Tag Archives: apple

How to save Windows Mobile

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Among Blackberry, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, Microsoft was the earliest player in mobile computing and smart phones, so why have they failed in this area?

With Windows Mobile 7 waiting in the wings, it occurred to me that I just don’t see people using Windows Mobile devices that much any more. In fact, at work, we’ve seen a shift from WinMo to Blackberry and iPhone, with the exodus split about 60/40 in favor of Blackberry. The market share shift has been swift and decisive.

Now I know this isn’t exactly news, but I was trying to figure out why.  Microsoft correctly foresaw the mobile market as being the next big thing for them and the software industry, and they had very early foresight that mobile was going to sweep our eyes away from our desktops in a major way. They had the timing right, but their solution is, and has been, inadequate.

The Value of Ecosystems

One key difference between Microsoft and Apple is that, while they both offer end-to-end ecosystems (Microsoft with XBox, Apple with iTunes/iPhone/AppleTV), they seem to use their ecosystems to different ends.  I believe Apple’s tightly-integrated iTunes ecosystem was primarily driven by the “digital paranoia” of the record industry in the early 2000′s, and it may not have been Apple’s idea to provide such a closed environment. But, in the end, consumers seem to prefer the “just works” ecosystem over the “bring your own interface” approach. For this reason, Microsoft can be seen to have failed at establishing a clear content-to-consumer delivery model based on Windows Mobile.

What’s worse, the Zune, which could have been a great launchpad for a simplified, stylus-free version of Windows Mobile four years ago, exists on yet another Microsoft island, limiting its value to the consumer. Rectifying this problem by bringing the ill-fated Zune line into the limelight of the Windows ecosystem would go a long way towards making Windows Mobile relevant again. Think iPod.

Failure to Recognize Consumer Patterns of Behavior

It was only a matter of time before the average consumer was using personal devices to manage nearly every aspect of his life. Yet Microsoft took the wait and see approach, preferring to believe that the corporate world would drive personal device adoption, where, in reality, we can see that personal, entertainment-oriented device use has driven the entire mobile industry for the last several years.  Two parts gear lust, and one part nerdification of the general populous, this movement is the exact opposite of the strategy Microsoft used for Windows Mobile.

Most People Lose Their Stylus

The user interface options available on Windows Mobile devices, until recently, have been based on resistive touch screen technology, generally used with a small, inkless pen called a stylus.  Blackberry, by contrast, has always offered its trademark “scroll wheel”, and Apple developed a slew of UI technologies, including groundbreaking iPod controls, that culminated in a stylus-free touch-screen control environment for the iPhone. Windows Mobile never employed either approach, so solving this problem (and Microsoft is solving it) will help.

Give Developers a Reason to Develop

The real trick isn’t coming up with the idea. The real trick isn’t coding the program.  The real trick IS getting people to notice.  Apple has more than solved this problem, for better or worse, with the Appstore.  You bring the code, we bring the customers.  While some web sites have served as communities of developers and consumers of WinMo apps, they exist outside the ecosystem and don’t provide turnkey delivery of content.

When Microsoft finally did show up on the scene with an official WinMo store, they stubbed their toe by naming it “Windows Marketplace for Mobile”.  Srsly?

Stop Trying to Look Like Windows

Windows Mobile shouldn’t look like Windows and shouldn’t even be called “Windows”, since a windowing environment on a 3″ screen is a useless idea anyway. Yet when we look back at the releases of Windows Mobile (and its mobile predecessors), we get the idea that Microsoft has always wanted WinMo to look as much like desktop Windows as possible. Only with Windows Mobile 7 has this pattern been broken. (See above screen grab.)

Blackberry never had this problem, as their main objective was to develop a good mobile UI, and they had no ties to an existing desktop environment.  Apple, who does have Mac OS X, decided not to bother bringing the X look and feel to their mobile device. This was a great decision, of course.

Come on Nintendo, Apple is going to Gobble you!

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NetFlix on the Wii. $9 a month.  Great, just what the doctor ordered.  Except that, like the PS3, you have to put a CD in the Wii’s drive in order to actually watch the movies you rent.  A MacMini or AppleTV doesn’t suffer that characteristic.  Usability, guys.   Same thing goes for you Amazon–if you’re going to compete with the ecosystem king, you better do it by beating them at the thing consumers care about most. Usability.

What the world will notice about iPhone apps after Adobe ships CS5

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Offering Adobe CS5 as an alternative development tool for the iPhone is a stroke of bittersweet genius. It lowers barriers to entry for aspiring iPhone developers and creates a go-to-market strategy for creatives who don’t have the programming chops to do it today. To be overt, Objective C is the main reason more developers DON’T create iPhone apps, and the main reason iPhone app development is neither rapid nor user-friendly. So there are some real plusses to the heat Adobe is giving Apple here.

