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Mobile OS Inflation
During this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the world’s most important mobile trade show, everyone seemed to think that a new OS (Operating System) is the way to go. It is unclear to me what makes them think that.
First, I’m a bit tired of the overuse of the OS nomenclature. Few deserve this title since they are really adding proprietary layers on top of Linux. Actually most do, even the beloved Android and iPhone. They should all be called “platforms”. However that is not the cause of my outrage. No.
Second, who does the branding for these things? Symbian, Bada, MeeGo, Mobiln, MeeMo, LiMo, Else, and others in addition to the successful iPhone, RIM, and Android. My favorite name in a sarcastic kind of way will have to be “Windows 7 Phone Series”. Redmond finally got something that does not deserve bashing throughout the blogsphere – a la Vista – and decides to use it everywhere. I get it, kind of makes sense. But, my fellow follower (singular) Windows 7 has a nice ring to it. Windows 7 Phone Series does not, I’m sorry.
Third is that application developers have better things to do than to port their app to the “OS” of the day. And who is thinking about users? Thanks to this inflation you will have to scavenge the world to find the right app if you made the mistake to buy a platform that didn’t quite make it for whatever reason. Now that is an outrage, but not the point of my post. Suffice it to say that there will be plenty of casualties in these OS’s flood.
Amidst this Mobile OS inflation there is one that in my opinion deserves mention: MeeGo. Sure, the name sucks but I’ll have to give it some points for obscure geekyness. A shape-shifting 9000-year old alien from the planet Marmazon 4.0 has to attract the dormant or not so dormant geek in most smartphone users, from the Blackberry suits to the Android hoodys. Let’s just hope it doesn’t suffer the fate of the CBS sitcom who didn’t get the chance to finish a single season mostly because it wasn’t any good.
Anyway, MeeGo is worth mentioning not because of the fact that it is a joint venture between Nokia and Intel. MeeGo is a platform that promises to bring smartphones to the 2010’s by using an x86 architecture instead of the perpetual ARM. x86 architectures are ubiquitous in the PC world whereas ARM architectures have their humble roots in the embedded world (you know watches, sensors, WiFi radios, set top boxes, routers, cellphones – Ok, not so humble). ARM uses RISC – Reduced Instruction Set Computing – vs x86’s CISC – Complex Instruction Set Computing. This difference has allowed computers to run more complex software and algorithms so they can behave like, well, computers. ARM on the other hand is fundamentally more power efficient, which explains its huge presence in mobility.
Until now the lowest x86 has gone is Intel’s Atom family (which drove the netbook “revolution”). What is so new about the Atom family? Low power consumption in an x86 processor. At the same time, Qualcomm has been touting its Snapdragon 1 GHz+ Arm based systems – base for the reference design of my favorite name Windows 7 Phone Series – and now powering some “smartbooks” (again with the naming).
You see what’s happening under the hood? New product categories are being launched, OS inflation is flooding the mobile world but at its real core there is a tremendous collision happening. ARM getting more powerful while x86 is getting more efficient. This brings us back to why MeeGo is so significant for the industry.
x86 based phones are out there but none has really made a mark basically because they haven’t offered anything new. In this blogger’s very humble opinion if Nokia-Intel get it right (which is a big “if”) this could be the next revolution in mobility: the power of a real computer in the palm of your hand. With html 5, 4G networks, ubiquitous 802.11n WiFi, comparative shopping, location based services, “billions upon billions” of webpages, will now be available to complex software thanks to CISC based smartphones. By the middle of this starting decade we will all wonder what was the hype behind all these “clever-phones” that could barely browse the web. We will remember them as we now think of the first color Mac’s. Very cool but just a sign of what’s to come.
Enjoy.
Microsoft Getting Smart about Smartphones
Well, it was just a matter of time. PC World reported that Microsoft will announce its own smartphone in the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona this month. I guess the pandemic of iPhone envy is hitting everyone hard. This one promises to be interesting since it will allegedly be based on the Zune misic player and the Windows 7 Phone platform. All good. Until now Microsoft’s strategy was OEM friendly. LG, Samsung, HTC, Motorola and others have introduced Microsoft based smartphones of varying success positioing Microsoft’s mobile OS as the 4th player (soon to be 5th thanks to Android) in the smartphone category (after RIM, Apple, and Symbian).
This strategy represents a hardware/software branded device from Microsoft in a sense competing with its own OEMs. All those companies however have not shown any loyalty to the Redmond folks since they have diversified or totally migrated to the Android platform. So I guess Balmer decided: Screw them I will go Google … sorry I will do like Apple … not really, I will do my own hardware and control my own destiny. Good move? We’ll see. But definitelly not a bad one or a move that will damage any OEM relationships. The world is ready for a diversity in OSs and the smartphone categry is the fastest growing category in the industry. Microsoft cannot aford to be the fifth.
The question is: Will this make a difference? Not likley.
Microsoft has by far the largest market share in the enterprise – with “big Windows”, not smartphones, that privilege belongs to RIM. It boasts millions upon millions of applications and it is the “standard” enterprise Operating System. These are not 99 cent apps, no! These represent real money for enterprises and Microsoft. A simple copy of Office may go for hundreds of dollars. Why? because it is the defacto standard (for now). The smartphone world behaves very different. With the exception of email and a couple of minor “connectors” to ERP systems there are very few apps for the enterprise. In fact Windows Mobile today has the largest number of enterprise ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) but they specialize in niche applications like inventory, supply chain, delivery, fleet management, etc. The devices these apps run on are not your typical HTC smartphone Fender edition but very specialized hardware made by Motorola and others.
The thing is: The Microsoft name, which carries a lot of weight in the enterprise, does not represent a mayority choice for the consumers as it does in PCs or in those niche applications. The perception of a “standard” OS with millions of applications does not exist in the Smarthphone world. There are millions of apps for several OSs, in fact lots of apps are available for most smartphone OSs (paradoxically Windows Phone is typically the last one to be developed). So my contention is that even if Microsoft comes up with a killer device it is an uphill battle to go after RIM, iPhone, Symbian, and Android. It may much better than OEM versions since Microsft has intimate knowledge of hardware and software to make it so, but it will hardly take the world by storm as its competitors have.
Good luck Microsoft and thanks for giving us all something to write about and for another great opportuniti for a clever Apple commercial. I’m sure there’s a map for that somewhere.
Enjoy.
Who needs a tablet?
Amidst some of the most spectacular speculation in the history of electronics (even for Apple) every manufacturer is launching some kind of a tablet device, a keyboardless computer with a big screen. This is not a new concept. I was recently playing around with a Compaq Concerto – that incidentally had a keyboard, a pen and a mouse, courtesy of a colleague, that was build 17 years ago. Since then the allure of using the most common way of written communication (a pen) has been just a promise. This year Steve Balmer, Microsoft CEO announced HP’s “slate” back in the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas in a setting that looked more like the Mac commercials than a new category launch. Dell, Lenovo, and others will soon have one too. The big question is why?
Acording to ABI Research the world will consume a staggering 450 million laptops in 2012 and [gasp] 650 million smartphones. If you take into account replacement cycles, that is how fast people buy a new one the results are pretty revealing. A laptop, on average get replaced every 3 years, which means that roughly 1.35 billion people will buy one within 3 years. A smartphone, thanks in part to carrier subsidies, is replaced every 2 years, meaning 1.3 billion people will buy one. Of course, they are both the same people! The question is, are those 1.3 billion geeks (what an amazing number buy the way) ready for a 3rd device and all the annoyances (chargers, accessories, batteries, breakage, data plans, network connections, etc., etc.) that come with it? Not so much.
Unless: a) It substitutes a device you already carry. b) enhances a device you already carry, c) it changes the way you interact with technology or d) it is so damn amazing that you have to have it.
A) Substituting a device you already carry is kind of lame. In order to do that it has to do everything the old device did and more. Kind of what smartphones did for the cellphone. But it comes at a price. That is the approach Microsoft and partners in crime are taking with teh “convertible” laptop. Ever since the Concerto, that approach has failed miserably. The enhanced user experience that touch brings does not justify the extra cost.
B) This may be the key to the tablet success. What if you could share your smartphone’s dataplan but have access to a bigger screen when you need it? Charge it and use the same accessories and apps your smartphone or your laptop uses but the experience is so much better due to touch, weight, a better screen and better interaction with your media. In other words, your laptop becomes your “content creation” device and your tablet a “content consumption” alternative with much, much better experience. The question still remains, how much is that worth and will manufacturers and carriers make money?
C) Changing the way you interact with technology needs a huge amount of disruption. One approach, suggested here, is to just make it part your your life and go after the time people spend with media in a different way. That is all good, but IMHO, it will still limit the penetration. As I have suggested in previous posts, the internet is desigend for a screem, a keyboard, and a mouse. Last I checked, there are no plans to change that any time soon. Be that as it may, media convergence – your pics, videos, blogs, magazines, books, news “papers”, etc. – in a single point may make sense, but again , at what price?
D) Lastly, an amazing device will drive some crowds, especially from the Silicon Valley sweethart even if there is no use for it, like the Newton or Apple TV. This unfortunately is very nichy and I doubt Apple, Microsoft, HP, and others will be making such a splash for a niche.
