MMOG on Cellphone - Resurecting Motorola RAZOR

There are 10 million players of World of Warcraft and a few million more MMOG players spread among the other major titles. These people form a distinct customer group. Some portion of these are very dedicated and would take advantage of the opportunity to access and play their character when they are away from their desktop computer. Imagine that a cellphone company signed an exclusive deal with WOW to provide a miniature version of the game client for the cellphone. It could potentially capture several hundred thousand players and become the center for an entire sub-culture in society that is growing. The cell client may not allow the player to do all of the functions of the full 3D desktop version. But by giving them the ability to manage their assets, plans raids, stay connected to other players, and exchange dialog these players would spend even more hours with the game. This service might have the power to rescue a struggling cellphone provider like Motorola from oblivion. WOW exclusively on the RAZOR could reignite interest in that platform and drive sales for generations of new and better devices. At least one company may be saved from competing in commodity hell by offering such a unique product – that also makes phone calls on the side.

Annual Computer Server Sales

At a recent presentation, Scott McNealy, the Chairman of the Board at Sun Microsystems, stated that estimates for 2007 were that worldwide sales of server computers were 8 million units. They believe that 1.5 million of these servers were purchased by Google. If you estimate the numbers purchased by Yahoo, MSN, Amazon.com, and Salesforce.com, it paints a picture in which server side computing is being dominated by a few big service providers. This seems to align with a statement that Sun’s CTO made in 2006 that “the world only needs 5 computers”. Most of these companies are creating a server-side infrastructure that can handle a huge load of the world’s computing needs as a subscription service, with few applications residing on the client-side (a.k.a. desktop or thin-client machines).

- Scott McNealy's Talk on the subject (somewhere on this page - they keep changing the URL)

- Greg Papadopolous' Five Computers: