My good friend, fellow MIT alumnus and intellectual property attorney extraordinaire, Tony Sebro, summed up his experience with his Blackberry. The picture ain’t pretty and it is emblematic of the problems facing RIM.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
How Much Is Your Brand Loved (Or Hated)? – The BrainYard – InformationWeek:
Passion makes a difference, in social media analytics as in life in general.
Measuring the intensity of emotion is one way NetBase distinguishes itself in the crowded field of social media analytics. Or, as Chief Marketing Officer Lisa Joy Rosner puts it, “I’m quite passionate about how we measure passion.
The point is to distinguish between liking and loving, mildly disliking and intensely loathing, while also trying to dodge linguistic pitfalls like satire that can confuse a computer program. NetBase does a good enough job of it that it has been able to win the business of major consumer products companies like Coca Cola and Kraft.
(Via Information Week – Business Intelligence.)
I’m not sure about this. A mentor of mine found in his research that passion drives comments. The more you care the more you tend to comment. So, how do you account for people dissatisfied or satisfied with your product but don’t care enough to comment? How does that change the reading on the love-o-meter?
RIM, You’re Done Here
RIM’s legacy is writ large on the world around us. Almost every major enterprise mobile system is patterned on their excellent email and PIM solution. But they are now slaves to their own success. They can’t sell anything other than a keyboard-candybar phone in an era where the keyboard is increasingly irrelevant or hidden away until needed. This failure of imagination in both consumer and manufacturer is their curse. In a world where every phone is smart and every phone does email, there is little to recommend any RIM phone over any other. It’s over and now we’re just waiting for the buy-out and inevitable disappearance of one of the greatest mobile companies in modern memory.
(Via MobileCrunch.)
It’s so often a mistake for your current customers to determine your product roadmap. Current customers can be a fickle bunch. You need to figure out what future customers will want. I’ve often heard that the “only” reason my friends stick with their Blackberries is for BBM. When the one thing keeping your customers is a service that can be and is now replicated, you have a serious problem. You need to be different in a way that motivates your customers to pay you and not someone else.
I Like My Odds in This Argument
John Gruber has haters.
I Like My Odds in This Argument:
Yours truly, two weeks ago, arguing that Windows 8 is fundamentally flawed as a competitor to the iPad:
The iPad succeeds because it has eliminated complexity, not because it has covered up the complexity of the Mac with a touch-based “shell.”
Aaron Holesgrove, arguing that I’m wrong:
Actually, the iPad succeeds because it enables you to read websites whilst sitting on the toilet and play casual games in bed. It’s a toy. You can’t eliminate complexity when there was never any complexity in the first place – Apple went and threw a 10″ screen on the iPod Touch and iPhone and called them the iPad and iPad 3G, respectively.
(Via Daring Fireball.)
A friend said this about my complaint that Holesgrove was being immature at best.
Seriously, though, your problem isn’t unique to Apple haters or anything. You have people that can’t argue their way out of a paper bag behind all sorts of opinions. The problem is that once you back them into a corner, they start in with the strawman arguments, false dichotomies, ad hominem attacks and other nonsense.
I like Gruber’s odds myself.
Up in the iClouds
I recently was chatting over email with friend Mark Chandler over Apple’s release of iCloud and what it would mean for our personal music. I lamented how Apple’s competitors seems to be making really obvious mistakes and with Apple’s solution in view, it didn’t seem like rocket science. His response was great as always, post-worthy for sure.
Apple is a hardware company at the end of the day. They want to lock you into a model, and they have to make sure that they offer just enough to keep you hooked, but leave room for improvement in the next gadget that they want you to buy. In this case, they improved the service instead of the gadget, but the perception is that the “product” has been upgraded. User experience is also a core value at Apple. Regardless of whether or not anything they have trotted out was a success, the user experience was an integral part of the product.
The Amazon model was good enough, but they didn’t have the depth of offering. People using that service were using it to get music to put on their iPods for the most part anyway, so Apple still got a residual of sorts. M$ needs to clean out upper management (Balmer just needs to go the same way that Amelio had to go) and let some of what they have in research see the light of day. Courier was the best challenge to the iPad that never was . It had the potential to be truly disruptive since it wasn’t trying to copy the iPad, but instead bring a different paradigm to the tablet form factor. The music store model that Apple is trotting out is pretty similar to the Zune marketplace, but the device was the weak link in the Zune ecosystem. If M$ was really slick, they’d have supported other devices including the iPod with that store and laughed all the way to the bank.
