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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Apple is currently king of the smartphone world. The iconic iPhone has doubled in market share since 2008, rising to 10.8 percent in the first quarter of 2009 from 5.3 percent in 2008, according to Gartner.

But Apple may be in for a Microsoft moment. Just as a steady stream of well-heeled competitors like IBM, Red Hat, and Oracle are aligning themselves with Linux as a way to undermine Windows in servers and desktops, so, too, are crowds starting to form around Google's open-source Android in the smartphone market.

Linux: the bete noir of proprietary operating system vendors.

Samsung, LG, Motorola, and others are placing increasing stakes on Android. Indeed, BusinessWeek reports that Motorola has "one bullet left in its gun" and this bullet is Android. It can't afford to let the "iPhone killer" draw blanks. "Motorola's handset business depends on Android," as ZDNet's Larry Dignan suggests.

Importantly, Android is growing in the area that defines the iPhone's success more than anything else: applications. BusinessWeek's Stephen Wildstrom says that "Android is now a contender" in large part due to its growing array of third-party applications:

The Android Market is surprisingly well-stocked, considering the relatively small number of Android phones in use....[W]ith support from Google and from handset makers desperate to come up with something that can mount a serious challenge to the iPhone, Android could become a major player.

And not a moment too soon. With Apple iPhone margins as high as 60 percent by some estimates, the market already seems ripe for an open-source competitor to bring prices down while improving choice. I love my iPhone, but as Android-based phones become smarter and slicker, I just might change camps.

It appears that I'm not alone. The "droids" are popping up everywhere:

As with Linux in the server market, the smartphone industry is filled with second-place competitors. Most of these have a strong interest in banding together behind a Linux-based solution, in this case Android, though there is also momentum for Linux-based LiMo and non-Linux Symbian.

It may take a soup-to-nuts, integrated solution like the iPhone to create a market, but it takes an open-source solution like Android to foster choice and lower costs.

Game on.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

The mobile industry has never been more active and interesting, with much of the froth centered on Apple's impressive iPhone. In the wake of the iPhone's success a range of competitors have arisen, many of them open source, including Google Android, Symbian, and...the LiMo Foundation.

That last one may not be top-of-mind for many people, but LiMo, launched in February 2007 with the goal of establishing a collaborative platform for Linux-based handsets, has quietly been making headway amongst mobile handset manufacturers, with more than 30 handsets shipping the first release of its software and a bevy to come at the end of 2009 with the second release of the software.

Most intriguing for me, LiMo's software isn't solely used in high-end smartphones, as Apple's and Google's software is, but instead covers a wide array of smartphones and feature phones.

The foundation started with just six members--NEC, NTT DOCOMO, Orange, Panasonic, Samsung and Vodafone--but has significantly expanded its membership over time, most recently adding Casio Hitachi Mobile Communications, Marvell Semiconductor, Opera Software, Telefonica, and more to the roster.

I spoke with Andrew Shikiar, director of Global Marketing for LiMo Foundation, on Tuesday to get a status report on LiMo, as well as to uncover what makes the foundation tick.

Shikiar pointed out that unlike Google Android, for example, LiMo is developed by a consortium of competitors and collaborators that have decided to commoditize the operating system and middleware layers of mobile computing with LiMo's Linux platform, thereby freeing themselves to innovate beyond the operating system.

Shikiar speculates that "it's unclear that the open-source community is going to be enthusiastic about contributing to Android when ultimately it's Google, alone, that derives the most benefits."

He may be right.

Shikiar also noted LiMo's somewhat unique governance model:

Part of what makes LiMo unique is our contribution and development model. Any company (at any level of membership) can contribute code, but must do so under an open-source, royalty-free license.

Because of our diverse members, the process of getting consensus during development is more time-consuming but this process also seeds the market for that platform at the same time.

In other words, all of the wrangling and competitive positioning happens within the LiMo Foundation's development process, which serves as a microcosm (and refinery) of the larger mobile ecosystem. This walled-garden open-source approach--one that helps to coordinate "crowdsourcing"--to development promises to yield a platform that reflects the diverse industry that supports it.

LiMo, of course, is not alone. It faces significant competition from the concerted efforts of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others. But as the industry has reset to a new expectation of open development, LiMo stands to benefit.

As an agglomeration of corporate interests, LiMo strikes me as more akin to Eclipse or the Linux Foundation than to Mozilla. Having grown up in the embedded Linux market with Lineo, I can appreciate its attempts to halt the fragmentation that has long plagued the mobile/embedded Linux market.

Given the swelling size of its membership and the new devices being shipped with LiMo's software, apparently I'm not alone.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.