One could argue that the Amazon Kindle, by far the most successful of these form factors (which by the way is expected to sell some 6 million this year, puting it in the category of niche for geeks), has it right. Mainly because it is designed to read books. Anyone that has played with it can see why. Great battery life, great form factor, light, and a brilliant eInk display that is the closest thing to paper that is powerd by a battery. But the key genius of Amazon is not that the device is brilliant, is the business model. Buy a book and voila, it gets delivered to your Kindle without having to worry about a data plan, a monthly bill, or extra charges. It is still a 3rd device, but it substitutes the book, magazines, and newspapers we used to carry around. THe lesson here is subsitute something you carry today and make it simpler, better, and cheaper (at least over the long run).
The question is what will the tablets strategy be? It is tough to say, but as geeky as I am, I will wait before I splurge for the $500 – $1000 tablet plus an extra data plan. For once, a “revolutionary” gadget does not excite me that much. Is it a sign of aging or just a sign of the times?
Enjoy.
Another Googlesque act at the Nexus of the smartphone market
Google is an amazing social experiment. Besides giving bloggers an endless source of topics to write about, it challenges all common sense, business logic, and engineering innovation concepts. In a very Googlesque fashion, Nexus One was announced during 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. What is more surprising is that it will most likely be a success.
Without having had my hand on it it is tough for me to have an opinion on its performance. But given the engineering track record of Silicon Valley’s favorite they probably nailed it (even if they didn’t you know there will be a Nexus 2). But that is not what will make it a success, nor is that what is surprising about it. Motorola, LG, HTC, Sony Ericsson, and others have or have announced plans for Android powered smartphones. Yet, Google, the author of Android, decides to put out a device that competes with all of them. Moreover, Google does not have to make money from it (even though they will) since it is really a bet on mobile advertisement revenue. So far nobody has found a way to make money on mobile ads, but it is my contention that if somebody can figure it out it will most likely be Google. It is hard to imagine that Google decided to compete with their hardware partners just to make a “few” bucks selling hardware. They most likely did it for the same reason Google does everything else: to disrupt a market.
Imagine a world in which you do not have to pay for cellphone service. Pretty much the way you didn’t have to pay for TV in the past. Advertisers paid for it and consumers take advantage of that money flow. I know, I know, those days are waaaay over and not likely coming back anytime soon (until Google has a say). But in the mobile Internet business the biggest barrier to entry IMHO for mobile search to explode is the hefty $30 – $50 a month data fee from your preferred carrier plus a $100 – $300 “club entry fee” for your favorite smartphone. Sure there are hundreds of millions of smartphones out there and there will be more in the years to come, but the mobile search revenue still dwarfs the “fixed” one. Granted usability, contextual value, and other issues are still important. But Apple and Google will shortly solve those. Cost will remain a barrier. Unless, yes, unless it is free. In other words, paid by advertisers. You and I can pick our favorite smartphone subsidized by a carrier to get your voice revenue and Google pays your data plan as long as you search. Weird? Sure, but then again Google is known for its weird business models.
Enjoy.
Leadership is Execution
Although it may sound a bit cliche, the success of a company (or any enterprise for that matter) depends on its leadership. It not only depends on their ability to inspire action but also in the leaders’ ability to paint a picture that people can relate to. I recently bumped into a post by an ex colleague that clarifies the point very eloquently. He comments that leading visions must be clear, compelling, and credible for followers to act on them. I agree. However execution is a key element for any leader to succeed.
Continue …
Google and Apple Call it Quits.
It is all over the news that Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, resigned from Apple’s board recently citing “conflict of interests”. Businessweek published an article contrasting the two companies. It highlights the fact that they are still aligned against Microsoft, but their ideologies are vastly different. There are some speculative blogs that tie this resignation to Apple’s removal of Google Voice application from the iPhone store. Although it might have been the proverbial “last straw”, it is hardly the reason. How much conflict was there really and how different are their interests? Google Voice proves the point in a very interesting way.
Continue …
Your Real "Real Money"
Cramer writes as he speaks: a little too cocky, self confident, straightforward, candid, and with a couple of “insider” jokes that make you think he is the only one that finds them funny. It is a great flight book (that is a book to read on a boring 6 hour flight). That being said, the book is a good collection of sane (yes, I said sane) advices for the novice and no so novice investor. His stock-picking rules are a good organized way to summarize the basics of disciplined investing / trading. I have two pet peeves on his recommendations: the way he defines diversification (which is not exclusive of Mr. Cramer), and the 5 stock limit for part time investors. Let me explain.
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