The Open Road

Despite Apple's tremendous success with the iPhone, we're still in the early innings of mobile adoption. As such, a strategy of "throwing-lots-of-things-against-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks" makes a lot of sense.

It's true of platforms like Google Android, but it's also true of applications.

Even on the iPhone, which reportedly drives $2.4 billion worth of applications in annual sales, very few application developers appear to be making much money. Zynga, creator of Farmville, is an exception, as BusinessWeek notes, doing more than $100 million in annual sales.

This isn't to suggest that developers should stop trying. Quite the opposite. Now is the time to try a range of applications to see what sells.

Google is following the same strategy with its Android platform. The company is happily promiscuous with its code, allowing and even encouraging fragmentation to see where the industry will take Android. Fragmentation enables handset manufacturers and others to find the best fit for Android in the market, rather than going the Apple route. ("If we build it, they will come.")

It's very possible, as Bill Weinberg notes, that such fragmentation and experimentation will result in Android getting greater play beyond mobile than it does in the smartphone market.

I suspect Google won't mind. As in other areas, it's using the broad-based, open-source approach to increase adoption of its services like Search, services which generate more than $22 billion each year.

It's an approach that works particularly well for a fast-follower: someone tracking the progress of an early market leader. An open-source strategy basically enables the industry to determine, by itself and for itself, what the market leader is missing and how to resolve the voids.

However, it's also a good way to generate developer interest and, hence, modifications and add-ons. Application developers might be well-served by open-sourcing their applications to encourage adoption and make their road maps a community affair.

There are over 4 billion mobile phones on the planet, with virtually no one outside of the wireless carriers and handset manufacturers making money from this extensive device reach. The market is ripe for software businesses, but first we need to experiment to discover what sells. Open source just might be able to help with that.

To beat Apple in mobile, Google is going to need more open-source developers. But it's also going to need more Google.

It's tough to balance corporate interests with developer interests, and particularly in open-source development. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington suggests that Android developers are frustrated over having to support multiple code bases to cover the diverse handsets on which Android runs, which is indeed a problem. Basically, these developers are asking Google to exercise more control over Android to ensure it works seamlessly on a range of different devices.

Such developers, however, also want more choice than Apple offers them. Somewhere in the resolution to that tension is a big market opportunity for Google, one that carriers and consumers are going to give it time to figure out.

Google's Android efforts have looked Apple-esque at times, as Linux Journal notes. This is a problem. Google may not have discovered "the evil room" on its Silicon Valley campus, but even a hint of "evil" from Google could send developers packing.

But Google is no Apple: its DNA meshes well with that of open-source developers', as Tom Foremski notes. The company really doesn't want to do evil.

Its dilemma, however, is that it may not be able to avoid some of the "evil" that upsets open-source developers. Like control. Control is critical to good software, something that the best proprietary and open-source software has long demonstrated. Linux, for example, depends upon Linus Torvalds serving his role as "benevolent dictator."

The difference is that it's easier for Linus Torvalds to be autocratic than Google. He's an individual. Google is a company.

Even so, Google isn't going to beat Apple at its own game (i.e., deathlike grip over all aspects of a product). To win, Google must marshal an external development community, one that doesn't like to be managed and, as Dan Lyons (aka "Fake Steve Jobs) points out, one for whom rebellion in the form of 'forking' is par for the course.

Google is therefore left with a strategy that depends upon diversity not wanting to be overly diverse.

This is a challenge, but also an opportunity.

If the company can learn to exercise Linus Torvalds-like control without appearing to dominate Android, the project will win. It certainly has a lot of people cheering for it. It also has growing experience that suggests it's learning to walk the fine line between community and control.

As CNET writes, "device makers see Android as their biggest hope to compete against Apple's iPhone and Research In Motion's BlackBerry devices in the smartphone market." Bingo. Carriers can't afford to cede all control to Apple and RIM, and consumers remain individualistic enough to demand devices that fit their needs, whether they're based in India or Canada or Armenia.

The world isn't going to abandon that diversity to uniformly converge on the iPhone. It's just not. There is no one handset to rule them all, Sauron-style.

