Losing the Bandwidth Wars

by Ken Orr

Take 1: Right after the US presidential election in November, I was in New York giving a talk at a Business Process conference. My wife and I took a long weekend after the conference and, as a result, I spent some time wandering around. Near our hotel, there was a relatively new vertical shopping center that included a Samsung demo center, which showed many of the Korean manufacturer's latest high-end products. Like everyone, I was interested in all the high-end plasma and LCD HDTVs. But I was also interested in some of the state-of-the-art smartphones that Samsung had recently announced. One recent release included a five-megapixel digital camera, and another included a 1.5-gigabyte hard disk. I asked the representative whether they had the smartphones, and he took me right over to them. They were cool and not much different in size or weight from any of the other cell phones on display.