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In my ‘State of the ICT Nation’ speech for the Prince’s Trust a year back – See Earthquake – I presented some research we’d put together forecasting that the number of devices connected to the internet (Mobile Internet Devices or MIDs) would increase from c2b today to over 10b in 2020. Although clearly smartphones, tablets and laptops currently make up the vast majority of MIDs, I ventured that by 2020 internet enabled cars would be a significant MID category.
That prediction came one step closer today as Ford announced that it going to stop installing CD players in its cars from next year. See Daily Telegraph. Instead, new Fords will have “a Sync "infotainment hub", which includes a socket to plug in a dongle, turning the car into a wi-fi hotspot. The in-car computer in the "hub" can then access digital libraries stored on the internet, be it on Spotify or Apple's iCloud”.
Of course, that does rather rely on having a strong mobile signal at every point of your journey – something that is still impossible even today. One suspects most Ford users will use their Image may be NSFW.
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iPads instead most of the time. But the idea of an in-car WiFi hotspot as ‘standard’ is clearly very appealing to back seat iPad users (of which I know quite a few…)
Ford expects 2m cars to have WiFi hotspots by 2015. Given that there are 750m cars in the world today, I wonder how long it will take for most of them to be WiFi enabled?
Remember it wasn’t that long ago that we all had cassette players in our cars – indeed I still have boxes of compilation tapes I had made. Now CD players are redundant after only about 10 years as standard fitments in cars.
Footnote – I read a fascinating article based on a speech by Facebook investor Roger McNamee. In it McNamee states that “Microsoft's share of internet-connected devices has gone from 95% to under 50% in 3 years”. As MIDs include smartphones and tablets, I have little reason to doubt that claim. However, worth noting that the Ford Sync system I mentioned above is 'Powered by Microsoft"!
McNamee also claims that "Apple will sell a hundred million internet-connected devices this year. That's two thirds of the PC market. If you add the other non-PC internet devices, that's more valuable than the PC market” . Apple shares closed last night at an all-time high of $403.
This must obviously be a great cause for concern in Seattle.
