The smart money's on ...

One of the best things about my job is the opportunity it gives me to talk to a lot of very smart people. Most recently, I spoke with Andy Lippman, one of the founders of MIT's Media Lab and now a visiting technical fellow at Nortel Networks.

Lippman, whose current focus is on mobility, doesn't talk about defining new services or discovering new applications. For him, it's more about finding the right architecture that enables users to create what they want.

“The world is not like it used to be,” he said. “This is not necessarily a world that is predicated on technological breakthroughs. We think technology is the most important thing, but, especially now, it isn't.”

That's because, in Lippman's words, people — particularly young people — have “wrestled” technology from the hands of the technologists and are “remaking it in their own image.” The pace of change is much more rapid now than in the past, he said, because people are gaining access to “the dominant technology” at a younger age. Cars were once a dominant technology, and kids gained access at age 16, he pointed out. Today, we hand pint-sized computers to toddlers.

“New generations are coming along every two to three years,” he said. “They are transforming society in a much more potent way than we technologists are.”

He argues that there aren't customers anymore and there aren't static devices. “It's a much more malleable world,” Lippman said. “Take Second Life as an example. It launched empty in 2003. Whatever you see in Second Life is what people built.”

The model going forward for service providers, he added, may be a page from the past — the old TV set with an antenna. “That TV didn't subscribe to anybody; it drew from whatever bits were raining on it from the sky. Even in that era, there were strong networks that distinguished themselves from the crowd.”

Portable devices of the future “are going to draw from a broad array of network resources,” he said. “Some of those are going to be long-distance, some of those are going to be local; the control of how you communicate, and who you communicate with, inevitably is going to move to that device. What you think of as services are features of the environment that you can draw from and use.”

Rather than attracting consumers with price or flashy new phones and locking them into service contracts, service providers will have to think differently. Their future is still bright — but it is a different one than many may be planning.

“The phone that talks to more than one network is inevitable; that sort of agility and breadth of service offering” is something consumers will demand, Lippman said. “They will not locked in by technology or an airtight agreement, but the value of a service.”

Smart money says you should listen to what he's saying.