The problem with mobile

Why hasn't the whole cell phone industry exploded?

I don't mean the "use a portable phone to call people" market. That market is doing great, because everyone knows how to use a phone and a cell phone is just a better solution to that problem for a lot of uses.

I mean the entire "data in my pocket" or "fundamentally different kind of interaction" business. For years, everyone has been talking about the coming goldmine in mobile.

I think the problem is that we've been trying to solve the wrong problem.

Ten or fifteen years ago, when I was working with the folks at Prodigy, just about all the functionality of the web was known. And yet almost no one was working on the right stuff--the stuff that ended up working. Take a look at virtually every giant online success (except for Amazon) and none of them were obvious in 1992.

I think we're going to discover a whole new universe of cell phone services that people want to pay for, things that we won't be able to live without. Like... ringtones.

Mobile doesn't have a problem. We (the marketers and the entrepreneurs) do.