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Fear, Uncertainty And Mobile Phones
from the bad-reasoning,-bad-understanding-of-history dept
Earlier this week, the semiconductors editor of EE Times wrote this incredibly fear mongering piece about how mobile phones were "sucking" in every other kind of device and that was going to create a "catastrophic vortex" for the semiconductor industry. The article got picked up by Slashdot, and is now receiving an awful lot of undeserved attention. The reasoning in the piece is terrible, so I've tried to pick it apart at TheFeature, looking at how the original articles misunderstands commoditization and innovation and assumes a constant world where the only innovation is that mobile phones will have more features -- rather than recognizing that as mobile phones get more features, it will allow many more things to be connected, providing even more opportunities for semiconductors.
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The inscrutable User Interface
Quoting from the original article: “In every case, the standalone device drawn into the black hole of convergence is, at heart, a system-on-chip with a control CPU, often a specialized DSP core, keyboard input and both graphic and audio output.” “Two electronic gizmos in a package are better than one, as long as the form factor doesn't get out of control or the user interface become inscrutable.” The essential fact is that it is the user interface that defines these devices. It’s the UI’s physical form that differentiates one device from another. The issue becomes how to pack all these feature sets into one device without requiring a headache-inducing array of tiny buttons, the presence of which would quickly make “the user interface become inscrutable” as the article suggests.
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