4 - Live Issues

Summary

This chapter describes a number of live issues affecting the successful development of mobile commerce. These include distinctions between what is technically possible and consumers' desires and motivations, issues around security, trust, and privacy, and concerns relating to health. We also consider the impact of unequal access to the benefits of mobile commerce, the implications of the blurring of the dividing line between work and private life, the re-emergence of geography as a key factor in electronic commerce, and the problems associated with obsolescence in networks, devices, and systems. Lastly we look at the cost burdens on would-be dominant players in an often high-stakes game.

The Possible and the Probable

Technology-based visions of societal change often stretch the bounds of credulity. In extrapolating from today's technical possibilities technologists run the risk of imagineering a future with an inflated role for their current pet gizmos and a bias toward wholesale behavioural adaptations that have no precedent outside the somewhat peculiar habits of technologists themselves. The generic future according to e-commerce is, unsurprisingly, a twenty-four-hour society fuelled by intense competition, instant gratification, and home-delivered pizza. Mobile commerce is sometimes painted as an artist's impression of an accelerated Silicon Valley lifestyle, with distressingly few points of contact with a recognisable mainstream world outside of that subcul–ture or –God forbid–on a foreign shore. We have deliberately avoided citing the twin clichs of mobile commerce in this book so far–but here goes.