I can’t say either action is a real surprise, given the success – or lack thereof – of both products, but it begs the question of what the hell is so unique about Apple that makes them so successful?  Both products were reasonably good and both came out with some marketing strength and high hopes, albeit none had Jobs sticking his turtleneck out for.  In fact one can almost say they are truly cleverphones.  Nexus One sold directly by Google lasted a few months but managed to sell more through the carriers than direct.  Kin, on the other hand, didn’t even last enough to hear comments about it.  Microsoft has decided to protect their channel by pulling it out of the market and allowing HTC, Dell, Samsung, and LG who will release Windows 7 Phone Series (gotta love Microsoft’s marketing) devices this year for the “holidays”.

What I think is really happening is that even strong players like these tend to underestimate the power of the wireless carriers.  They own the customer since people buy phones in order to get a service, not the other way around.  Smartphone OEMs have learned the game and have succumbed to the carriers’ will, quite successfully I might add.  The market has turned into a selection of services where you pick a desirable phone for.  In other words, I know I want AT&T, Verizon, Telus, Vodafone, etc.  for whatever reason and then I select my phone.  Nexus One tried to separate it out unsuccessfully, even given the fact that Google didn’t need to make money on the phone!  People still bought the subsidized phone through the carrier in spite of a long term commitment.

Microsoft on the other hand didn’t try to sell direct, but attempted to bypass OEMs, where carriers buy more devices from.  So it is easier for them to add a Windows 7 Phone from HTC to the portfolio they already buy from them.  Besides, Kin was a succession of project “Pink” in which Microsoft had an agreement with Verizon to supply a device.  This contractual agreement forced Microsoft to release Kin with an OS that was not quite Windows 7 Phone.  In addition to that Verizon changed data plans and made the Kin less than attractive cost wise.  Again, a wireless carrier took control of the market.

One can also blame Palm’s near demise (and HP’s gain) on carriers’ acceptance or choice.

Whatever the reasons are, wireless carriers will continue to dominate and control the market.  Granted, both Google and Microsoft have a potentially great future with their mobile OS without their own branded phones as long as they follow the desire of the carriers they sell through.

The only exception so far is Apple.   AT&T has gained millions upon millions of customers that wanted one and were willing to compromise their carrier selection for the privilege of carrying an iPhone.  When Apple opens up to Verizon we’ll most likely see them run back and abandon AT&T.  Apple will churn the base, Verizon will add users, and AT&T will lose them.  Very few new iPhone users, but Apple will continue to sell them new ones.  Will Jobs be open to have an unsubsidized dual system (AT&T and Verizon) iPhone to sell direct so users can declare him his loyalty?  I can see it if AT&T and Verizon decide to create cheaper iPhone plans since they will not subsidize the phone anymore and create a price war.  We’ll see.

But for the time being iPhone remains the only device requested by name and the carriers maintain control over everything else.  For how long?

Enjoy.

AT&T has close to 6 million non-phone devices on the network.  Now why is that even relevant, my fellow reader (singular)?  Simply because there are a lot more non-phone devices and a lot more things out there that need to be connected than there are phones or people.  Yes, they may not be sexy, play music, browse the web, or even wash your car, but they essentially do everything else.  Beyond the obvious (Kindles, iPads, etc.) these things are everywhere and in desperate need to be connected.

Take your car, for example.  If you have Onstar it’s already connected (not with AT&T) so you know some possible apps.  But imagine a world in which you go to Google Maps, plan a route and squirt it into your car’s GPS!  Or simply download the movie you want your kids to watch from your home DVR.  Your electric meter one day will be connected to so you can monitor your consumption real time (Ok, Ok, i don’t know why would I want to do that either, but you can).  Every thing out there can be connected and can benefit from the internet.  But where things really start changing is with Enterprise Applications.

Next time you receive a FedEx or UPS package go to the web  immediately after you sign for it and voila it says received, in real time because the device where you signed is connected.  The copier service personnel can consult schematics and order parts in real time when his/her machines are connected. Or the copier can ping someone when it’s running out of toner; the end of the  empty copiers or useless service visits.  Making every device a smart device has endless  applications that are starting to look affordable.  Ma Bell’s humble cellular non-phone numbers are starting to show growth.  The ubiquitously  connected world is getting started.  Make sure you are ready for it.

Enjoy.

