Sprint's McGuire on Frolicking in the Social Grass

Russ McGuire is Sprint’s idea guy, tasked with developing Sprint’s overall strategy and vision for the future. He’s author of the book The Power of Mobility, which centers on the notion that an object or idea’s value intrinsically increases when it’s mobile. Just as the dawns of the PC age and the Internet age unleashed enormously disruptive forces that some companies managed to capture while leaving others behind, the mobile age has the same if not more potential, McGuire postulates.

If anyone at Sprint has a notion of what the wireless world will look like in 2025, when we’re well into the age of mobility, it’s McGuire. You may be surprised, however, to discover that McGuire’s vision of a wireless future isn’t quite as whiz-bang as you might imagine—at least not on the surface. McGuire’s premise is that mobility isn’t a standalone property but an additive one--it advances the services and devices it enables. So his future applications and devices look remarkably like the ones we’re using today. How those applications and devices relate to each other and the network in the freedom of a mobile environment is the true leap forward.

In an interview, McGuire identified five trends in wireless he said would mold wireless in the year 2025, most of which are trends were already experiencing today.

• “The first is the reality that our mobile devices are becoming increasingly capable. The device has processing power and storage, and it really starts to look like a full-featured computer. Whether we use it that way or not isn’t the point. The point is that functionality is there-- all of the capabilities that we’d expect from a computer, plus things that are unique to mobility: near-field communications, proximity detection, location awareness.
• “The second trend I see happening are radios becoming embedded into specialty devices. Again this isn’t anything that is a surprise. We saw it in the announcement of the Kindle 2, which is probably the highest-profile example of a radio being built into a special device. Thinking not just 3G and 4G radios but also Bluetooth, making all kinds of things in our lives interconnected with the world around us is a fundamental trend going forward.
• “The third also is nothing new, but it’s a component or building block to that future. More and more of our personal and business data is being stored in the cloud. Wherever we go as long as we’re connected to the Internet, there’s the possibility of the information we’ve collected being connected to our lives and our every interaction.
• “The fourth really interesting one, which I think Palm has really latched onto with its new webOS, is the concept that all of the things I’ve just talked about -- right now they’re still independent, they’re detached. What Palm is really focusing on pretty heavily with the webOS is the idea of automatic synchronization of data from different sources. So the data that is in the cloud is automatically synchronized with the data on my mobile device.
• “The last trend is the whole idea that all these pieces come together in a way that makes sense to me as a customer, that takes into account the context in which I’m operating: my preferences, my location, what’s in my address book, what’s on my calendar. All of that is accounted for to make the user experience above and beyond what is possible today.”