MobileInfoPlanet

I haven’t heard the term ‘ecosystem’ as many times in my whole life as I have since Elop’s announcement on February 11. All of sudden it is all about the ‘ecosystem’, everyone is attributing everything to the ‘ecosystem’ – even when your phone stops working because it got crushed by a bus it apparently has something to do with the ‘ecosystem’ these days.

But you know what? I could not care less about an ‘ecosystem’. Honestly I don’t. And I am getting bored hearing about it everywhere, even more so because everyone seem to take at face value that an ecosystem is the way to go in the future. I have argued before that the concept of an ecosystem doesn’t exists on your PC, so why do I need it on my phone? I don’t need it on my PC, and I don’t want nor need it on my smartphone/mobile computer; the more tied you are an ecosystem the less flexibility and freedom you have to use your phone the way you want to, and if you do not agree with that then just have a look at this – that is a direct consequence of your beloved ‘ecosystem’. And you can be sure that we will see more of that if everyone, manufacturers and consumers alike, is set on jumping on the ‘ecosystem’ bandwagon. (And no, an appstore is not an ‘ecosystem’, appstores existed long before the iPhone no matter how hard Steve Jobs is trying to sell you that they were first, eg. google ‘Handango’ and ‘Palmgear’, both existed years before Apple’s appstore).

I am certain that the future will be about openness, so that you can connect to any cloud that you wish, and the lock-ins that we are see now will seem antiquated. It will about open services and open APIs, and those manufacturers who chose to continue the current path of lock-ins will disappear or be marginalized.

So instead of an ‘ecosystem’ what I want instead is a true mobile computer. I want the full experience in my pocket, with no compromises. I want to be able to carry around my phone and use it just as I would use a laptop. I want access to the whole web, be able to download any file or media and then consume it directly on my phone or my TV, no matter what kind of media it might be.

So who will be the first to throw ‘ecosystem’ in the bin where it belongs and instead focus on what we should be striving for: true mobile computers with complete freedom and unrestricted access to everything in the cloud? That is why I have such high hopes for MeeGo, as I would like to see it as being the stepping stone to something greater and better beyond where everyone are rushing right now.

And if not MeeGo, there is always Canonical of course….

I wrote in another post that I think/hope that the new buzzword ‘ecosystem’ is a just fad that will eventually be replaced by largely platform-independent services and an open OS.

I am aware of that there is little economical incentive for the current big players to go down that path (with Google possibly being the least one to resist as long as it generates traffic for them), something that was also mentioned in the comments of that post. So I have was thinking about it when I came across this article at The Register about Canonical. Since I use Ubuntu it should immediately have occurred to me that Canonical is one of the obvious candidates for coming up with that open solution I am hoping for: if I am not tied to or need nor want any ‘ecosystem’ on my desktop then why would I want it on my smartphone/mobile computer?

In the meanwhile I am crossing my fingers for that rumored MeeGo announcement on June 21!