Granted, their products are good, WebOS is a neat idea, but they have lost the clout they once had.  It is sad to see a Palm, in a way the inventor of the category suffer this fate.  But hey, in this industry you have to listen to Bob Dylan: “You’d better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, ’cause the times they are a-changing.”

So what happened to Palm?  Execution and focus, lack of them, that is.  Back in the late 90′s with an explosive IPO after a spin-off of US Robotics everything looked rosy.  But they got greedy instead of focused.  But as Michael Douglas said in Wall Street: “Greed is good”.  No question but greed has to have a source.  And my fellow reader (singular) that has to be your products, not Wall Street itself!  It is my theory that Palm, as many other great corporations get too caught up in Wall Street’s metrics, quarters, and their leaders making money off of money alone, that they loose focus on the main thing:  Their products.  Countless corporations (Google, Apple, Toyota, Ford, etc.) are the opposite: they have focused on creating the best products or services, and Wall Street follows.

Greed is indeed good, but with a focused source.

Enjoy.

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.

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.

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.

For those of you who didn’t get the traditional Google “invite” for Google Voice or never heard of its acquisition of Grand Central a couple years back, it may sound weird that a voice app will be so game changing. But Gran Central started with a simple concept: You sign up and then you can manage all your numbers every way you want by writing rules to deal with your all calls. Your boss calls any of your numbers and you decide where and when it rings. Let’s say you want it to your cell only during work hours (you don’t have to tell him/her it is 11 -3). An 800 number calls and you can send a “number canceled” tone so they take you off their list. Your spouse calls? All you numbers ring. Anything else goes to voice mail. And – this is the feature that makes me drool – it is a single voice mail for all your numbers. And, are you ready for this? you get an email with a visual version of your voice mail. Sort it, read it, delete it, whatever you want! No more fiddling around with “6-6-6-4-7″ or whatever weird combination of digits you always forget to look for the one important message you know you missed!
Cool, so far, isn’t it? How much will you pay for the convenience of your true Personal Digital Assistant? $20, $50 / month? How about nothing? Sounds like a deal doesn’t it? Not too fast. Being now owned by Google you will expect them to make money. And yes, you guessed it, through advertisement. They recently were awarded a patent in which they claim all sorts of advertisement opportunities: ring-tones, busy signals, call waiting, while you wait for the call to be connected, etc, etc, etc. Although some may be annoying to users, I’m sure Google will not abuse it so you want to turn it off. And that model is where Apple and Google do not see eye to eye.
Apple has made boatloads of money by keeping control over every element of the value chain of their solution. The little (not really little) exception on the iPhone is the cellular carrier. But you’ll have to forgive them (for now) since building worldwide cell networks requires amounts of cash that even Apple cannot pony up. But it is controlled through a tight partnership with, for example in the US AT&T. Apple sells iPhones only to them (again for now) and in exchange the vow not to allow applications that will cause damage to AT&T’s cash cow. As you can imagine, Google Voice is one of those. So Apple pulls it off the App store.
On the other hand, Google is a friend of the open source initiative. They claim (and quite successfully) that openness is the way to go. Allow the best software engineers to produce the best product and improve on it around the world. We will all benefit. Android (Google’s mobile OS) is an example of that. We will soon see lots of new phones using this OS and they will all be slightly different but will share the core (Linux kernel with a Webkit browser) defined by Google but handed over to the industry, source code and all. Chrome OS (which isn’t really an OS either) will follow suit. Google’s model is based on making money by all the information that passes through their cloud (or humongous array of computers).
The core is Google’s mantra and let the best software win. Whereas Apple is end-to-end control since I am really the best. One can draw parallels to the political ideologies of the world and reach unsubstantiated conclusions on what may happen some years after this “wall” has been built. I won’t, just to avoid hurting cult fans in either side of the battle, since I am not sure, my faithful reader (yes singular), which camp are you on.

Enjoy.

Research in Motion, responsible for those of us “thumb-typing” all day long and undoubtedly king of the smart phone market announced quarterly results today. Impressive!! They beat analyst estimates again. Yet, the stock traded at some point after hours almost 10% below yesterday’s close (it has then recovered all but the last 2% or so). Is the Blackberry is running out of juice (I hate puns!) at last?

People buy things because of the things these things do (whaaat?). Applications are what sell devices, not the devices themselves. Sure a sexier iPhone will sell better than an ugly one but first and foremost you have to want to do what the iPhone does before you consider it.

