Mobile World Congress 2013 – Back from Barcelona, Unchanged

A strange thing didn’t happen in Barcelona this week. I arrived home, unchanged and I suspect 70,000 other folks had the same experience, or lack of it.

The event was gigantic. The new exhibition space at Fira Gran Via was 94,000 square meters – that’s in the neighborhood of 10 American football fields. There were over 1,500 exhibitors – that’s about 5 visitors per exhibitor.

In a week where the term “Big Data” was declared dead, one has to wonder how redundant the term “mobile” has become. Perhaps the time has come to just face facts that “mobile” is now a part of everything and focus on building great experiences and services and just assume that mobility just needs to be baked in.

The hard problem at hand is how to build great software products and services that don’t just run on all platforms, but take advantage of each specific platform and can bridge multiple services. No more lock in. No more walled gardens.

For instance, I want one music app that runs on my PC, my phone and my tablet and can give me a single view into all the content I have access to in multiple cloud storage services and Spotify and Xbox Music. Is that too much to ask?

After a few days with a huge cohort at Mobile World Congress, I am no closer to having a real pain point alleviated. But, I did get a chance to to hear thousands of pitches for new walled gardens, apps that run on one flavor of device, and good old fashioned platform lock-in. There were just a few brave companies looking to enable federation and interop.  All this mobile business has become business, as usual.