The mobile-computing world is increasingly a two-horse race between Google and Apple, with Apple clearly in the lead but Google Android making up ground quickly. Microsoft and Symbian are also still in the game, but the ultimate winner will be the one that best appeals to consumers or developers.
Or both.
Sexy? Yes. But what about the developers?
This struck home while reading Mark Sigal's analysis of the "inevitability" of Google Android. On his way to dismantling the idea that Google's victory is assured, Sigal stumbles into apparently divergent interest groups:
[U]nlike the PC, where "good enough" was the bar required to seize the market,...for most consumers, their mobile device of choice is a lifestyle decision, a personal, ever-present extension of themselves that is resident in a way that never existed before with the PC--a value proposition that Apple has completely run with on iPhone (and iPod before that).
Fundamentally, though, mobile is a platform play, a game that is largely won by securing the hearts and minds of developers, and for them, the expectation bar is now set pretty high, owing to the success of iPhone across so many domains....
If you're Google (or Microsoft or Symbian), then, who do you target? Developers or consumers?
It's a real question, as while both parties' interests ultimately converge (consumers want developers to make great applications so that those same consumers can pay the developers lots of money), the short-term interests of consumers (sexy product) and developers (ease and richness of development platform) don't necessarily go together.
Motorola RAZR? Sexy product, lame development platform. Windows Mobile? Arguably a solid development platform...with almost zero sex appeal for consumers.
This is why John Carroll is probably right to argue that Microsoft should reinvigorate its mobile strategy with an emphasis on .Net as a powerful way for developers to write powerful mobile applications, it's not going to be enough. Microsoft can port all the business applications it wants for Windows Mobile. It won't matter.
Consumers don't buy business applications. Not until after they've chosen a phone that meets their personal needs, first.
Yes, enterprises do try to dictate corporate standards with Blackberrys and dull Dell PCs heading the list. But in the fast-changing mobile market, you can't hope that consumers will be forced to use your software. You want them to want to do so.
This is why I believe Google has a good chance of taking a serious bite out of Apple, and Symbian and Microsoft do not. Symbian is too difficult an application development platform, as Gartner notes, and Microsoft...is boring.
Not that it needs to be. XBox certainly isn't, and actually helped Microsoft surpass Apple in a recent consumer survey focused on product innovation.
But not in mobile, or even in computers. Apple understands how to create wicked cool products that consumers want, which is why its Mac sales are projected to grow by 26 percent in 2010, right through the recession, and why its iPhone continues to thrive.
But Apple's Achilles heel could well be developers, which are reportedly tiring of Apple's apparently arbitrary application approval and updating process. If Google can continue to help handset manufacturers to achieve the "Wow factor," while simultaneously creating a more open, robust development platform, it just might be able to beat Apple at the game it started.
In other words, the winning mobile vendor will be the one that marries sex appeal for consumers with platform appeal for developers. Google is on course to deliver, but it probably needs to win big with consumers before it makes waves with developers.
Is Apple an enterprise software or hardware company? That's the question Gartner's Nick Jones asks, ultimately answering with "you have to have a pretty relaxed definition [of enterprise] before Apple fits it."
"Enterprise" is defined by the company you keep.
With this definition in mind, Apple clearly fits the "enterprise" moniker, whether Apple wants it or not. As BusinessWeek reported back in 2008, the Mac is finding its way into enterprise computing, with or without the IT department's blessing. Ditto the iPhone.
Is it somehow less enterprise because the CIO didn't issue a policy giving permission?
Maybe "enterprise" means something more than "gets used a lot within the enterprise." In fact, Jones points out a few reasons he, personally, doesn't feel Apple is an enterprise vendor:
Apple does the bare minimum for enterprises, they aren't deeply committed to security, management, road maps, low TCO and so on. And they don't open up the architecture of iPhone enough for third parties to fill the holes.
But, again, is this really how we should define "enterprise?"
