I've often been asked the question by casual observers and industry experts alike, "What's stopping the adoption of advanced wireless services?  There are so many great technologies available to people through their phones, how come most people don't take advantage of them?"

It's an interesting question for anyone - but for me it carries particular interest because of my prior position as CEO of the WAP Forum... one of the "bleeding-edge" technologies that was being used as a tool to modify the behavior of mobile device users.  I've often wondered why there's such inertia around the functionality of wireless devices.

There are, in my estimation, a few factors at play here:

1. Conditioning. Phones have been, historically, positioned as just that: phones. It's a difficult transition for people to make after years of inundation by advertising, rate plans and technologies that are all about calling, minutes, long distance, reaching out and touching someone, etc.

2. User interfaces. Most of the MMIs (man-machine interfaces) in today's products are pathetic. While the iPhone gets close to offering an interface that encourages people to do more with their devices than just make and receive calls most of the traditional products are geared all around voice. The iPhone is the first product that can honestly be viewed as a pico-computer that makes phone calls instead of a cell phone.

3. Cost. Users are uncomfortable with unknowns. Most people on the street couldn't tell you how much a kilobyte or gigabyte of data is equivalent to in terms of a downloaded file, a web page or a song. Until carriers wake up to this and continue to charge by bits instead of an all-you-can-eat plan (such as Sprint's new all-in-one plan of the AT&T data plan that is the requisite companion to the iPhone) users simply won't take the chance on getting unexpected bills. Give them a ceiling or an unlimited plan and you'll see habits change in the same fashion that AT&T's original no roaming or long distance fees changed people's habits about making long distance calls from their cell phones.

4. Age. People who read this blog are the exception. I can assure you that the vast majority of users are not as tech savvy, nor do they wish to be, as the users who frequent this forum or other venues that might be viewed as tech-centric. The generation that's now in their late teens or twenties was born into a society where a cell phone wasn't really differentiated from a landline phone - it was just a phone. And now it's morphing into their personal communication device that's a companion to their PC (or replacing it altogether). IM made them more comfortable with texting, for example. Downloading music on the PC generated the demand for iPhones or other combo devices. As this generation replaces the users of the generation that matured with cell phones being viewed as toys of the rich and powerful, adoption of newer services will accelerate.

5. Need. For example, after spending a great deal of time in Japan I can tell you that there's a fundamental difference in the way people view the services on their phone for a simple reason: The living spaces in Japan are significantly smaller than they are in the U.S. and don't have a corner, much less an entire room, to devote to a PC. To phone users in Japan, that _is_ the Internet. PCs are tools that they use at work. There's also the very large factor that we are not a nation of public transit users; it's a lot harder to use the advanced features of a phone while you're driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic than it is on the ferries of Sydney, the trolleys of Stockholm or the TGV of France. I can assure you that the drivers in those places are making voice calls instead of using the advanced features of their phones, too.

6. Networks. There's an issue of network speed involved - until the networks are fast enough to facilitate high-speed browsing, video, etc., it's just easier and faster to call someone instead.

Finally, there's the availability of so many competitive devices. Back-seat DVD players, handheld gaming devices, laptops, iPods, satellite radio and hundred other things challenge phones for the attention of users. They'll converge into phones soon, but in the meantime, it will remain a battle to get people to change their behavior from seeing the phone as a voice-centric device to seeing it as a multi-platform entertainment/communications/personal information device.