The Risks Of Invisible Mobility
Nick Jones, 30/11/2009, posted in "Analysis"
Nick Jones is a vice president in Gartner Research. Mr. Jones' research focuses primarily on mobile and wireless business and technology. His research coverage includes business-to-employee (B2E) and business-to-consumer ...more info
Nick Jones is a vice president in Gartner Research. Mr. Jones' research focuses primarily on mobile and wireless business and technology. His research coverage includes business-to-employee (B2E) and business-to-consumer (B2C) applications of mobility; mobile application development and delivery technologies including J2ME, and compact .NET; mobile payments; and emerging trends and technologies in the wireless and mobile industry. His secondary research interests include the social impact of technology, and European IT issues. ...less info
We’re going to see ever more confusion caused by the fact that people don’t realise that you might be mobile. This is already causing chaos in lots of interesting ways; for example:
Nothing is immovable. Lots of services and applications make unwarranted assumptions that things are nailed down and can’t move. For example Skyhook assumes that WiFi access points have fixed locations. How wrong can you be?
ACM risks forum recently reported a situation where a New York driver’s iPod map suddenly told him he was in Monaco, because he was passing a WiFi enabled cruise ship. And what about applications like JoikuSpot which turn a 3G enabled handset into a WiFi hotspot, or even some new models of Chrysler car which come equipped with WiFi hotspots. What will Skyhook do when there are more mobile hotspots than fixed hotspots I wonder?
No, I’m not using a PC. Way too many people, applications and web sites assume I’m using a PC. One of my pet hates is those unthinking people who use Outlook email features such as voting buttons which aren’t supported on mobile clients. Or people who send me mobile email with attached documents using file formats that can’t be read on a handset. Or embedded links to services that only run on PCs. Or assume that I’m browsing the spreadsheet on a PC which can run Excel macros.
What makes you think I’ve got a big screen or even a keyboard? I’m browsing around in a moment of dead time and just found a nice new web service and want to sign up for it. And then the nightmare begins; a huge form demanding a pile of personal information. Even when I don’t mind providing the information, I’m not going to spend hours trying to enter it on a tiny keyboard with predictive text. I want to defer that until I get home.
The cloud fallacy. There are lots of cloud fallacies, but one of the biggest is that connectivity is fast, ubiquitous and affordable. Like that’s going to be the case with a mobile device using the average wireless network.
I just lost the ultimate veto. What I do when I see the disk light on my PC flashing away hysterically and a torrent of data streaming out down the DSL and I have no idea why? Or maybe my laptop is doing something unexpected and expensive, like locking up while downloading a movie over a roaming 3G connection? Answer: I vote with the power switch. Pulling the plug is the ultimate veto – except on a mobile device. Soft power switches and non-removable batteries mean you lost the ultimate veto.
You did back that up didn’t you? We all back up our PCs regularly don’t we? OK, I may not be as diligent as I might be, but at least I could back up my PCs if I weren’t so lazy. But what happens when I use a device that either has no backup option, or where backup is a cloud service provided by someone else in whom I have to place absolute trust. Any Danger users out there?
These are just a few of the risks of what I call invisible mobility, there are lots more. I wrote a note about the enterprise aspects of this problem back in 2007 (sorry, behind the paywall) and things have got a lot worse since then. So question your assumptions, because mobility invalidates many of them. And if you have any good stories about confusion caused by invisible mobility let me know.
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