Tablets and other MIDs: Commoditization of hardware??
A Tablet market report from Goldman Sachs states “The OS platform wars could drive greater hardware commoditization over time. We believe that over time the more open platform vendors may have to impose standard hardware and user interface specs on handset and tablet OEMs to ensure that software developers have a uniform installed base. This move to standardization would narrow the ability for hardware manufacturers to differentiate their technology over time and could result in hardware commoditization like that found in the traditional PC market.”
With the gaining importance of software in the Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), hardware’s role as a differentiating factor is indeed diminishing. And with that, so do the profit margins for the chip industry incumbents. So, how are the chipset players reacting to survive, if not thrive, in this evolving market?
Qualcomm shows a recent example - “Qualcomm will give web apps a boost”.
As a part of the company’s effort to enable a shift away from today’s fragmented set of native mobile environments, it is set to release shortly a set of applications programming interfaces geared to give Web-based applications deeper links into hardware. The company already supports Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone and WebOS mobile OSes among others. A move to Web-based applications would help it reduce the variety of platforms for which it needs to write software supporting its chips.
Web vs. native apps - as the mobile usage increases, both will grow with it and become valuable factors of product road maps. The question the product strategists need to ponder upon, however, is “what does my target audience need?” While the debate of web vs. native apps is not new, it does throw some interesting options in this backdrop of looming hardware commoditization.
One option is - The chipset vendors start conforming to the standard specs set by the open platform vendors. The hardware is strongly connected to the OS platform and with a proliferation of various mobile OS in the market, it is not an easy task supporting them all or even hedging on a few. Not enticing.
But what if a chipset vendor were to make inroads into web apps and get a deep link between web apps and its native hardware through some popular browsers? it can potentially get some interesting revenues by tapping the right web apps based on their target market – and remember that web apps is an open platform – no waiting, no approval. Its success is hinged on its adoption by the user community.
Having said that, the speed comparison (of compiled vs. interpreted code/web vs. native) will be there as well as cases, especially till the near future, where native wins over web but companies are working on those too (Qualcomm has been working for two years to optimize software so that browsers run as fast as possible on its chips). What has happened to desktop apps, can also happen to native mobile apps. Hmmm…. This may be one escape route from the commoditization problem.