Think about the things that make mobile Mobile.  A portable, connected, location aware personal computing and communications device.  (Trip Hawkins sums it up best as a “Mobile Social Computer” here) The very things that present the promise and possibilities of mobile are the very things which the Carriers control the most tightly.

The Carriers control the distribution of software.  They control the APIs to allow programs to access hardware like the camera, Bluetooth, GPS chip, and microphone.  They even control the list of networks and servers accessible to the mobile devices. 

Carriers, with one foot in their telegraph pole dial-tone 48-volt twisted pair graves, are the ones with a chokehold on our future.  They hoard the tools needed for Mobile to become a new medium, or at least a fully realized continuation of the personal computing medium.

But it is theirs, theirs to control, to hoard, to take to their graves with.

Can you hear the death rattle? 
Analysts like m:metrics and Telephia made much hay last month about the “flat” mobile game revenues.  A closer look reveals that the overall revenue is indeed about the same for the past four quarters. But, BUT, off-portal is UP over last year, which means that the carrriers are actually DECREASING.  The tighter the Carriers grip their non-voice business, the more life they squeeze out of it.

The Future is NOW
William Gibson once said that “the future is here.  It’s just not widely distributed yet”.  In the case of mobile, the undistributed future is the 7% of users playing the OEM version of Bejewelled, and the 3% spending 12 minutes just to find the call-ahead seating number for their local Outback steakhouse.  At that rate, the mobile future sucks.

Bits is bits
Bits is bits, and some bits are not more expensive to transmit than others, be they voice, images, data, whatever.  Why should a minute of voice bits cost twenty cents while sending 10 seconds of image data costs $1.99?  The Carriers own the infrastructure, and they need to be paid for your traffic on it.  When the Carriers try to play Trotsky and govern descriptions and rates for different bits, the system devolves to the lowest common denominator. Customers and content publishers need to treat handsets like PC terminals, and their carriers as online service providers.  Stop using Carrier managed multiplayer services and leaderboards; build or license your own.  Find ways to move more data from the phone (gamedata, voice, text, location, photos) to a server, or vice versa, at regular data rate prices. and ultimately, start building and/or supporting our own content gateways and vending decks, to take the central planners out of the loop.

It is called “the cutting edge” and “pushing the envelope” becasue there is the expectation of something getting cut or broken.  Let’s start with cutting the Carriers’ twisted pair and allowing Mobile to break out.