Questão 1629808

Creative, convergent, and social: prospects for mobile computing

1 The mobile computing industry, more than most,

suffers a constant obsession with the future. Commoditization,

market saturation, and technology and service convergence

4 render the mobile communications business one of the most

volatile and precarious in terms of cycle time, customer churn,

and obsolete investments. At the core of the industry’s

7 preoccupation with prospective market trends is the question

of what technologies and services users will demand in the

future — a question that has proven to be notoriously difficult

10 to answer.

The first thing to notice about the current state of the

mobile industry is that it is becoming increasingly

13 commoditized. It is growing difficult to sustain competitive

edge on handset differentiation alone. Mobile phones, like

toasters and microwave ovens, are all now stylishly designed

16 and contain similar chipsets and functionality. Although it

would be wrong to suggest that consumers see all handsets as

equally attractive — aesthetic qualities will surely continue to

19 matter for such personal and visible devices, just as they do for,

say, wrist watches — the large handset manufactures anticipate

difficulty relying on high-margin luxury production models. As

22 an alternative, they turn toward the idea that services can help

differentiate their offerings. Recent movements in related

industries to define a revitalized science of services (IBM,

25 2008) have emphasized that interaction with the physical

device is to a large extent governed or defined by the service or

application layer that resides on top of the physical artifact

28 (Spohrer et al., 2007). The appeal of a device depends,

therefore, on the way in which it integrates into a larger system

of services (Austin and Beyersdorfer, 2007); the locus of

31 competition, whether through functionality or aesthetics, thus

moves to a more diffuse realm where appeal depends on

nuances of interaction between service components. The

34 industry’s perceptive but imperfect comprehension of this shift

has led to a sometimes comic frenzy, a quest for the next

perfect service or killer application that can be successfully

37 monetized — a service or application users will actually pay

for.

Internet: <www.palgrave-journals.com> (adapted).

Judge the following items according to the text above.

The word “current” (l.11) can be correctly substituted by obsolete.