Blackberries mobilized email. An applications that had been relegated to a computer and involved carving out time of your day to actually do it. RIM leveraged their know-how in two-way paging technologies to create email “push” technology that allowed devices on a cellular network to receive email in real time. They had perfected the thumb qwerty keyboard in the RIM- 950 (leapfrog) so they had a great input UI. They added a screen and a great scrolling interface. Lastly (and the most important component) they created the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) that made email “push” technology seamlessly integrate to Microsoft’s Outlook and voila, by April 2000, mobile email was born. In other words, they created the perfect combination of device, infrastructure, and services for the application at hand. Over the past 9 years they’ve managed to dominate the smart phone market by essentially bringing mobile email to more and more people from the corner office to around the corner soccer moms and hockey dads. Sure, you see some people running SAP interfaces, Syclo apps, Salesforce.com, and a bunch of other business apps on them, but they are really, really very good for email only and most importantly email is what lures people into buying them. Are there more people that need to mobilize email? Not really and they now have too many options to chose from. That may be the reason why Wall Street did not get excited about another blowout quarter by RIMM. They have to clearly prove a new application base in order to grow significantly.

Similarly Apple had found an amazing way to sell and distribute digital music that made everybody win: consumers, record labels, and mostly, well, Apple. When they introduced the iPhone they leveraged that, added telephony (which was no big deal anymore) and found a great way to mobilize the internet. A real browser with an awesome user interface made it really useful on the go. But forgive my heretic comment, but iPhone, 3G, and 3GS are reminiscent of the PC speeds of the 90′s and the RAZR, KRZR, ROKR sequence: essentially the same thing with an minimal evolutionary advance.

Palm is now trying to combine both email and browsing but, like I pointed out in a prior post, it is just dividing the pie further (if they are lucky) not really growing the pie or creating new pies.

In other words we need a new mobile application that will create new categories of devices and grow the market. Think about it, we started with simple telephony, we added PIM (Personal Information Managers), text messaging, media, pictures, videos, games, email, location (gps), internet browsing, books and magazines, and there may be a couple more. But the list really stops there. It is all about things that are tethered today and need to be mobilized so we can do them any time and anywhere without having to dedicate special time to them. Or things that we keep in one place and we want to take with us everywhere we go.

The app store phenomena with various degrees of success is, in my opinion an attempt to find other things to do with your device as a secondary functions. Good idea, don’t get me wrong, but if wireless carriers, device manufacturers, OS suppliers, etc. all have an app store, few are making money, and more importantly few app developers are making money too it is hardly what you would consider a market changing catalyst the way the Palm Pilot, StarTack (now I’m aging myself here), BlackBerry, or iPhone have been.

There are several possibilities here: Either someone finds something else to mobilize which I find difficult to believe at least on a massive scale (the PC industry has not found a lot of new things to automate on a fixed basis that will later need to be mobilized) or we approach this in a totally different way. The fact of the matter is that your Blackberry, iPhone, MotoSurf, Palm-pre, pro, pra, or pri are a commodity.

The point is that although there may be some innovation coming up to a device near you it is only evolutionary. It may be in the form of a sexier phone with more features. But to really be a catalyst for change the networks need to build out bandwidth and capacity. Network addressable storage has to come to a consumer simplicity, and innovation has to come in the form of services and data delivery. Why? well …. that’s a topic for another discussion.

By the way, make sure you start digitizing your entire life in preparation for it. Remember whatever you own that displaces water it is not portable. If it is stored in binary format it is.

Enjoy.

The industry seems desperate to find an alternative to the iPhone so far with no success. Palm (the inventor of the category in a way) launched last week the “pre” a successor to the “pro” (pretty creative naming) that is supposed to be what we’re all been waiting for. Based on what Palm calls WebOS (do not try to pronounce it in Spanish) which is really a WebKit browser on top of a Linux kernel. It is to me just another “clever phone”, pretty well designed, but just a follow up.

The phone looks promising with a full touch screen, a sliding qwerty keyboard, a well thought out user interface and a great webkit browser. It is really an adequate challenger to the iPhone’s kingdom. The problem is the partner carrier. Sprint has been losing customers since the Nextel acquisition (at the tune of 300K/month at some point!) that did not go well at all. It has the worst coverage in the US and the least amount of international carrier partnerships. It has put all its eggs in the 4G JV with Clearwire and has not invested enough in the mundane 3 or 3.5G. If it wasn’t enough, the Pre is built on the CDMA technology, which is great, but very few carriers in the world support it. One will hope they thought about it and they are cranking an HSPA version as we speak for AT&T and most of the world. Better yet, a dual mode (like the Blackberry Storm) that supports both technologies in the same device. But for the Pre to stand a chance, it needs to find other carriers pronto.

