Technologies are constantly evolving. Existing technologies mutate and develop as new technologies are introduced— CDs pretty much killed off vinyl records, then the Digital Compact Cassette and Minidisc fought to do the same thing to tape recorders until the iPod came along and blew them all out of the water.

Sometimes, technologies compete in markets where competition fuels progress- for example, where next-generation games consoles try to outdo one another on features. Sometimes, technologies compete; where there isn’t enough room in the marketplace for a VHS and a Betamax to live side by side, one prospers and the other dies out. All in all, it’s very much like evolution.

It’s exactly what it is that makes one technology “better” than another that interests me. After all, “survival of the fittest” doesn’t necessarily mean that the physically fittest— survive; rather, the ones who survive are simply the species best adapted for survival. (I think the mark of a genius idea is one that makes you think “well, that’s obvious— I could have thought of that…”)

In other words, if food is in short supply at a time that it takes a lot of food to keep the biggest, strongest creatures around, the strongest become the least likely to survive. If there is an island with no predators at ground level, then there’s no reason that a fearless, flightless bird wouldn’t survive. At least, until animals that might kill it for food or fun are introduced…

As Sony are aware, the best technology won’t necessarily be the one that survives in the marketplace. Technically speaking, their Betamax format was better than JVC’s VHS (it’s still often used in video studios), but the home video market was cornered mainly because more films were available on VHS. There are factors involved in marketing technologies that are more important than the technology itself.

Today, the technology market is becoming more mature, and people are more aware of the importance of market forces. There’s no way that Sony would make the same mistake twice and release it’s next generation DVD format without plenty of studios already promising to release their films on it, because there’s no way that the early adopters— the people who rush out to buy something new and enthuse about them enough so that everyone else wants one by the time they have become affordable— would spend their money on what looks like tomorrows dodo. And the early adopters of new technologies have a huge influence on whether it’s going to break through to the mainstream or not.

Which brings me to my point. What happens when a new technology is released which has a potentially enormous market waiting for it, but the gadget-hungry early adopters have no need for? A few years back when the majority of households didn’t have a computer, phones capable of emailling were marketed. Now, if this device had been a masterpiece of design (which I’m assured it wasn’t, but bear with me), it would still be utterly redundant in a house where the gadget-hungry geek already owned a desktop PC, a laptop for working on the move, and a PDA or blackberry for when they didn’t want to carry their laptop around. But for the house where there was no desktop computer, no laptop, no PDA and no desire to spend hundreds of pounds on one, it could have been a useful and popular tool to allow them to send and receive emails. (Again, if it had been a masterpiece of design…) Except the people with no desktop computer, laptop or PDA didn’t really have much use for sending and receiving emails…

To take a more contemporary example, the mobile internet seems likely to be the next big growth area of the web. We’ve gone from the static websites of the original dotcom boom (such as shops which showed you online versions of their printed catalogues and invited you to visit their high street stores) to the more dynamic, user-influenced Web 2.0 sites, where websites share and exchange information with one another, where user-generated content is central to the users experience. The next logical step seems to be moving that experience away from it’s current ties to the desktop, so that you can get the information you are looking for (or publish your own information) from away from the desk, or even out of the house.

Obviously, the first thing that relies on is a mobile device- not something bulky enough to require it’s own bag, but something truly pocket sized, like a mobile phone. You may or may not know that most mobile phones have been able to connect to the internet for several years. The technology is apparently in the pockets of the majority of the residents of the UK- there are apparently more mobile phones than people in the UK, and worldwide more people have access to mobile devices than have access to desktop computers. In developing countries, it’s easier to install a wireless telephone network than to install cables to every household, so mobile phones are more prevalent than fixed land line phones. According to the W3C, more than 2 billion people own a mobile phone, with a million new subscribers every day. However, without web pages that are useful, reliable and accessible at a reasonable price, the technology alone is almost useless.

Now, with standards-compliant websites, it should be very straightforward to transform an useful, reliable and accessible website into a useful, reliable and accessible mobile-friendly website- either by creating an alternative style sheet, or removing the styling altogether and simply delivering the content, or even by creating a parallel front-end that takes it’s content from the same database as an existing site.

The obstacle that remains is a reasonable price for data access. Without cheap access, people won’t want to use the mobile web. Without people wanting to use the mobile web, networks won’t give cheap access. Without an audience that’s actually using the mobile web, companies won’t want to develop sites.

The question is- if the early adopters are one step ahead, using the latest PDAs and laptops rather than mobile phones, connecting to the internet from cheaper inner city wifi hotspots instead of over their phone suppliers more expensive network, how will that affect the way the technology develops? Before the wider public will start using mobile web services, they will need to have access to the web that is reasonably priced- which generally isn’t the case at the moment. (Networks are still feeling the effects of the over-inflated prices paid for 3G network licences, and the much slower than expected rate of adoption.) While the early adopters are using wifi to connect to the internet via inner city hotspots rather than the more widespread GPRS or 3G handsets, it doesn’t make business sense for website owners to develop mobile web services for either the early adopters (a tiny minority) or the average mobile phone user (who doesn’t use their mobile phone to access the internet.)

So, thanks to the mobile networks rush to buy 3G licences in the rush to make money from everyone using video phones, development of the mobile web— which would seem to have been a far more obvious application of the higher bandwidth 3G offers— is held back.

Meanwhile, as unmetered internet access in the home and office becomes increasingly popular (and to some extent taken for granted by developers) websites become bigger, more complicated, more likely to rely on Javascript or plugins like Flash and generally become harder to use on a small screen device. Meanwhile, the number of different mobile browsers is increasing, many of which are trying to “guess” the best way of displaying a web page on a mobile device in completely different ways, making it harder and harder to properly develop and test a mobile site. It seems that we’re not just failing to move towards a working, efficient mobile web, but actually moving away from it.

Is the Mobile Web going to be the dodo of the technology world?

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