More access to friendly development tools = more iPhone apps = a more mature and varied iPhone marketplace.  Everybody wins, right?  TechCrunch even headlined their post about this, “the year Flash’s 2 million developers come to the iPhone.”

Maybe not.  Sorry TechCrunch.

When Adobe announced that it will include an iPhone “packager”, that is a program that will package Adobe Flash programs as iPhone apps, my initial reaction was, “Great, now I can do that time entry app I’ve been envisioning for my company’s web-based trouble ticketing system.”

But I quickly realized that this packager is only going to produce iPhone-runnable Flash apps, and the full set of iPhone APIs will likely be out of reach to Flash developers.  The telephony APIs and other niceties XCode jocks get to use will probably still be off limits, to say nothing of distribution of the apps.  It will be very easy for Apple to spot a Flash app on its way through the App Store submission process, and disapprove it.  In fact, the rejection of the packaged Flash apps could be automated such that there’s not even any oversight–and on similar grounds Apple used to reject the Commodore 64 emulator last year.

Not to mention that fact that other apps that could benefit from Flash’s presence (like Safari, to say the least) still won’t be able to run custom-made Flash client programs.

So maybe Apple will come around–but in the mean time, I don’t think this announcement is nearly as significant as it sounds.

Microsoft will rely on entrenchment as its primary market motivator

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It’s clear to me now that Microsoft, one of the “great American companies” I often refer to when talking to my kids about things I admire in business, has switched from advancement to entrenchment as its retention strategy for existing customers.  That is, rather than move their platforms forward and pull global businesses along with them, a more defensive strategy is emerging–one where Microsoft tries not to hemorrhage too much business to Google and even Apple by reminding companies how cheap it is NOT to migrate away from the Microsoft eco-system.

A fantastic example of this dynamic came to light today when it was announced that the next version of Microsoft Office for Mac will replace Redmond’s clunky Entourage e-mail app with an actual Mac OS X version of Outlook, the predominant e-mail application used in medium and large enterprises.  My company alone supports somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve-hundred Outlook nodes at about fifteen different firms.  So a Mac version of Outlook, as the t-shirt saying goes, is “kind of a big deal.”

But what’s an even bigger deal is that Outlook once ran natively on the Mac–on Mac OS 9 anyway–and shared a great deal in common with its Windows cousin.  And, suffice it to say, it was a better product than its redheaded stepchild, Entourage.  It makes me wonder why they ever canned Outlook on the Mac to begin with.

Now I’m beginning to understand that Microsoft is on an all-hands mission to get as many enterprises, large and small, as entrenched as possible before Google and other market players really step to the plate with something that competes with Microsoft, and in particular Outlook and Office.  (Anybody who suggests that Google Apps currently beats Microsoft Office is smoking some pretty harsh crack, sorry guys.)

Entrenchment is the key to damage control: keep the customer believing that it will cost them more in dollars and difficulty to move away from Microsoft, no matter how compelling the alternative, and they’ll stick with Microsoft.  This was how they (soundly) destroyed Lotus Notes, and Redmond’s incredible staying power may allow it to stave off Google Apps for quite a few years to come.

Why does Microsoft still insist on using crummy brand names?

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“Windows Marketplace for Mobile”.

OK, does this name strike anybody else as particularly dumb?  On the syllable count alone, the marketing folks at Microsoft should’ve shot this one down before it had a chance to get into the wild.  Now, it seems, it’s going to have to stick.

Compared to Apple’s “Appstore” (2 syllables) or Nokia’s “Ovi” (barely 2 syllables) or even Blackberry’s “App World” (seeing a pattern?), Microsoft’s elephant-sized name for it’s application store clocks in at a whopping 8 syllables. Imagine the water cooler discussions that will never happen as a result:

“Hey man, where’d you get that sweet pinball game?”

“Well, I got it from Windows Marketplace for Mobile!”

Riiiight.  Who seriously is going to call it that?  Microsoft’s history of self-defeating brand names hasn’t been on display this starkly since “Microsoft Windows Server Base Operating Systems Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005“.  Srsly, who uses this wordy terminology?

With Apple having already coined the de facto term “Appstore”, why doesn’t Redmond take advantage of the growing strength of the Zune brand and call their wordy app store something like “Zune Store” or “Zune Place” or even just “Mobile World”?  Even HandMarket, a third-party app store for Windows Mobile, beats Microsoft to the punch in succinctness.

eWeek picks up on Apple’s DIY plans for Voice features

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In an article posted today at eWeek, AT&T is excused from its traditional role as scapegoat in the Google Voice rejection fiasco.  And my previously posted sentiments about Apple building something that competes with Google Voice have finally been echoed on a mainstream outlet.