The battle for the smart phone kingdom currently dominated by Research in Motion (aka RIM) the creator of the Blackberry with the most successful lineup in the industry that seems to yet unchallenged (yeah even by the iPhone). The interesting thing is that Windows Mobile (WM), the first mobile OS with (sort of) a real mobile browser after WEP is falling behind, way, way behind. LG, Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and others serve up WM phone of varying success but no where near what RIM has been able to accomplish. When in 2006 there were twice as many WM phones shipped than any other smart phone.

Now, there is still the battle of the App Stores where Apple has an apparently unbeatable lead. Palm has not announced its store yet (as RIM has) but the Pre is iTunes compatible…weird thing. Is it a play for the true alternative to the iPhone or is it something else like someone getting ready to buy Palm? Who knows. But in any case, Nokia failed miserably with its store, RIM’s success is yet to be seen, and Windows’ App store, well …, will be Windows: late and not so impressive.

This battle brings memories of the glorious days of the RAZR, where everybody had one but Moto still sold 100M phones until it fell off a cliff with no true follow up. Will the iPhone follow the same fate? and the Pre, HTC-magic, G2, Moto-Q, STORM, Dare, and all sorts of weird unimaginative names – all probably registered trademarks – being the “me too’s” will also fall into oblivion soon? Check out a great comparison here.

A real mobile internet is what is needed. Check my other post What’s next after the iPhone and tell me what you think.

Enjoy.

Image rights belong to the Science Museum Library, UK

We may feel nostalgia for out traditional telephone lines or what the industry calls POTS (Plain old telephone system) but is the world still in need for something so 20th century? Every year millions of landlines are being canceled in the US and Western Europe and in some places in the developing world they were never even installed.  It seems that the world is doing away with wires in lieu of wireless or cellular telephony.  Vonage and other VoIP (Voice over internet protocol) providers have  given a bit more life to the traditional telephone but in some places cellular is the only phone.  Why hasn’t it totally moved over? For a home installation the phone is supposed to ring throughout the house so you can pick it up wherever you are.  The traditional telephone industry came up with cordless to cut the wire, but it still rings in multiple places.  The VoIP providers created the little boxes that you plug into you wall phone jack to “transform” your phone wires into VoIP phone wires.  This way all your phones ring with a single number and you can still hook up things like your alarm, answering machine (not sure why you still want that), a fax machine (ditto), modem (seriously?), etc.  But the cellular providers have not done the same.  Think about it.  For example in the US if you have AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint and you are on a family plan, you can add a line for $10 / month and all your calls within all numbers in the plan will be free (well, actually included) plus every call you make to at least 40 million people (within the network) or 70 million + 10 chosen are also included.    So why nobody has come up with a little cellular box that you plug into your home phone wiring to make your home number another number of your family plan?  If you can get a free phone from any of these providers you have to imagine that someone can build this little box.  This “box” will make your home phone work like you’re used to.  Why haven’t they done it is a mystery.

Verizon has been advertising The Hub.  Essentially a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone not too different from your Vonage box with an attached cordless handset.  It has the additional advantage of making it part of your Verizon family plan for “only” $35/ month plus a $200 entry fee.  Sure it does things like the Chaperon feature that allows you to monitor where your kids are, it has a message center, picture sharing, etc.  But when you can get the phone service for only $10 / month you’ll have to question yourself.  Furthermore, you could use your internet service to duplicate the hub’s features if your provider gave you the app.  It hardly looks like a useful device.

So AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, or any other provider ask one of your suppliers to do “the box” so I can do away with my home phone. Give it to me for free, create an app over the internet that I can use to send messages and manage my accounts and you will make it a lot more difficult for me to move to a different network.  Well, at least until they offer me the “box” and a free year of DirecTV.

For enterprises, though it is even more puzzling.  Why do PBXs still exist?  We all carry cellphones, don’t we?  Can enterprises outsource their telephony services to a cellular provider the same way they outsourced their shipping needs to UPS, FedEx or DHL?  But this is a topic for a future post. Enjoy.