Tech to Spec

I read the title of this blog article and my mind started to bend to try to understand.

The title you ask: “2 phones for everyone—if industry can’t get its act together.”

Well that seems simple enough Jacqui Cheng the ars technica author was simply stating that she thought the cellular telephone industry was headed for 200% market penetration if the industry could not add more features while still simplifying their interfaces. This seems simple but lets take a look at what that means.

It means all cellular companies currently are able to put good features with simple interfaces. These companies aren’t seeing what people want and that is better interfaces and more features. The second part of titles implies that these companies should care that people “have” to carry two cell phones.

I don’t get it. First off if I was a company selling 100 products and I know that I could spend a boat load of cash improving my product, squeezing more features in, and listening to my customers making the interfaces smoother that I would then get an opportunity to sell only 50 phones. Wow, I am game. I would love to sell less product.

I hope you can sense my sarcasm, as well as understand that I too am over simplifying this case. There isn’t just one company out there and new companies would love to get into the handset game. The large players will try to win market share from others and new companies have nowhere to go but up with market share. Those factors alone will push innovation and have companies try to tip the scale towards competitive advantage.

Well I will end my rant since I haven’t really added anything to the article itself. I think companies will continue to innovate to retain customers and grow. New players like Apple and future start-ups will come in and shake things up as well. My guess is I read too much into a title and well it did its job it made me want to read more.