to explain my reasoning. As I stated quite clearly, the posting was a brief summary of my keynote presentation to the Canadian Wireless Telecoms Association. The actual presentation did go deeper - but certainly not deep enough - to explain how I got to those conclusions.

I should mention that Ray Kurzweil's treatise of the subject matter has a very valid point - one that I also made in my speech, but did not think of writing into my summary - that there are going to be much greater disruptive innovations over the next 20 years than the linear projections that I made.

To give just one example from my presentation in Ottawa. I was asked to forecast 20 years into the future. So I went back 20 years to examine the world of 1985 and showed how essentially every gadget and technology then in existence was now a standard feature of a normal high-end cellular phone of 2005. So back in 1985 we did have modems, but these were quite rare items connecting mainframe computers to the Arpanet - the precursor of what we call the internet today. In 1985 there were 2000 connected computers in the world.

Back then the Macintosh had been launched (a year earlier in 1984), and I know at some point soon thereafter Bill Gates started with his vision of a PC on every desk. But I bet nobody, absolutely nobody, could foresee that those personal computers, the PC's, could be all interlinked, via modems, to a system so user-friendly that any person in Bolivia could access any website in Bulgaria, etc. That one billion people on the planet could access that computer network - not only from their desks and homes, but very literally anywhere while walking on the street, sitting in a bus, etc.

Now yes, I do know the concept of a global web of computers had been conceived by many science fiction writers. William Gibson's book Neuromancer even coined the term cyberspace in 1984 (a book that at the time strongly influenced my interest into technology and intensified my curiosity to visit Tokyo..)

So what's the point? That yes, back in 1985 probably most futurists could have made reasonable forecasts to the evolution of the personal computer, and if they used Moore's Law, they'd probably hit today's PC performance at an accuracy of plus/minus a few years.

But could they have also "invented" the idea that a personal computer would some day use the evolved technology of modems, and that somehow all PCs would be shipping with built-in high-speed modems some day? That the penetration of PC's would expand past the office into the home (beyond the techie nerds, obviously, who had had PC's before the office workers got them); and would there be any conceivable way that common people could find any utility and benefit from accessing data via this computer network. (Not to mention the 2 billion cellphone users who are increasingly having access to the internet - today over 100 million, ie over 10% of all internet users access the web only with a mobile phone, that is they don't even have access to a PC. In Japan and Korea the mobile phone is already the dominant internet access device; and with cellular phones replaced much more frequently than personal computers, shortly the cellphone will become the globally dominant internet access device.)

The internet is one of those totally disruptive technology developments, that would not have been "foreseeable" in any forecast of the next few decades, made in the mid 1980s. Long-run forecasts, hundreds of years into the future, maybe, but not to appear over the next decade.

In my foreacast I allowed for this kind of disruptions to appear, and made that lame comment that of course my forecast will be proven to be wrong, but that "luckily I will retire at the age of 65 in 2025 so I won't have to live up to that forecast" - as a joke. In reality, obviously I will put the more deeply explained version of that forecast into my next book(s), just like my previous forecasts are all in my previous books for all to see - and for me to stand by them and be counted.

Finally, as a more immediate thought for anyone visiting at this blogsite. If you are interested in the near future and how to capitalize on it. Businessweek four weeks ago ran as its cover story - and devoted half of the whole issue to - the concept of the digitally connected consumer, ie customer-communities. Businessweek said this affected all industries, not only the IT, telecoms and media. Businessweek said digitally empowered customer-communities are the biggest change to all of business, since the industrial age.

Think about that. Biggest change since the industrial age. Since the industrial revolution we've had electricity, the telephone, radio, cars, TV, airplanes, credit cars, personal computers and the internet. Yet BW says customer-communities will change business more than all of those? Its a mighty big thing going on.

The Economist had the same theme on its cover story April 2 of this year, and a big 16 page special report. The Economist put it this way - understanding customer communities will determine the very survival of all businesses. Survival !!

Biggest change affecting the survival of all businesses. I would argue this merits a bit more of a look, by anyone who is honestly interested in a successful business, product, service, project or department for the next 5-10 years. And guess what. My fourth book - Communities Dominate Brands - is the world's first (and still only) business book on these digitally connected customer-communities, covering all aspects of digital communities, from blogging to gaming to dating to rating to TV interactivity to cellphone smart mobs to community collaboration websites, etc.

Visit the blogsite for the book - www.communities-dominate.blogs.com - for more, where my co-author Alan Moore and I post regularly on the developments on these themes. We also have links to chapters from the book, and of course ordering info on the book (as well as my previous 3 bestsellers). Communities Dominate Brands makes a perfect summer holiday book to read, to put you in the mindset of the truly strategic thoughts for after summer holidays. Biggest change since the industrial revolution...

Dominate !

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Murli]

Hi Tomi,

Thanks a lot for writing. I'm very impressed and humbled by the fact that you'd take the time to reply in such detail even though I didn't exactly flatter you. :-)

Agree and understand all that you said about forecasting the future so I'm going to skip right to your point about communities dominating the future. It's very interesting that you brought this up because, at the consulting firm where I work (in Singapore), we have recently begun some work on this very theme. Quite a coincidence! We call it People Power. I will be blogging some of my own thoughts on this topic and will see if I can also get any of my colleagues to write some guest posts about this.

A somewhat related theme that I have begun thinking about is something I call Individualisation. I am noticing that, whether one looks at marketing, service delivery, product development or even manufacturing, consumers are increasingly demanding (and companies are able to deliver) products that are highly customised to their individual needs. As I see it, this trend can only accelerate, and not merely for "information products", but also real, physical products. The rate of progress will of course differ depending on the domain -- I can get Individualised music fairly easily today but I can't, in general, receive medical treatment that is Individualised based on my specific genetic fingerprint.

I see Individualisation having repurcussions (many of them positive) for all kinds of businesses and also having many social/cultural implications. The imagination is still at work on what some of these could be.

This theme is closely related to the rise of People Power/Customer Communities, the Long Tail effect, micro-segments and other fashionable buzzwords :-) so I have so far hesitated in proclaiming this as a Brand New Theory. Still gathering evidence that this is truly something new before I start blogging about this, but would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks again for writing,
Murli

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Murli

I had no idea you are from (or in) Spore? I was there just a few months ago (I am based in London) when I was the featured highlight of the Singapore Infocomm's big 3G Telecoms event called "Wow 3G" - you may have caught the big media visibility we had, including newspapers and TV etc. We have to get together the next time I'm in town.

About Communities - obviously you will be interested in the book. I will e-mail you the first full chapter for you to get a glimpse of it. I know for example the specialist IT bookstore sells it, and of course Amazon carries it. Any visitors to this blogsite - if you'd like to receive for free the first chapter of my latest book, just send me an e-mail to [email protected]

Separately on the idea of Individualization - I think you will find Mark Curtis's brand new book very fascinating. Its called Distraction (was just released here in London a week ago, should become visible on Amazon.co.uk in about a month or so, and in a few months should appear on Amazon.com) The book is a brilliant analysis and treatise of how modern humans are trying to cope with the ever more complex distractions of the rapidly evolving digital worlds. I'm sure you'll love that book..

Oh, and if you'd like an "exclusive" excerpt from my book for your website, or if you'd like to do an online interview or something, let me know...

Dominate !!

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Murli]

Thanks for the book recommendation! This will go on my Amazon wishlist.. or maybe I'll just buy it myself. Will wait to read an excerpt on Amazon when it gets listed there.

For the rest, sent you an email. Cheers!