It reminds me of the criticisms leveled at open-source software early in its adoption. Originally Linux, for example, wasn't considered "enterprise grade" or "enterprise ready," presumably because it didn't meet Jones' hurdles above.
Now, however, Linux is considered an essential enterprise technology. What changed? Nothing...except adoption.
Here's a test for Jones: while Gartner pooh-poohs Apple's iPhone as an enterprise mobile device, perhaps for a variety of good definitional reasons, will it hold to such a rationale once the iPhone's market share within the enterprise dwarfs that of Windows Mobile, which has lost a third of its market share since 2008?
Seriously, at some point it won't be enough to listen to Microsoft's Ray Ozzie deprecate the iPhone's enterprise credentials because its 100,000-plus applications are "not very deep" and lack the "thousands of man years" that have gone into the applications that run on Windows. It won't make sense. Why? Because no matter how "enterprise grade" those Windows Mobile applications are, few within the enterprise are using them.
Enterprise is as enterprise does. Would you rather work for the company that builds software for the enterprise, or would you prefer to work for the company whose software gets used by the enterprise?
If you can have both, great. But it's silly to say Apple isn't an enterprise company simply because it sells to the enterprise without even trying.
Together we can figure this out
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.
One App Store to rule them all?
(Credit: Apple)Apple has an app store, of course. So does Microsoft. Google has two, one for Android and now one for Wave. In fact, it's hard to find anyone who doesn't have an app store these days.
We're swimming in app stores. Or drowning.
I'm serious. At the Symbian conference in London on Tuesday, I attended a panel that was overrun with app stores. Nokia, Symbian, GetJar, Sony Ericsson, Handmark, and Handango were all promoting their respective app stores, each talking about how great theirs is.
They're probably right. They probably are all great. But how am I, as a lay consumer, going to figure out which one to use?
More particularly, how will developers decide which platforms to target?
After all, everyone wants to be a platform these days. Does that mean that no one is?
Developers may be spoiled for choice, but "choice" in this case may not be what they want. Developers need to feed their families and will follow the money. Money is more easily made when choice is manageable (which is a euphemism for "limited").
This means we'll see plenty of application developers remain with Apple (though it's debatable whether the iPhone is the land of milk and honey for anyone but Apple), but we'll also continue to see a stampede to Google Android.
At present, every other mobile platform is playing for third place, but this could change: Symbian, as a foundation, is in a good position to launch an effective challenge to both Apple and Google if it can get its marketing and execution right.
Outside of mobile, it's unclear what role app stores will play. It's nice that Google Wave is getting an app store, but it's just one more "forge" among many. Every vendor (my employer, included) seems to feel an irresistible urge to create a forge/app store where third-party developers can "add value" to their "platforms."
Do we really need these? Or do we need more general repositories like Google Code and SourceForge?
I wish I had a definitive answer. I'm just not sure that these competing app stores do anything more than appeal to vendor vanity, and they could end up causing customer confusion.
As a consumer, I don't want to have to think about sorting among competing app stores. I just want applications.
Presumably, if I use a Sony Ericsson phone, I'll automatically find myself within its app store (unless my wireless provider doesn't slot me into its app store first, that is). But if that's the case, what's the point of making a big deal over a glorified catalog of applications that work with my given device/software/etc.?
It strikes me that app stores, like the cloud, are simply a way to dress up old ideas. If they help to organize potential buyers and sellers of software, great. But I still think I'd prefer meta-repositories of applications, similar to SourceForge, than individual application repositories for every single device or piece of software that I happen to buy.
How about you?
Had Vizzini of "The Princess Bride" lived to relate a third "classic blunder" beyond land wars in Asia and competing with Sicilians, he might have urged start-ups to avoid hardware-dependent strategies. Hardware, after all, can be expensive to build and can't match software for ease (and cost) of distribution.
So, is hardware a bad idea for start-ups? Or are we just thinking about hardware in the wrong way?
Open me up, find software/services inside.