Google needs to go see a shrink. They can’t figure out what they want to be right now, and with Oracle about to drag them over the coals over the JVM that’s part of Android, they are only further distracted. You’d figure with all the info that they have at their disposal they’d know exactly what people want and just deliver it. They are also suffering from what we all saw around MIT. A bunch of really intelligent people with zero street smarts that have a hard time accepting that they can and will be wrong at times. They nailed search, and expect to nail everything else with the same amount of ease. They need to hire the equivalent of an elementary school art teacher. Someone that knows when to take the construction paper away from the kid and hang it on the wall for everyone to admire, but also knows when to make the kid just start over with a new piece of paper. Google Wave is the best example of this. Unless you were an ADHD addled kid, that product was unusable. The idea behind it was sound, but the execution was lacking.
I’m not writing off any of the other players just yet, but they are going to need to come up with something that no one has seen before, or they are going to have to cater to high-end niche users.
Actually Rob, it is rocket science. One needs a bunch of smart people, a lot of money, and plenty of luck. You don’t get to the moon, much less stay in the air for any amount of time without all three.
I stand corrected.
Mark Chandler is a computer security professional, chef, and DJ. safechef@yahoo.com
Goals That Don’t Include Being a Sysadmin
My Month With the Nexus S – Release Candidate One:
“I said at the start that if the Nexus S were my first-ever smartphone I’d probably love it. But since it wasn’t my first, I come to it (and maybe more importantly to the operating system) with expectations of performance, stability, battery life, and general attention to detail that it just can’t meet. Sure, it comes with a whole host of freedoms that I can exercise, like installing a third-party keyboard component to replace the system keyboard, but I didn’t exercise those freedoms because I don’t care, I’m just not that guy. I never themed my Windows installations, never jailbroke my iPhone, never turbocharged my car. I want a phoneputer that just works and lets me pursue my own goals; goals that don’t include being a sysadmin. The Nexus S does everything one could reasonably expect of a smartphone, and it does them competently, but if you’ve experienced a smartphone that does those things exceptionally, mere competence is a big step backward.”
(Via Daring Fireball.)
Features vs. usability really is not a contest.
They Still Don’t Get It
★ Why Windows 8 Is Fundamentally Flawed as a Response to the iPad:
But I think it’s a fundamentally flawed idea for Microsoft to build their next-generation OS and interface on top of the existing Windows. The idea is that you get the new stuff right alongside Windows as we know it. Microsoft is obviously trying to learn from Apple, but they clearly don’t understand why the iPad runs iOS, and not Mac OS X…
The ability to run Mac OS X apps on the iPad, with full access to the file system, peripherals, etc., would make the iPad worse, not better. The iPad succeeds because it has eliminatedcomplexity, not because it has covered up the complexity of the Mac with a touch-based “shell”. iOS’s lack of backward compatibility with any existing software means that all apps for iOS are written specifically for iOS.
(Via Daring Fireball.)
Microsoft has not unlearned the core lessons of Windows to do What’s Next.
Zaky: Apple’s Cash to Exceed $300 Billion by 2015
Zaky: Apple’s Cash to Exceed $300 Billion by 2015:
Andy Zaky:
If it then carried that 2013 0.00% growth rate into 2014, the company would have $230 billion in cash or just about $250 in cash per share. 2015 it would have $300 billion in cash or $330 in cash per share. Again, that assumes 0.00% growth for 2013, 2014, and 2015. So if Apple grows 0.00%, then by 2015, it will have more cash per share than the stock is trading at today.
(Via Daring Fireball.)
Those numbers aren’t tricks. Apple is a beast with cash. But Zaky assumes the world in 2015 will be a later version of the world in 2011. Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007. Is 2011 just 2007 4.0?
Business Class: Freemium for News?
The idea of creating a business class for online news where is not about buying information, but buying better experience, it’s about service and customer experience. That’s right: Customer (paying), not user (free).
via Daring Fireball.
Now this is an idea that might have some traction. I would pay for online news to provide clean, efficient news delivery.
Windows Phone 7 Fails To Halt Microsoft’s Mobile Slide
Windows Phone 7 Fails To Halt Microsoft’s Mobile Slide:
Microsoft’s share of U.S. smartphone platforms slipped 1.7%, to 8%, during the three months ended Jan. 31, according to market watcher comScore. Over the same period, Google Android’s share increased 7.7%, to 31.2%, while Apple’s iPhone held steady—increasing .1% to 24.7%.
(Via InformationWeek – All Stories And Blogs.)
Ouch. No hardware carrier needs two monkeys on their back. Microsoft’s traditional model has been to charge for their OS and appropriate some value from the OEM. Google’s turns all that on its head. In fact, Google is willing to pay through revenue sharing on search. Microsoft’s rumored “billions” paid to Nokia to implement on Windows Phone is too little, too late. Microsoft can’t pay everybody to implement on their OS.