Category: Apple

Harnessing the Power of the Web

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It was often said at Microsoft and highlighted in the industry trade rags that one of the great strengths Microsoft had been its legion of developers. To be successful in technology it has always been paramount to court the developers, help developers make money and continue to innovate so they stay loyal to you.   To be stagnant is to die.  I was thinking about this as I read about Google’s new technology SPDY (pronounced speedy).  It is a technology designed to help load web pages faster, thus improving web site performance.  If web site performance is better customers, users etc..are likely to stay on the page longer.  It is a win-win for everyone involved.  What I found most interesting is that once it has matured enough Google plans to give it to the open-source community.  It is a strategy that has worked before for Google so I see the appeal. Where is the largest community of developers on the planet?  They are on the web.  So what does the future hold for the developer and how technology goes from inception to reality?

As I have written before the Open Source developer community at its core is that heavenly place on virtual earth that they can come closest to their god…one’s and zero’s ( for assembly developers that one is for you..for the rest just read on).  It is the wild west where everything is available for free, so they can download and get to the actual code of whatever they are working on.  Could be writing and compiling code.  Getting access to the kernel code of the latest Linux OS.  Asking questions to the community about scripting tools like Ruby or Java Script.  Developers love a challenge and the open source community is great for asking questions, getting answers and learning about the next great challenge.  I equate Open Source with “the Borg” from Star Trek – The Next Generation (ok I have crossed over into “über” geekdom, but it was the best analogy I could think of – next blog: “The life of Giorgio Armani”, how’s that for recovery?).  But open source does provide for a network of a broad and collective minds and tapping into those minds and getting them excited is a way to tap into a huge potential financial windfall.  The support of the developer community is the quickest way to start generating “buzz” and once that starts others quickly come on board to try to get on the wave early before it crests,

Sales and Marketing is one of those things the open source community equated with the ills of a capitalist society and was and sometimes still is frowned upon.  I can see the appeal of the net to bypass this need for sales and marketing but even the internet has evolved.  Despite the appeals by some to minimize this skill set it will always be necessary to some degree as they are the ones that develop and deliver the message you are trying to convey.  Open source started as a grass-roots movement but as it has matured corporations have started to be more willing to embrace.  There a multitude of services behind it, could be ad driven models or service driven all requiring the S&M (oddly appropriate) folks to get involved.  In terms of generating “buzz” they were core in getting Google’s Android off of the ground and into the minds of developers.

Moving forward it is  also important to developers that whatever platform they are writing software for, that the company they stand behind is perceived as a leader towards the future.  Developers have responsibilities to and want to make sure they see bright employment horizons beyond the current year.  Apple, which is anything but open source has been able to get developers revved up for its platform by being perceived as a market leader and innovator with a strong grasp of what the future will hold in terms of opportunity. They also do a great job of sales and marketing with the Apple logo and tens of thousands of websites, TV personalities saying ” go to www… and download your iPad app”, not to mention the many websites I visit with the download your Apple app, “click here”.  The flip side is Google’s Android, which shows the velocity one can generate through the web.  Apple had jumped out to a considerable lead.  Had Google opted for a apple’s to Apple’s approach, I don’t think they ever would have caught Apple.  It is already projected that Google will catch Apple and exceed Apple in market share and applications.  By engaging and embracing the open source community, Google was very quickly able to generate excitement and mass in its platform.  It engaged the open source community and the “buzz” generated spread like wild-fire.  If they had tried to build their own more closed community it would have taken years to be successful.

It has  become apparent that to generate mass quickly that you have to consider trying to harness the power of the web communities to gain access to your ultimate customer – the consumers who use the web.  In an ever increasing competitive environment to reach existing and new audiences the internet is the fastest way to success.  That of course does not just mean put it in the web and you will be successful.  It does take some skill and experience.  However if you can excite the army it is a very large army you will have at your disposal.  Everyone wants an army of support.  It’s in intimidating and historically successful and right now, and for the foreseeable future, the largest army is on the web.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann June 29th, 2011

Mango

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I was watching the other morning the announcement by Microsoft of its new update to Windows Phone 7 called , “Mango”. On air was Windows Phone Czar, Andy Lee’s. As I listened to him fumble through a series of questions about what makes “Mango” so cool it took me back to my early years in the industry. I was listening to a program manager talk about the exciting new release of C/C++ 7.0 (put your pants back on I can tell you are getting excited already). He equated a C/C++ presentation to “watching paint dry”. I think I have made my point regarding Andy’s oratory skills.  Phone’s are a sexy device so if you are going to talk about a new phone update with over 500 new features it had better have some sizzle. Why not have some dancers?  Give the public some entertainment value.  Make them think they are having fun!  With my pontificating coming to a close, there were good things that came from this weeks announcement and a lot of things that made me worried for the future.

If you are going to pre-announce a new phone that will not be available for 6 months it had best generate some excitement, because what you are trying to do is tell the market place is, “hey wait…be patient because in 6 months we are going to have something for you that is really cool”.    I don’t think that was accomplished.  For starters this announcement did not have much of a whisper campaign leading up to it.  I first started hearing rumblings about a week ago.  In Microsoft’s defense it’s different when they leak to the press and Apple leaks to the press about a new iPhone, the market dictates and right now in terms of market share Apple is grossly superior.  There was a time in Windows 95 days that Microsoft was the king of the whisper campaign.  But to generate such a campaign there needs to be something in the new product to get people excited.  I heard a lot of feature discussions but nothing I would deem break through. Maybe it’s just me but I do like the name”Mango”.

