and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

The sad reality^[1] of the cell phone sector is that it is craptastic. To provide my own disclaimer, I am not in a position to comment other than a mild awareness of the underpinnings of the hardware and software and, with only a slightly more authoritative tone, I am a user.

Never have I had exceptional service. Never have I gone a week without a dropped call or bad reception. Never have I enjoyed using a cellphone's interface. Never have I enjoyed the extreme differences between one cellphone's interface and the next. Never have I felt as though my money was 100% well spent on my cellular service. Never have I been impressed by how cheap a feature was.

The reality is that the whole system is broken. It's a hodge-podge of different and disparate technologies that do not work, let alone with eachother. Each phone is different and loading any sort of universal software to them is a nightmare. And I'm not talking about the nightmare of installing Windows on your new desktop - that's a walk in the park in comparison - I am talking about widespread uncompatibility, locked features, and battery life so short that it would just be frustrating if you put it on vibrate mode in bed.

The reality is that, as a business, the cell carriers are petrified of you actually .. you know.. using your phone. Functionality like data sync and bluetooth are crippled so that they can control the content, thereby controlling your dollar. Want to transfer your own ringtone? Nope, sorry, we can't let you do that. It's the equivalent of the RIAA selling you tape recorders but disabling the recorder so you can't steal music.

Unfortunately, the startup costs involved in getting into the cell market are astronomically high. No Apple-seeded-in-the-garage stories here. The reality is that the cell market is a more inexperienced, and more fucked up beast than it's predecessor the landline market was and.. well.. that was and is still pretty fucked up. New markets need new ways of thinking, new engineering, and new approaches. The automobile industry was not created by Standard Oil. The Internet has proven that new technology often comes with new blood in unsuspecting ways.

The reality is that the entire industry has locked itself into money-making mode. Provide inferior service with horrific customer service and overcharge for the privelage. As this door is slowly unlocked perhaps we will see some sort of sustainable and useful service in the future.

Alex Krupp talks this all over in a recent blog post:

What follows is an explanation of why creating a successful mobile-wireless software startup is not just improbable, but impossible.
The underlying technology is broken
The business case is a proven recipe for failure
The social aspects are more awkward than a middle school dance

But the most interesting part is the comments, where plenty of people show up to dispel these negative beliefs... only their arguments are made up of ifs and whens and maybes.

1) There are hundreds of different phone models. Your software needs to run on all of them. How hard is this?

Not particularly hard, if you follow properly apply good software engineering practices (good device layer abstraction, scaling feature-sets, etc).

The likely winning debate candidate will wave the Japanese and Asian markets in your face, speaking of social networking and high bandwidth downloads. The reality is that they have been able to consistently build networks and make their technology work. The reality is that Japan covers 3.92% of the land area that we do and they are well over six times as densely populated.

The reality is that Americans are very capable of kowtowing to industry, accepting bad products, and accepting bad service. They are also quite capable of paying for it, too.

¹ man, am I talking a lot about reality these days. I guess I really am a realist. Bummer, cause I always thought those optimists looked pretty damn happy. *sigh*