Comment

Thoughts on "thoughts of Chairman Mike" - by a reader

Before Mobile World Congress, Mike Short of O2 wrote: "I am sure there will be a million more thoughts and ideas that will come out of Mobile World Congress and I would love to hear your views on the big stories and trends."

A reader has responded:

If I worked for a company that sold connection then I'd want everybody to assume that 'mobile' equated to 'online'. If I was running an event for mobile phone networks and manufacturers, then ditto.

In the real world though, that shouldn't be the case.

Real people, who visit customers, might prefer to work with devices that have the relevant data on them, capture the data or carry out an assessment, without having to worry about signals in the basement of a steel framed building.

For example, the local authority might like to have one visitor carry out tasks for a number of different departments or functions. That would be difficult to achieve without lots of duplicate entry keying given the non-joined-upness of council systems.

Indeed the suppliers of those kind of systems quite like a one-to-one match of connected working, because then all they've got to do is knock up a window onto the back office system; regardless of the probably appalling ergonomics and functionality.

So the interested parties might be happy to conspire to avoid mentioning any other type of 'mobile' but, please, let's not all fall into that trap without at least questioning the assumptions and generating lots of, perhaps, unnecessary data flow.

See also: Thoughts of Chairman Mike