Well doy, Apple realizes that consumer-empowering voice technology is a competitive advantage.  We VoIP folks have been preaching that gospel for the last ten years.  Comrade Ken Camp wrote with visionary accuracy about the merits of VoIP in his book IP Telephony Demystified, one of the really early books on the subject.  I agreed with him when I wrote Switching to VoIP that VoIP is a leveler of the playing field, a true equalizer and a legitimately revolutionary technology item.

I’ve also viewed carriers like AT&T, at least for the last four or five years, as access providers, not “phone line providers” offering dialtone.  Apple, it seems, has arrived at the same conclusion.

Three points on the Apple/Google/FCC Fiasco

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First, it’s not the FCC’s domain but the Federal Trade Commission’s domain whether or not a business practice, like Apple’s (admittedly inconsistent) enforcement of it’s own developer agreements, is an unfair trade practice. And it may well be unfair; that doesn’t make it within the jurisdiction of the FCC, whose stock and trade isn’t social progress or anti-collusion.  Clearly, those are business matters whose definition of justice has little or nothing to do with voice as an application.  We have to be careful not to push the social progress agenda too hard–especially to the extend that we’re routinely punishing those who are earning a great profit, vis-a-vis Apple and the iPhone.

Second, let’s ask the real question: Since we know the decision to allow Google Voice is ultimately up to Apple, and not AT&T, what could Apple’s motivation for this rejection possibly be?  Are we ignoring the simple answer?  Enhancements to the iChat ecosystems, perhaps? The most obvious answer may not satisfy the conspiracy theorists.  But something as easy as Apple is getting ready to release their own Voice-killer makes the most since to me, to heck with AT&T’s bandwidth.

Finally, I’ve almost concluded that AT&T’s days as the exclusive distributor of iPhones in North America are numbered. Apple would have to score a pretty low IQ to permanently marry their network support to a single carrier, with the rise of new wide-area wireless networking standards and mass WiFi addiction marching on with no favoritism towards Bell.  This would seem to indicate, at least out here in the “sensible” midwest, that Apple is not beholden to AT&T, a company short on both sexy intellectual property and an applications-oriented revenue model, for a short-term political favor that screws its relationship with Google, a company who is enriched of both.

The answer to this mystery, I believe, is in Cupertino.

Apple: Decide if the iPhone is a platform, and do it quick please

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If Apple insists on barring developers who overlap the “built-in functionality” of the iPhone, how is a developer to know what types of applications are a safe bet–in the long run? Since Apple recently banished Google Voice from the app store (which is an epic fail on Apple’s part, btw), one has to wonder, since all apps borrow some of Apple’s API functionality, just what they consider built-in and not.

The article, Apple Makes the Case for Web Apps concludes that developers will be more inclined to  create web-based apps geared at the iPhone.  While Apple’s recent actions may give developers pause to consider the web approach, I disagree that many will abandon their native app inclinations because of all that they lose in doing so.  For one, you can’t create home screen shortcuts to web apps (that I know of).  But the best reason not to develop web apps for the iPhone is their lack of support for front-end controls on the phone itself.  That is, in a web app, you don’t have nearly the power to access the GPS location, the GUI controls, the iPod library,  and so on. The new 3.0 iPhone browser is better at hooking into the phone’s local hardware, but is still quite hobbled compare to native apps, so geolocation and photos won’t have the pinache they would on a native app. Those are the content items that have made iPhone apps so much better than previous-generation mobile apps, and with the web approach, they’re more or less off limits.

How is it that YellowPages.com can offer a directory lookup app on the app store when it obviously overlaps Apple’s built-in Contacts and Maps functionality?  Yet instead of picking on YellowPages.com, Apple is seen picking on Google, arguably their biggest and most powerful ally.  Add to that the insult of Apple’s marketing of the iPhone and iPod Touch to developers as a platform for great apps, and it should make us all feel a bit used.

In the heady days of the computer revolution, Microsoft was forced to recognize that Windows (even MS-DOS) was a platform. Rather than stifling upstart competition by barring certain developers from the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft at least realized that it was developer embrace of the platform that would cause it to live or die in the long run.  The result was that, through the early 2000′s, Windows was the go-to platform for the whole world, and everybody from Sun to IBM lost lengthy, futile, billion dollar battles trying to undo Microsoft’s early decision.

Apple is nearly past that point in their new platform’s life cycle.  If it’s an app platform–let it be.  Palm and Blackberry are still waiting in the wings, and Windows Mobile will be the centerpiece of Microsoft’s revenue strategy in the next ten years.  And, like it or not, whatever else Microsoft did that was crummy and evil, they never told a developer he couldn’t distribute an app.