Hacking the Phone Platform

Douglas Ruskoff picks up the vision of phones as hackable platforms from the director and head of user experience at Nokia's Insight and Foresight unit, Marko Ahtisaari in a recent talk.  First, on the need to innovate:

"What have we had? We've had mobile voice, which was the lead application and still is the lead application. Texting, person-to-person, one-to-one messaging. And, recently, the only dominant functionality that we've added is the camera. We need new innovation on this platform for it to grow."

Second, how the most promising and compelling software innovations have always been born in the hands of playful users.

Third, on phones, like the internet, innovation springs from the bottom-up where the platform is open.  SMS began as a signaling technology (Basically, a text-based way of saying "you've got mail.") adapted for mainstream communication by users themselves.

The boom of what Ahtisaari calls "personalization hacks" followed much the same path. The industry certainly hadn't predicted such boundless enthusiasm for sounds, graphics and themes but quickly capitalized on the excitement once they realized, as Ahtisaari explains, that "personalization has an intense value and people are willing to pay for it." Ringtones are the most promising form of content to emerge this way so far; users now pay up to three dollars for a ringtone compared to 99 cents for the entire actual song from which it was derived. It's the kind of phenomenon that is essentially unpredictable and would seem absurd to any business development department. In terms of social currency, however, it makes absolute sense: a ringtone is a way of sharing music instead of simply listening to it. But such observations are a lot easier to make in hindsight, once the user base has gone ahead and hacked their way to the most sensible and creative applications of the technology we've sold them.

Ahtisaari seems to be at pains to remind an industry now gloating about the profitability of ringtones that they really began as a hack. It was back in July of 1999 that a 23-year-old British phone hacker realized how a feature on Nokia handsets allowing companies to create tones and graphics could be hacked by users to add their own ringtones. Once the industry caught on and created easier ways for everyday users to exploit the same code as the hacker community, the market surged from fringe to mainstream in less than a year.

This is outsourcing through openness the model of innovation that Howard Rheingold suggests for transforming users into developers.

...If I was a Nokia or a Hewlett-Packard, I would take a fraction of what I’m spending on those buildings full of expensive people and give out a whole bunch of prototypes to a whole bunch of 15-year-olds and have contracts with them where you can observe their behavior in an ethical way and enable them to suggest innovations, and give them some reasonable small reward for that. And once in a while, you’re going to make a billion dollars off it.

Douglas points out that most hacks are not in the commercial interest of the platform, but the reward of tapping into the bottom-up outweights the risks.  The challenge for the marketing function then becomes managing middlespace.  What innovations in, and that serve, the longtail should be developed for the mainstream?  Sometimes the adoption pattern's momentum will make these investment decisions clearer.  Sometimes it takes an understanding of the portfolio of options, both of diversity and combinations over time, to see potential.  But this is managing emergence, for which there is barely a practice and where attempting to manage instead of sensitively lead can be folly.

Mass customization used to be a way to divide the spoils of the late majority at significant risk and cost.  Platform architecture that mattered less when optimized for the tornado of growth that proceeded it was essential for economies of scope.  Now the cost for open network effects has fallen for a new interplay between the long tail and TLC.  Mass customization and personalization is so valuable that users as developers take it on themselves.  A product splinters into a thousand derivatives along the long tail.  Each new one proceeds along its own technology adoption lifecycle, and the challenge for the platform owner is which to accelerate.  Each is an option, where the option didn't exist before.