And so long as it's not, developers will give Google leeway and time to figure out the optimal development model for Android.

While TechCrunch highlights technical problems with Android's handset support, this strikes me as a short-term, highly solvable problem. It's a relatively safe bet that Google will figure out ever easier ways to manage development across diverse devices, as others have done.

Volantis, for example, offers an open-source approach to manage Web development across an ever broadening array of mobile devices: 6,000 and counting. (Disclosure: I am an adviser to Volantis.)

Google could do the same. It has time. As ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn writes:

Google's cost structure gives it the power to be patient, something no other market player has. The Android bandwagon is built on this patience.

With over $4 billion in mobile advertising revenue that Coda Research Consultancy is projecting for 2015, it's worth it to Google to figure this out. I suspect that, like Red Hat's certified Linux, over time we'll see Google certify Android applications. There are more mobile devices than different servers and server architectures, but it's essentially the same problem.

Developers may find Google's control of Android irksome, but it's less burdensome than Apple's winner-take-all-and-we're-the-only-winner approach, and it's worth it to see device compatibility issues dissipate.

Symbian has the market share; Apple's iPhone has the mind share. The future of mobile, however, will be owned by the company or project that best appeals to developers, especially open-source developers. Microsoft, with its long-standing interest in developers, also needs to reach out to open-source developers, if it wants to succeed.

Part of this reason is cost. As IBM's Savio Rodrigues suggests, Research In Motion could reduce its cost and improve the reach of its platform through open source:

RIM should be utilizing R&D investments more effectively by leveraging existing open-source projects. RIM could have built (its software development kit) for a lower investment by starting with PhoneGap or an equivalent open-source framework...This was absolutely a missed opportunity for RIM to compete versus Apple, Palm, and others using open source.

No, I'm not going to suggest that RIM open-source the BlackBerry Enterprise Server; that would be silly. Rather, I believe RIM could have saved R&D costs, increased the value of its BlackBerry platform, and influenced developers building for the iPhone, if RIM had built the Widget SDK on top of (an) open-source project like PhoneGap.

Symbian is taking this road, as Michael Mace points out, putting developers, and not itself, at the center of attention. The more money third-party developers can make with Symbian, the better off Symbian will be.

Palm, too, is trying to appeal to open-source developers by making it cheap and lucrative to develop for Palm devices.

Apple's world, by contrast, comes with a hugely sexy device, optimized distribution...and low return on investment for its developers, according to Newsweek. In Apple's world, developers add value to Apple, but not necessarily to themselves.

Microsoft is different. Although the company has not committed its mobile strategy to open source, it is a company that has a serious romance with developers. With 97 percent of its sales coming through its channel, Microsoft depends upon third-party development and distribution partners.

Now Microsoft is launching Windows Mobile 6.5, a light upgrade to previous versions that has failed to catch the media's attention. Today, the company has few--246, to be exact--applications available for version 6.5 in its Windows Marketplace for Mobile, but it has more than 20,000 designed for Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1.

The question, however, is whether it can attract new developers to the seemingly moribund Windows Mobile, which declined in market share to just 9 percent of handsets shipped in the second quarter of 2009, according to The Wall Street Journal. An open-source complement strategy, similar to what it's using for SharePoint and its CRM product, could help.

It must, as Google is calling.

Microsoft has no choice but at least dabble in open source, regardless of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's publicly sanguine stance on Google. Open-source Google Android is starting to make waves, even if its momentum can be overhyped. Verizon has jumped on the Android bandwagon, citing the "unmatched openness and flexibility of the Android platform."

Open source isn't an afterthought for Google. It's a core business strategy. And it's winning converts.

Ballmer pooh-poohs Android and further discards "free as a business model," but he acknowledges that Android represents open source, with significant financial resources behind it.

There's more to it than this. Free is a great business model, one that Microsoft has used to tremendous effect, as Internet Explorer, SharePoint, Bing, and other Microsoft successes demonstrate and as Techdirt highlights.

Microsoft needs to integrate open source into its mobile strategy. It needs developer attention. As CNET's Ina Fried reports, a recent Windows Mobile 6.5 session at Code Camp attracted just six developers. You don't win with numbers like that, and you don't get developers without open source, anymore.