Gadi Amit of NewDealDesign suggests that the hardware business, long shunned by Silicon Valley VCs for its costs and complexities, may be getting easier due to ready-made manufacturing capacity in China, which is driving down the cost of building hardware.
Open-source hardware could drop the price of development even further, as Om Malik recently wrote. Give away the designs for your hardware and let would-be customers build it themselves.
This is a particularly appealing strategy for companies that depend upon hardware to drive what are essentially software businesses. Apple builds its own hardware because it wants to control the complete consumer experience, but it could also enable third parties to build hardware that is optimized to run iTunes, OS X, and other Apple software.
Yet hardware could prove the undoing of Apple in smartphones, just as it did in the personal computer industry, when the pioneer Mac gave way to the relentless, ubiquitous Windows.
Sure, Apple's iPhone is currently blowing the competition out of the water. Google Android, however, poses a serious threat, given its ability to embrace multiple hardware vendors with a common platform. Were Google to extend this strategy with open-source hardware, too, the strategy could prove even more disruptive to Apple's current dominance.
Android's momentum is a sobering reminder to Apple that community can trump control.
This same strategy applies to others, too. What about TiVo? Or Sling Media? These are all companies that have built and distribute their own hardware, but really what they're providing is software or services. The hardware is simply there to enable consumer access to software-driven data or entertainment businesses.
So why not open source the hardware and, hopefully, accelerate adoption by lowering the cost of manufacture and distribution?
This is exactly what we're seeing happen in software, as companies race to open source complements to their core businesses. Intel with Linux, Google with Android, IBM with Linux/Apache/more, etc.
Can it work for hardware, too? I think so. But we're still waiting on someone to prove it.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
To beat Apple in mobile, Google is going to need more open-source developers. But it's also going to need more Google.
Take me to your leader(s), earthling
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.
Windows Mobile 6.5
(Credit: Microsoft)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.
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.
Open source, despite its community roots, often doesn't become mainstream until corporations get involved. There are notable exceptions--Mozilla Firefox and the Apache Web server being just two--but often it is corporate self-interest that provides the mechanism to deliver the value of community-developed open source to a mainstream audience.
While the mobile market remains highly fragmented, therefore, I take it as a very encouraging sign that Google has thrown its considerable heft behind Android, its open-source mobile operating platform.
Sure, we've had mobile open-source companies for years. I was part of one of the first: Lineo, an embedded Linux vendor that distributed an optimized Linux distribution for PDAs like the Sharp Zaurus. More recently, Funambol has proved popular as a mobile application server, specializing in synchronization technology.
But just as Linux's big moment on the server came with IBM's $1 billion commitment to fund its development and marketing, so, too, will the mobile open-source market come into its own with Google Android.
Android has recently pulled ahead of Microsoft's Windows Mobile in the smartphone market, according to data from AdMob, hitting a global 5 percent market share (in terms of access to mobile ads, not units shipped), while continuing to grow 25 percent month over month.
While Microsoft dominates on the desktop, with even its not-yet-released Windows 7 beating Linux, according to W3C data, Linux, and increasingly Google's Android flavor of Linux, is making a big push on smartphones.
To fuel this, Google has been upping its commitment to developers, most recently with an upgrade to its Android Market, but also pushing its handsets into an ever-widening array of handset manufacturers and wireless carriers, most recently Sprint.
I've suggested that the only way to beat Apple's iPhone is with a big commitment of resources. Google appears to be doing this, but in an intelligent way: it is trying to attract a wide community of developers to share the burden of beating the iPhone.
InfoWorld's Neil McAllister thinks it's not working, but I'm more sanguine. So long as Google invests marketing and development resources to Android, the open-source operating platform has a good chance.
And, importantly, so long as Google remains committed to mobile, there's a very good opportunity for other mobile open-source players to draft on its momentum. An entire open-source industry has grown up in the shadow of IBM's original $1 billion commitment to Linux.
The same can happen in mobile, and this time it will be Google's turn to lead.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
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.
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.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
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.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
