Utility > effort + risk, where: utility = willingness to pay; & effort = everyone's effort, is the equation devised by Steve Baker, Director of Software Platform Strategy at Motorola, for deciding whether a mobile phone application is worth doing.
"The utility has got to outweigh the cost and the risk of that application," Baker told Silicon South-West's Wireless 2.0 conference.
The problem there, for Western applications developers, is that operators don't pay enough.
"DoCoMo takes a very modest share of the revenue from applications- say 10 per cent - Western operators like a much larger share, and that drives developers out," David Wood, founder and executive vp of Symbian, told the
Motorola's Baker emphasised that developers should do applications that: "Span OSes, OEMs, and Operators. It's no good if an application is only available on my chip, or my OS, or my network."
But he conceded: "It's still a pain to access a Website on a mobile."
All in all, said Baker: "It's balls-achingly difficult today to get applications out there."
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