Microsoft could attempt to replicate Apple's model of mobile success, but its DNA is more Google than Apple. Microsoft rightly recognized early on that building products soup-to-nuts, as Apple does, was not the best model to achieve ubiquity (even if some suggest that this model has broken the PC industry). That model works great, early in the formation of a market, as Clayton Christensen theorizes, but it loses its efficacy in mature markets.

Microsoft could attempt to replicate Apple's model of mobile success, but its DNA is more Google than Apple.

Mobile doesn't yet count as "mature," but it's getting there fast.

An enabling strategy similar to what Microsoft did on the "desktop" would succeed in mobile, too, but it's going to require a Googlesque open-source approach for Microsoft--not the Apple approach.

This isn't to suggest that Microsoft should open-source everything. As I learned from my own open-source mobile days at Lineo, to build a successful business in mobile (or elsewhere), you've got to own something.

Google is interested in owning the advertising that results from greater mobile Web browsing and other mobile services. For Microsoft, it could match this, and extend it with ties to its server and personal computer businesses, like SharePoint. It probably can't afford, however, to try to build a big per-unit licensing business--not with Google undermining that model with its free Android.

Microsoft simply needs to find the right "format" in which to deliver its open-source mobile strategy. The software giant has 90,000-plus employees. Surely, one of them can figure this out.

We like to ascribe secret designs--nefarious and otherwise--to software vendors. Super-secretive Apple, in particular, tends to excite endless rumor-mongering as to what it's up to. It seems to me, however, that Apple and its top competitors, including Google and Microsoft, are increasingly transparent about their plans. We simply don't pay attention to the signs.

Let's start with Apple. The big rumor at present is the company's alleged work on a tablet computer, kicked off by The Wall Street Journal's bold declaration that "people familiar with the situation" suggest Apple is working on "a new touch-screen gadget."

While the rumor may be true, it's highly unusual for anyone "familiar with the situation" of anything at Apple to talk about it. After all, the punishment for divulging confidential Apple information is death. Or worse: the icy glare of Steve Jobs.

But we don't really have to look to rumors for this one. As Cult of Mac reports, Snow Leopard includes a range of functionality--including a full-size virtual keyboard--that makes a lot of sense on a touch-screen device (one bigger than an iPhone).

Conclusive? Nah. But a very good sign of what Apple is thinking.

Google actually goes one step further. Google announced Chrome OS in early July, but it's not waiting for a magical unveiling moment. Instead, Google watchers think that they know exactly what Chrome OS will be like...because we already have it:

If you use Google Chrome and Google's web applications, then you're already running Google Chrome OS. Just maximize Google Chrome's window and imagine that each tab is an instance of an application.

Perhaps Google is more open than most because it increasingly works with open-source code and communities, and secrecy doesn't exactly lend itself well to fostering either of those, but still....

Even Microsoft, that reputed bastion of secret monopolistic plans, is pretty open about future product direction. For example, Steve Ballmer has called SharePoint Microsoft's "next big operating system". This may not mean much to many, but it speaks volumes about Microsoft's desire to marry its personal computer dominance to cloud and/or server-based computing.

Want to see where Microsoft thinks computing is going? Yes, you can read the documentation on Azure, but you'd find a much more tangible example by installing SharePoint.

Perhaps we should spend less time guessing at what such leading vendors may announce, and instead take a closer look at what they've already released. The clues are often hidden in plain sight.

This may herald a new era of transparency, as technology success increasingly depends upon community outreach, outreach that requires the ability to handle code in advance of a general release. Or it may simply signal the fact that it's very hard to keep secrets in any industry, much less the software industry, particularly when success depends more upon execution than whizbang innovation.

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For all the rancor between opposing technology camps--Microsoft vs. the open-source community, Apple vs. Microsoft, etc.--there's a lot more symbiosis going on than meets the eye. In fact, it's hard to imagine Apple without Microsoft, open source without Microsoft, and so on, as Harry McCracken suggests in MacWorld (not online at time of writing).

