McGuire’s Law of Mobility

In November 2003 I joined Sprint as director of strategic planning for the division of the company focused on business customers. The company was in the midst of a transformation from being organized around products to instead being organized around customers.

Sprint had very strong consumer wireless/mobile offerings with innovative devices and services, but on the business side, the company’s strengths were much more on the fixed/wireline side. I was blessed to step into an opportunity to help this organization pursue mobility and integrated wireline/wireless solutions through this transformation.

I had been in the telecom industry for over 15 years, but focusing on wireless was new for me. As I’ve recounted elsewhere, I was blessed to participate in the Microprocessor Revolution in the 1980s and the Internet Revolution in the 1990s. Now in the 2000s, I was seeing a new revolution brewing, this time enabled by wireless technology.

In my role at Sprint, the big question was “what will this mean for our customers?”

To help figure that out, I read a number of books, including Unleashing the Killer App¹ by Larry Downes and Chunka Mui. The book was written in 1998 and explained how the microprocessor and the Internet had changed the rules of competition across industries, and how businesses needed to respond. While already somewhat dated by the early 2000s, the book provided a valuable framework for understanding the fundamental forces underlying these revolutions and how companies needed to think differently in response.

Downes and Mui focused on Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law to explain how the rules of competition were changing. As I read, it got me thinking about the new mobility revolution I was watching unfold. What would be the defining “law” for this new revolution? In what ways would mobility create new value? How would that force companies and industries to rethink their approach to the market?

And so, I began a quest to find that law, thinking it must surely be out there. There are some technical laws that impact how wireless networks operate, but I couldn’t find any “law” that spoke, as Moore and Metcalfe had, about how wireless technology advances translate into value for the customer.

So, I started to observe different examples where I saw value being created in surprising places that could be attributed to mobility.

The first example was staring me in the face. A couple of years earlier, I’d been at a conference in Ottawa where a rapidly growing Canadian pager company called Research In Motion (RIM) had first publicly demonstrated the ability to make a cellphone call from their two-way messaging device. The resulting device, the BlackBerry 8510 was a groundbreaking product. It turns out people liked having their e-mail, calendar, and contacts all synchronized with their desktop and available on their cellphone.

In 2004, RIM hit the impressive milestone of signing up it’s one millionth BlackBerry customer. Within 18 months it would quadruple that number. Obviously, the company’s products were viewed as valuable by its customers who were willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for their prized BlackBerry and an extra $30 per month for the service.

That must’ve been an incredible e-mail experience — with beautiful formatting and a powerful user interface! No, that wasn’t it at all. Almost no message formatting survived the BlackBerry experience, and although RIM had pioneered some innovative ways to make the experience slightly less painful, e-mail on your phone was nowhere near as easy as on a computer with a large screen, full-sized keyboard, and mouse.

So what made the BlackBerry so valuable that people joked about being addicted to their “CrackBerries”, and President Obama forced policy changes so that he could keep his RIM device when he was elected in 2008?

It was simply that a BlackBerry (or any of the competing devices that emerged) allows you to receive and respond to e-mail quickly wherever you are.

The second product that caught my eye was the cameraphone. The first cameraphone was introduced in South Korea in June of 2000. Sprint offered the first cameraphone in the U.S. in November 2002 with VGA quality imaging (640x480 or 0.3 megapixels) and that could only hold 10 pictures at the highest resolution. But the cameraphone concept was popular. By the end of 2003, over 80 million had been sold worldwide.

The first 1.3 megapixel phone arrived in 2004, which still wouldn’t come anywhere close to rivaling traditional analog photography, but people were already taking lots of pictures with their phones and fundamentally changing how they took, viewed, and shared photos with their friends. What was it that made cameraphones valuable?

Again, it is that a cameraphone allows you to take a picture anywhere and anytime, and to easily share it with others.

Switching to services, I next considered the rental car industry.

Some of my readers have been around long enough to remember how car rental returns used to work. At the end of your trip, you would drive the rental car back to the rental car lot and park it. You’d dig through your bags to find the original rental car agreement and a pen to write down the mileage. You then would gather up all of your luggage and carry it across the lot to a small hut. You’d stand in line until it was your turn and then you’d hand over the agreement with the mileage, the car keys, and your credit card. Within a few minutes, you’d have a receipt in hand and would head out of the hut with all your bags to look for the bus to take you to the airport terminal. That process was acceptable when you didn’t know that there was a better way.

Avis redefined that process when they introduced Rapid Returns. First introduced in 1984 as a fixed kiosk to replace the waiting in line for a human service agent, Avis took a step further in the 1990s by arming agents with handheld wireless devices who would come to you as soon as you pulled in the lot. They would scan the barcode on your car, type in your mileage, charge your credit card on file, and print a receipt for you before you’d even gathered all the luggage from the trunk.

This approach to service created tremendous value for customers and transformed the industry. Why? Because the service came to you instead of forcing you to go to an arbitrary and inconvenient fixed location. (In 2013, Avis took the concept much farther by acquiring Zipcar, an innovative startup with car pickup and drop off in even more convenient locations, all managed through a mobile app.)

So, in 2005 I bundled these observations together and wrote them up in an article for Business Reform magazine² as the Law of Mobility.

The Law of Mobility simply states that the value of any product or service increases with its mobility.

Wireless technology enables this mobility, and as the cost of adding wireless connectivity drops, then mobility will naturally be built into all products and services. Given the Internet of Things, smartphone apps for everything, and on-demand delivery services like Instacart, this may seem like a no-brainer, but it actually was a new idea in 2005.

Since my last name starts with an M and ends with an E, just like Moore and Metcalfe, the law also became known as McGuire’s Law. It was first picked up on by Danny Briere³ and over time has gained traction.

¹Downes, Larry, and Chunka Mui. Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1998.

²McGuire, R. (2005, September-October). “The Law of Mobility”. Business Reform.

³Briere, D. (2006, January 16). “Moore’s Law, Metcalfe’s Law; now McGuire’s”. Network World.