Enterprise J2ME Developing Mobile Java Applications [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

1.2 Mobile Technology Adoption

To take advantage of mobile commerce, businesses and consumers must adopt state-of-the-art mobile technology. The diffusion of innovations usually goes through five stages: visionary, missionary, ordinary, commodity, and maturity. The characteristics of each stage are listed below (see Figure 1.1).

Visionary: The technology has just come out. Few people see its business value. The technology proponents in the visionary stage base their arguments on advocacy rather than on solid value propositions. A famous advocacy slogan is "You need this. You just do not know it yet." In this stage, few companies except infrastructure builders can make money.

Missionary: Business practitioners start to see the value of the innovation. Pioneer companies or employees become early adopters of the new technology and start to profit from it.

Ordinary: The value of the technology is well accepted by the main stream business executives, and most companies have developed plans to implement solutions based on the new technology. In this stage, the developers and enablers of the new technology make the bulk of profits.

Commodity: In this stage, the adoption of the technology becomes common practice. The technology has started to generate profits industrywide. However, since implementations have been standardized, the barrier of market entry becomes substantially lower, which results in intense competition in the enablers sector.

Maturity: In a mature market, most commodity technology suppliers are consolidated to a few dominant players.

On a typical innovation diffusion curve, the transition period between missionary and ordinary stages are associated with explosive growth of adoptions and a limited number of technology firms who have the expertise to implement viable solutions. The unbalanced demand and supply creates golden opportunities for developers and technology firms to make money. We have seen this pattern repeated throughout history.

At the time of writing (Fall 2003), the value of mobile commerce has been well accepted by industry leaders and business executives. Leading companies in financial services, information services, transportation, and manufacturing sectors have already started to implement their mobile commerce strategies. Other companies will soon follow suit. All these signs indicate that mobile commerce is currently at late missionary stage and is moving toward the ordinary stage.

Although mobile commerce poses to bring tremendous opportunities, we have to be cautious and understand the risks. Historically, technology adoption was never a smooth or linear process. As we have seen in the recent rise and fall of dotcoms, the expectations of technology adoption are often exaggerated; the relationships between the new and old business models are often distorted. Those unrealistic expectations have resulted in severe consequences for those failed dotcom companies and their employees. Nevertheless, adoption of e-commerce as a whole is steadily moving on. I expect the mobile commerce adoption will experience similar up and downs. Many of the heavily hyped, first-generation mobile companies may not ultimately survive. The final winners might still be steady and effectively managed blue chip companies.