PC users...have long benefited hugely from the existence of Macs. Microsoft and PC manufacturers have cribbed so many of Apple's good ideas that it's tough to imagine what Windows machines would look like today if the Mac had never existed.

For years, however, that debt went largely unpaid. The PC platform finally started giving back in 2006, when the first Intel-based Macs shipped and the Mac essentially became a PC--and a really good one at that. Intel's mammoth investments in chips are sustainable only because its processors end up in most of the world's Windows PCs. Mac users reap the same technological windfall even though it's the Windows majority that provides the economies of scale.

Of course, Microsoft also propped up Apple's waning fortunes back in 1997 with a $150 million investment and, more importantly, a commitment to build Mac versions of Office and Internet Explorer. Without Microsoft's software on Apple's machines, they arguably would have been much less palatable to the general public.

Not that these two companies are alone in their curious symbiosis. For example, where would open source be without Microsoft? After all, it is Microsoft that helped to create a standardized hardware platform (Intel) for both "desktops" and servers, which paved the way for Linux, but it is also Microsoft that consistently sets the bar, at least on the "desktop," that open-source projects strive to meet and exceed.

Microsoft, in turn, owes a growing debt to open source, and is increasingly getting involved with open source, most recently releasing an open-source software development kit for Bing to help developers write Mac OS X and Cocoa Touch (iPhone) applications. Linux is pushing Microsoft to innovate again in the server and mobile markets, while a host of open-source applications, databases, and middleware challenge it on the Web, "desktop," and mobile.

Open source, whether in Mozilla's (Firefox) hands or Google's (Chrome), is also challenging Apple and Microsoft to innovate again in browser technology, which, in turn, Apple is enabling, at least, in Google's case, through its own open-source WebKit technology.

Strange world, technology. On the ground, there are ideological skirmishes between rival camps of customers. In the boardroom, plots are hatched to ridicule the competition.

But in reality, Microsoft needs Apple needs open source needs Google needs....You get the picture.

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Twitter has become an excellent way to quickly scan headlines. It's terrible at just about everything else. It's hard to have a coherent discussion in 140-character soundbites, and even harder when the architecture of Twitter is set to "broadcast" rather than "discourse." But maybe, just maybe, Twitter's not to blame. We are.

After all, Twitter is simply a creation of our society, and reflects our priorities.

Not all of society, of course. After all, as The New York Times reported, teenagers, usually technology's early adopters, hardly use Twitter at all, with only 11 percent of people aged 11 to 17 using the service. They are, however, heavily into Facebook, preferring to share with friends rather than talk at strangers.

A generational thing?

Perhaps. But I think the technology we build and use says a lot about society.

Competition from Bing, Ask, and other search engines is just one click away and likely equally good for Google users, yet we stick with Google. Why? Because it's fast, free, and has never disdained its users with a cluttered interface. Many of us were with Google early on and continue to reward its early respect for its customers. We're a loyal people that likes a crowd.

This phenomenon is hinted at in personal computers, too. While I'm part of a rising group of people who prefers the Mac to Microsoft Windows, I'm also in a distinct minority, according to data from Net Applications. The reality is that most people look at their computer the way they do toilet cleaner: necessary to get a job done but not anything to get worked up about.

Contrast this to personal entertainment devices or phones like the iPhone/iPod. Here, Apple trounces Microsoft's Soviet offerings and Dell, a leader in enterprise computing hardware, has to go all the way to China to even register a design win. Apparently, we want to differentiate in our communications and our entertainment (iPhone/iPod), but not our work (computers).

Back to business. As well as open source is doing in enterprise IT, the reality is that CIOs and CTOs don't get too worked up about freedom and such. There's a very good reason that IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft dominate enterprise software, and "choice" is not it. These vendors simplify purchasing decisions by providing limited, but still good, choices.

Business, in other words, is business, not religion. OpenOffice is nearly as good as Microsoft Office in most ways, and better in a few. But it still captures anemic market share because it's simply not worth the bother for most enterprises or consumers. (Firefox, on the other hand, is, and continues to gain market share because we value the increased options its add-on library brings us.)

