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Mobile Design & Development Resources

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

I have accumulated lots of links that serve as resources for understanding, building, and launching mobile apps and services.   Every so often I will share a data point or an insight I gleaned from these resources and somebody will ask me for the link – I then go digging.   To reduce the amount of digging I do and provide a better way to share these mobile resources I will start to organize them by topic here.  If you would like to add something to this small directory please add them in the comments.

Mobile Design

Mobile Development

Mobile Technologies

New Forms of Mobile Search & Discovery

App Store and App Marketing

Mobile Monetization

Web Businesses Adapting to the Mobile Era

Mobile Strategy

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Five Signs That You Are Not Thinking (Originally)

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Five signs you are not thinking and thinking originally

1. Your Inbox is empty & calendar is full

2. You visit Techmeme/TechCrunch/etc more then 2x/day

3. You have 4 or more coffee meetings a week

4. You have not written / sketched / coded something in more then 48 hrs

5. You  attended 3 or more conferences during the past four weeks

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If You Are a Product Manager Without an Angle of Attack, Prepare for a Blood Bath

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

If you are a product manager and not managing a product that is a monopoly (i.e. Microsoft Office, Windows, Google Search) or strong number one then you need to figure out  your angle of attack.

This could be attacking on a set of different features, attacking from a different channel to flank your competitor, or attacking from the position of an emerging platform.  What is a viable angle of attack, lets look at a few:

A Platform 
Attack

In the gaming space users are moving from consoles to social networks.  Zynga realized that and attacked starting with Facebook taking advantage of massive user base combined with a relatively immature platform that they cleverly exploited.

The Channel
 Attack

In Japan where Yahoo has 56% search market share Google is attempting to flank Yahoo! via mobile search channel — by dominating the mobile search side they believe that overtime they will convert users on the PC.

 Over the next few months expect many companies to disrupt established players via the mobile channel.

The Missing Feature

Incumbents get fat and lazy and start overlooking important features. Skype attacked the 1:1 communication space from the angle of audio/video communication – free calls anywhere in the world. MSN Messenger and Y! Messenger should have seen this opportunity, they ultimately matched Skype feature for feature but it was too late. Skype had become a verb for talking and video-conferencing. [Skype also fits under the category of platform attack – they were one of the first legal services to leverage the broadband platform – Om has more on this here.]

Business Model Attack

Netflix is a classic example. Blockbuster business model was largely based on capturing late-fees. Netflix said we will not only deliver your movies directly to your home but you never have to pay late fees. Netflix destroyed Blockbuster.

These do not qualify as a viable angle of attack:

We’ll Out Design Them

The argument I hear fairly often goes something like this “Just like Apple we will provide a far superior user experience and destroy them because their UI sucks.” I love great design (I led the acquisition of Inquisitor for Yahoo!) but unless your design advantage runs deep (Apple’s does) a competent incumbent will steal your design and pawn it off as their own. Great design is part of an attack, not the attack.

If you are a product manager and you cannot articulate your angle of attack you are going to end up attacking head-on which is costly and bloody.

Posted in Product, Strategy | 1 Response »
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There Will be No Globally Dominant Mobile OS

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

All three major players — Apple, Google (Android) , Microsoft –have launched or announced their mobile OS the question the question we are asking is who will dominate the mobile OS ecosystem? The premise of the question is flawed.  There will be no globally dominant mobile OS the way Windows dominates the PC.  Just a few of many reasons:

  • Price: Price-insensitive markets (e.g. most of North America and Europe) view their phones as jewelry. At $99  (iPhone 3G) it is not a very expensive piece of jewelry.  Highly price sensitive markets (Southeast Asia and South America) will see Android coupled with copycat devices.
  • Carrier Distribution: Carriers remain a vital distributor in most markets. They have financial (generously provided by OEM and web companies) and strategic (keep Google honest) incentives to distribute multiple platforms.
  • Open Platforms Win: An overstated arguement.  The 20% of apps that matter will get ported to all platforms with over 10% share and the 3-4 incremental days that it takes to get an App into the iPhone App Store is annoying but mostly inconsequential.  As the mobile browsers continue to expose more device APIs the Android is open argument wears thin.   OK, so you say well I want to go really deep into the mobile OS and create my own layer above the OS.  There are very few companies who have the resources and skill-sets to do this. OEM’s like Motorola are trying but don’t have the right skill-set.  The companies who have the resources and skill-set to this are the exact same companies who have launched their own mobile OS.
  • Data Lock-In: Data you create on your device will not stay on your device the same way that data you generated on your PC 20 years ago remained there.  As the world moves to the cloud in 2010 these client level data lock-in advantages are muted.   More important are the cloud based data lock-in (e.g. Y!Mail, Gmail, etc.).  The device is just access point.
  • Application Lock-In The argument goes something like this.  Users spend lots of money on Apps and music and given these investments will be locked into the platform where they made these investments. To build significant application lock-in users will need to be spending far more then $50 a year on Apps [source].  Recall, to create strong switching costs 10 years ago users spent hundreds of dollars on Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suites.  Could it really be anything less?

[For good history and insight into mobile fragmentation see Richard Wong's TechCrunch post and presentation]

Posted in Mobile, Strategy | No Responses »
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The iPhone Experience Lock-In

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

A few weeks ago I got my hands on a Google Nexus for a few weeks and used it as my primary phone.  I have no intentions of doing a Nexus product review as lots people have done that by now.  I can critique a few user experience issues but overall it is a good device, and for anybody upgrading from a Motorola Razr device it is an awesome device.

But for me, the iPhone has become like those pair of jeans that grow so comfortable you just don’t want to give them up.   Given the hundreds if not thousands of weekly interactions one has with their iPhone it becomes part of your muscle memory and switching to a new mobile platform (i.e. new experience) becomes a significant investment in time and energy.  This is experience lock-in.  This lock-in is likely stronger then PC experience lock-in because your mobile phone is an extension of your body in a way that a PC is not.

I know people who can barely use a PC to send email but would never give up their Blackberry or iPhone.  Apple has a significant experience lock-in.  Can it capitalize on this quickly enough in some of its key markets (North America, Western Europe, and Australia).  The $99 iPhone is a good start.

Posted in Product, Strategy | No Responses »
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Is Groupon.com Sustainable or Defensible?

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

Groupon.com is a clever way to create demand for local businesses, and with their success plenty of me-too Groupons are sprouting up.  This raises the obvious question that got asked on Quora.com the other day:  Is Groupon a sustainable or defensible business?  Here’s my take:

To create higher levels of defensibility they need more deals per city. With only a deal a day per city (~50 or so cities) the activation energy a competitor needs to catch up is fairly small (sales force and some search marketing spend).  If they had more liquidity on the supply side (thousands of deals per day) it would be very hard to create this kind of supply with a sales force.

PS:  I highly recommend Quora.com.  If your following the right topics and people the conversations are thoughtful.  Ping me if you want an invite.

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