The ringtones of profit may sound generic

Next year, Manchester United will make and sell mobile phones. So will Celtic, Tesco and the News Of The World. Don't believe me? Then you're not looking closely enough at what's happening in the industry.
Two weeks ago in Shanghai one of Motorola's top designers said the company would ditch attempts to beat market leader Nokia in the field of operating systems. Instead it would make its own one more like Nokia's.
(It's not alone -- everyone has pretty much waved the white flag to the Finnish giant on that score.)

But Motorola also indicated that it would concentrate on making the phones cheap and focus its sales strategy on doing mega-deals with operators. It said it was keenly aware of the success of Samsung, the massive Korean outfit that has come out of nowhere in the European and American phone markets. It has done this not through any stunning technology breakthrough or jaw-dropping design, but by assembling a few increasingly available mobile phone commodities, such as operating systems, cameras and chips, and packaging them into a small plastic device with a Samsung logo on it.

Sound familiar? It is -- it's the PC industry all over again. Similarly, Sharp raced into the market last year, pumping out generic, bland picture phones and dumping a gazillion of them on the market through a trade deal with Vodafone.

They're not the only ones. All the signs point to the fact that, apart from Nokia, operators care less and less about established brand names and are willing to go with the cheapest generic model that conforms to a minimum standard.

Prowling on the sidelines, prodding this evolution on, is Microsoft. The software giant has been itching for two years to get into the mobile phone arena.
It wants to turn it into a market where the main differentiator is the operating system, which it hopes will be its Stinger platform.
(In fact, that reality is already here -- but it's Nokia's system that most people prefer.)

In this way, all Manchester United will have to do is buy the operating system, a generic box, a few chips, a screen and the services of a Chinese assembly plant.
All that's left to do is put a red devil logo on it and sign a deal with a big operator, which will almost certainly be delighted to increase volume on its network.

If you want to see this in action, go to Shanghai, a city of 20 million people. There, in the city's biggest Chinese department store, you'll see about 30 different mobile phone 'brands', many of them very similar looking.

They're not shoddy, fly-by-night models, either -- they're advertised and come with guarantees.
Their advent should come as a stark warning to lower-tier market share phone-makers such as Motorola, Siemens and SonyEricsson -- don't let the same thing happen to you as happened to IBM when it ignored how Microsoft took over the PC industry.

Next year, Manchester United will make and sell mobile phones. So will Celtic, Tesco and the News Of The World. Don't believe me? Then you're not looking closely enough at what's happening in the industry.