Open source is absolutely getting adopted, but only where it accomplishes tangible goals like cost reduction and increased productivity. As a society, we don't seem to want to waste hours of the work day fighting ideological battles. We just want to get work done.

Well, except for when we're furiously friending on Facebook during work hours, costing employers as much as 1.5 percent of productivity. You see, we're not all work and no play.

Which, incidentally, suggests that there just might be something to attempts by IBM and others to marry social software with enterprise IT. Our work lives are increasingly blended with our personal lives. They're just about the same thing.

All of which must increasingly be done in real time, as Twitter, instant messaging, SMS/texting, and other immediate or near-immediate technologies suggest. Even e-mail, which used to be considered "fast" communication, has moved to mobile devices so that it's omnipresent and, hence, that much quicker.

All of which raises the question, "Why are you still reading this post?" After all, you've spent 3,000 characters here in which time you could have already plowed through 21 tweets. Think of all the headlines you could have read. :-)

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If you look at the history of computing, very few companies manage to resurrect falling fortunes to lead their respective markets. Does this mean that once down, a company should resign itself to being out?

Apple is a famous example of a come-from-behind victory, but also a poor one: while it wins plaudits for its sexy MacBook Pro laptops, it still commands less than 10 percent of the personal computer market. Good, but not great.

In browsers, Firefox was left for dead years ago, only to get a new life and 22 percent market share. But Mozilla executive Mitchell Baker is quick to call Firefox's resurgence against Microsoft an "anomaly."

Few companies or products challenge an incumbent, at least not on its own turf. Disruption is required to displace an incumbent, following Clayton Christensen's thinking in "The Innovator's Dilemma."

All of which makes me doubt Google's efforts to beat Apple in smartphones, and suggests Nokia and Motorola aren't going to fare much better. They simply aren't disruptive enough.

Nokia, for its part, made a big gamble open-sourcing Symbian after years of nurturing it as proprietary software to run mobile devices. The company has now discarded Symbian for its foray into Netbooks by partnering with Microsoft, a move that exacerbates its weak-kneed decision to bolster its mobile strategy with Microsoft Office. Nokia's approach leaves pundits like Joel West wondering "how Nokia will have an advantage on scale, innovation, features, branding or distribution over existing netbook makers," not to mention traditional mobile and laptop makers.

Disruption through Windows or Office? Unlikely.

Microsoft compounds the error by playing up its more expensive application for Windows Marketplace for Mobile, a strategy doomed to fail. Microsoft is playing to the developers' wish to make more money per customer, but if those customers prefer the iPhone, who cares how much Microsoft lets developers charge?

It's not just Microsoft and its crowd that are screwing up. Open source has also failed to offer a disruptive panacea. Motorola is betting big on the Google Android platform, but thus far has little to show for it.

Google, for its part, has attempted to disrupt Apple's iPhone in its apparent area of weakness: its closed nature. Google open-sourced the Android platform and invited the world of third-party developers to flock to it.

They never came.

As Slate's Farhoo Manjoo writes, "Even though it's far friendlier to developers, Android has failed to attract anywhere near the number of apps now clogging the iPhone." Android may be open, but it's not cool, and "cool" is where customers and, hence, developers are.

Which leaves me with my original question: if a vendor finds itself playing catch up, should it even bother running the race? In response I'd suggest that unless a vendor is willing to commit significant resources to a disruptive strategy, it might as well give up.

Of the companies mentioned above, only Google has a disruptive strategy, but it isn't spending nearly enough resources to tackle Apple's iPhone. Until it does, it will lose, open source or not. As for the others, neither Microsoft nor open source will save them, as they lack even a hint of disruption in their game plans.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

It was announced Monday that smartphone maker Research in Motion had acquired Torch Mobile, a provider of browsers and other applications based on the open-source WebKit project. Though Webkit has become the unofficial standard for mobile browsers, as Don Reisinger reports, it seems to be a largely Apple-controlled open-source community, one that has the potential to leave RIM, Palm, Google, and other WebKit users constantly playing catch-up to Apple.

Is WebKit open source? Absolutely. But is it truly an open, level playing field for RIM and other would-be competitors to Apple? Likely not.

