microsoft

...now browsing by tag

 
android apple app store branding browser business business strategy commerce communication content strategy customer Data data usage design ebay firefox Global google groupon hotel photos innovation iphone marketing microsoft Mobile mobile advertising mobile devices monetization office oyster.com prioritization productivity product management product manager product strategy project management reviews samsung Search sensors smartphone software Strategy value virtual goods
 

Are You Building Something That Will Move the Ball Forward?

Saturday, November 27th, 2010

My co-founders (David and Matt) and me are embarking on building a new company called Gigwalk.  The experience got me thinking about why we start companies.  I was going to write a long post about this but came across a Tim O’Reilly interview where he captures it perfectly while commenting on some of the TechCrunch50 companies “I don’t really care if they succeed or not, they are not really moving the ball forward in any meaningful way”

Ultimately life is too short to work on something where I could make a bit of money but really didn’t care for.   If my only goal was to make money I would be working on Wall Street (as a few of college professors encouraged me to do so). Wall Street is a great place to make tons of money working on stuff that doesn’t matter much.

If you take a much longer perspective – say 100 years – companies that move the ball forward succeed in changing what people do and how they think.  They change the course of history. Each of these companies dramatically changed billions of people’s lives over the past fifteen years.

  • Microsoft and Google changed how people work.
  • Facebook and Yahoo changed how people communicate.
  • eBay and Amazon changed how people buy and sell things.
  • LinkedIn is changing how people manage their career.
  • PayPal changed how we pay for stuff.

As Tim says these companies clearly created more economic and social value than they captured – the founders and investors did pretty well along the way.  I have no idea whether we will create a company on the same level as some of these — only lots of hard work and a bit of luck will determine that; yet this interview got me thinking on why we should start companies.

Posted in Startup | 4 Responses »
Tags: , , ,

Android is Leaving the Door Open for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

When discussing the mobile landscape many people I talk with dismiss Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Phone 7 as too late.  They are definitely late, but not out.  Given a large enough market Microsoft knows how to execute (see gaming and enterprise software).  Additionally, the strong number two player in the market – Google –  is leaving the door open for them.

Fragmented User Experiences

Each Android device OEM (HTC, Motorala, Samsung, etc.) has created their own user experience layer on top of the out-of-the-box Android UI.  None of them have done a particularly good job.  Beyond the poor execution these fragmented user experiences create two problems for Android.  First, it creates a learning curve as user upgrade their devices. Users abhor relearning basic functions (ever wonder why Mapquest still has significant traffic in the face of far superior products).  If you are running the HTC Sense UI for Android and one day consider upgrading to a Motorola device running Motoblur these UI differences will appear daunting.  HTC is perfectly fine with this kind of reaction as they are trying to build lock-in to HTC devices.  But what happens when the user says to themselves well as long as I will need to relearn a user experience why don’t I try an iPhone or Windows Phone.  The second and perhaps more serious risk to Google from these fragmented user experience is the user never carves away a piece of their mind for Android.  To the consumer Android means ten different things based upon what kind of marketing the carrier did for the device, which UI layer you were running.  In fact many people have no idea that they are even running Android as there is nothing unique about the user experience that says I am running Android.

Google sees this as a serious liability and future versions of Android are focused almost exclusively on improving the out of the box user experience to avoid this experience fragmentation.

Bloatware

Yes, everybody pre-installs applications – even the iPhone.  While the iPhone does pre-install maps, weather, finance.  Carriers selling Android devices are going much further.  They are pre-installing niche products like the Nascar and Football apps – Wired provides the gory details here.  For example, my Droid Incredible from Verizon pre-installs City ID (a zip code lookup application), Footprint (local guides), Teeter (a game).  It is bad enough to pre-install niche apps, they prohibit you from removing these applications.  With that kind of experience it’s not surprising that 80% of Android owners will not buy another one.

Mess of a Marketplace

The Android Marketplace is a living example of a philosophy taken to its extreme with negative consequences. Android believes in a laissez-faire market.  Let all the apps in and allow the use to decide what is best.  The Android narrative goes something like this. Apple is the North Korea of the smartphone market and we (Android) are the open enlightened western country – where would you rather live?   This positioning may work for a small subset of developers but for users who actually simply want to find and install the latest app it is really not so simple.   Jon Lech Johansen’s recent blog post Google’s Mismanagement of the Android Market captures it well:

one should not need a PhD in Computer Science to use a smartphone. How is a consumer supposed to know exactly what the permission “act as an account authenticator” means?

Another example of this mismanagement, try searching for Yahoo in the Android Market. If you don’t have an Android I included a screenshot of what you see.  The first result (as of July 25, 2010) is an app made by a company called Lovemaq.  They stole the Yahoo logo, wrapped a few Yahoo.com web pages into an Android app, layered some ads around the app, and threw it into the Android Market.

Updated July 29, 2010:  Android app that steals your data was downloaded by millions.

The Case for Microsoft

After killing Windows Mobile 6 and the KIN Microsoft finally has their shit together. They are bringing a unique user experience (opens engadget’s recent review) in Windows Phone 7, a history of cultivating and supporting application developers, and strong relationships with both enterprise customer and OEM device manufacturers.  Combine this with a stomach for losing billions of dollars to build scale and the door Android is leaving open Windows Phone 7 will be a serious competitor far faster than most people realize.

Image courtesy of Flickr twenty_questions

Posted in Mobile | 2 Responses »
Tags: , , ,

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 »
Tags: , , , ,

Cost of Split Energy

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Every business relationship you ever get into should have a very deep appreciation for the split costs.  Put simply, how quickly can I disengage from this relationship.  After some interesting comments by Steve Jobs on Microsoft (gotta love his panache) — Steve Ballmer discusses this exact point — the long dance with IBM in the early days of Microsoft cost the Windows consumer product innovation.

Posted in Strategy | No Responses »
Tags: , , ,