The mobile industry in its own words

The world's biggest mobile phone trade show - Mobile World Congress 2008 - took place earlier this month in Barcelona. Here's a flavour of the topics on the minds of some of the industry's biggest players...

"For those of you who are old enough and who have followed our industry for long enough, you know the old debates around TDMA and CDMA and GSM - they were not particularly productive debates to have in the end. Because technology is not what matters, it is services, it is applications, it's experiences."
-- Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone

"I learned the hard way, in mainframes and mini computers, the best technology doesn't always win does it?"
-- John Chambers, CEO of Cisco

"As much as technology fascinates and inspires us to do more new things something has to change. We all need to make decisive moves towards a more sustainable development."
-- Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, president and CEO of Nokia

"Apple has raised the bar to the iPhone and we all now know how important user interfaces are… We as an industry will have to raise our game to make sure that we can produce the kind of user interface that our customers are now becoming accustomed to."
-- Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone

"Everything will be viewed as a service. Not just software as a service… service as a service, bandwidth as a service, compute power as a service, storage as a service - changing business models at a speed we've not seen before."
-- John Chambers, CEO of Cisco

"It is important, if you really want to have a society that works, to use communications to reduce travel and make this planet work for the long perspective."
-- Carl-Henric Svanberg, CEO of Ericsson

"I'm not the biggest believer in the great unification server in the sky. I believe in unified presentation and let diversity reign. Because it's just too Orwellian to think that everything's going to come together into one big box."
-- Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM

"Time magazine got it wrong a year ago - it is no longer about personalisation. That was '06. It is now not about you, it is about us… All of a sudden it will become the world of us."
-- John Chambers, CEO of Cisco

"In order to protect the positive sides of communication we have to fight the abuse."
-- Viviane Reding, European commission for information society and media, giving her support for an alliance against child sexual exploitation on mobile devices.