Yes, there are other developers from Nokia, Torch Mobile, and Google involved with the project, but Apple controls the project, if by no other means than sheer numbers. Apple employs the majority of WebKit developers (30), with Google coming in second (19). Torch Mobile? It employs just eight of the WebKit development team members.

More pertinently, Apple employs far more of the WebKit reviewers than anyone else, which gives it much more control. Most of the other participants are committers, which are important but not equal in control to reviewers.

I've even heard that WebKit is not accepting outside contributions at present, though I have not yet been able to verify this.

Not that you need to look too deeply to see Apple's grip on the project. Just look at the logo:

Look familiar? It should. Here's Apple's logo for its Safari browser, which is based on the WebKit project:

Coincidence? Um...no. After all, the WebKit blog is called (get this): "Surfin' Safari. Think the blog is going to change its name anytime soon to "Surfin' RIM"? Don't hold your breath.

As the proud owner of four MacBook Pros and three iPhones, I'm not bashing Apple. I love what it produces.

But if part of RIM's interest in Torch Mobile was influence in the WebKit project, it could have saved its money. WebKit, for better or worse, is largely an Apple project, with serious support from Google. For everyone else, WebKit may be the best game in town, but it's Apple's town. It almost certainly will result in a better Blackberry browser for RIM customers, but not one that RIM has as much control over as it would like.

There are some technologies that make less and less sense as proprietary software. The browser is one of them. With Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome actively gaining at Internet Explorer's expense on the "desktop," it would be nice to see a truly open-source project--open in source, and open to outside involvement--standardize the mobile browsing experience, too.

There's Mozilla's Fennec, of course, but its development has been slow. WebKit may be the best option for RIM and others, but it would be an even better option if Apple took its hands off the wheel to open up the project further.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Microsoft says "There's plenty of innovation in the pipeline" for Windows Mobile. For those of us who haven't considered a Windows-based phone since the iPAQ's decline, the real question is, "If Microsoft has an innovative Windows Mobile experience, why is the company keeping it such a secret?"

Seriously, where has Microsoft been on mobile? It's a market that the best companies in the software industry are targeting, including Google and Apple, but Microsoft seems to be AWOL. CNET's Ina Fried notes some wishful thinking on Microsoft's part to get back in the smartphone game, but I'm not seeing it.

As Mark Sigal highlights, Google is approaching mobile with an open approach; Apple is winning with a closed approach; and Microsoft? Well, Microsoft seems to still think the phone is a PDA, with little innovation (closed or open) that would trouble a consumer to bother buying a Windows-powered mobile device.

Perhaps that is why Microsoft's smartphone market share has now dipped below 10 percent and shows no sign of resurrection.

This isn't about open source versus proprietary software. It's about focus, something that Microsoft seems not to have given mobile in a long, long time. Steve Ballmer was willing to spend roughly $45 billion on Yahoo to compete in search, but has managed only a $500 million acquisition of Danger to compete in mobile.

This despite advertising, computing, and (of course) communications moving to mobile devices. What has Microsoft been thinking? Or not thinking, as the case may be?

Yes, Microsoft is now partnering with Nokia to up its mobile game, but ZDNet's Larry Dignan is spot on calling this a "dog of a deal born from weakness," not strength.

What Microsoft needs is to innovate. Or at least to copy someone else's innovations. But it appears to be doing neither. This is inexcusable for a company with its resources and development talent. Microsoft is a great company, one that occasionally turns an industry on its head, as it has with SharePoint to the stodgy Enterprise Content Management market.

But Windows Mobile? It's lame.

This isn't a demand that Microsoft miraculously achieve mobile perfection. Heck, the iPhone has taught us that, great as it is, "good enough" is more than good enough (e.g., it comes with an underpowered camera...that everyone seems to use).

Microsoft is fond of talking about just how much it spends on research and development. But it's time to stop talking and start shipping. I've heard rumors of an exceptional mobile product on the way from Microsoft, but that's all I ever hear: something "in the cooker" that will "rock the world soon!"

As Morrissey used to croon for The Smiths, "How soon is now?"

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.