Second competing on features is a zero sum game.  There are so many mobile apps available in the market place today and your phone form factors are pretty  well-defined, that there is not a lot of wiggle room to create the game changing feature that will change how people use their mobile phones.  The real game changer these days is to change the user experience, which Mango sounds like it is trying to do (or at least market), but it will not happen until the release in fall, just in time for the holidays.  The end users will decide.  However between now and then a whole host of new features will be provided across multiple devices.  Thus cluttering the market place even more.

Partnerships can be a blessing and a burden. The partnership with Nokia has a lot of great potential.  Nokia has invested heavily in emerging markets such as China and India.  Two countries with huge upside.  The downside is the company recently received an internal memo from CEO Stephen Elop that Nokia is a “burning platform”.  Not the kind of motivational speech I am sure Nokia employees were hoping for. A huge part of Mango’s success or failure will hinge on Nokia.  A company that is desperate and making its last stand.  That is not the ideal place to be if you are trying to recapture past glory, but due to a series of missteps Nokia and Microsoft find themselves on the same boat trying to plug the same hole before the ship slips below the surface seeking the depths of the abyss.

Microsoft, despite all the brain drain that has occurred, still have a lot of people who care deeply about the ability of the Windows Phone business to succeed.  Despite Andy Lee’s monotone delivery style he has a brilliant and successful track record at Microsoft, he is not a dumb guy by any stretch of the imagination. Sometimes a legacy of success can lead you down a road of false belief.  The Microsoft mobile group was on a path to success and just got side swiped by Apple, who had a grander vision for mobility.  But maybe that’s the point..it’s about mobility and not the phone.  As long as the game is about developing the next great phone, than an opportunity is lost as easily as it is gained.

Now it’s about sustainment for the next 6 months as Microsoft will need to keep the name “Mango” on people’s lips.  There will be significant hurdles as between now and then there will be updates from Android, called “Honeycomb” and the release of the iPbone 5.  It will be imperative to continue to re-iterate the new features coming in “Mango” and get people to wait.  But Microsoft is a big company with a lot of different big initiatives and what is hot one day and considered a company directive is gone the next as XBOX, Bing, Office, Windows all vie for the publics attention and affection.  That to me is the big question over the coming months leading up the official launch.  Can Microsoft maintain the initial momentum garnered from this weeks big press release in New York, can a whisper campaign be sustained end elevated. Whispers can grow to a Lions roar, causing excitement, angst, a multitude of emotions or they can just blow away silently with the wind, all but forgotten.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann May 26, 2011

You need to be Cool to be Tech

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Kevin Turner, Microsoft COO, would often get asked by internal employees, “Why can’t Microsoft be cool like Apple?”.  He would always reply, “I would rather have 90% market share than be cool”.  I think the question actually made him upset. I found his dismissive attitude towards Apple rather naive and offensive.  All I can say is its dangerous to use the past to justify the future.  It has been a interesting twist of events to get to this point and by all accounts great product execution by the people at Apple.  With the latest earning release, Apple continues to be operating on all cylinders, forging ahead full throttle.  Their Apple iPhone now has 5% global market share, an increase over last quarter of 115%.  It is now more profitable than Microsoft.  No small feet given they make hardware, which naturally has higher COGS.  How does something like this happen?  It’s an interesting journey.

I think you have to take a step back before you move forward.  When technology  was first thrust upon us in the late eighties/early nineties it was new and foreign.  You needed a grease monkey to help with running it.  Grease monkey being men who had not showered in a week and slept under their desk.  Not a pretty site.  Speaking of pretty sites the technology we were given was not pretty either.  It was big, clunky and beige.  You needed to hide it in a home office as it did not make for pretty home decor.  But the people behind these new innovations were proud of what they had created, like they had unlocked the mysteries of the universe.  The early phase of technology was exciting but very intimidating, as many of the people who were the first to use at home and at work started their word processing experience on a typewriter.  If you made a mistake you used something called white-out.  Some of my readers of middle age will be laughing now, while my younger audience is clueless as to what I am writing about.  This new computer based word processing was intimidating and frustrating.  Auto-save did not always exist.  If your computer crashed after working two hours on a midterm, late at night, you lost everything.  No joke, I know from experience.

Along the way though something else was happening.  A generation if kids were growing up with this technology.  They were used to interacting with technology.  They had higher standards.  They had lives.  Kids today have no fear of technology.  Give them a device and they naturally start poking around trying to figure out what cool things it can do.  There is no intimidation about technology.  It is just something they are accustomed to.  Their natural curiosity just takes over and takes them away.  You see it in school with 2nd and 3rd graders walking around with a iTouch.  The presentations they do on the Mac at school is better than most presentations I give at work (supposedly I am a pro) – they are more lively and more colorful.  It is most amazing how seamless the whole experience seems to the younger generation.  They are not intimidated, they do not need to learn, they just know.

Thirdly there is digital convergence.  The lines between PC’s, Television, phones, music, etc..were all being blurred as everything is going digital.   The debate today of is a Tablet a PC or not highlights this for me.  Who cares except for a bunch of marketing and industry analyst folks.  At the end of the day consumers are buying what they desire and if a Tablet can perform all the tasks they need, great.  They will forgo the purchase of a Netbook or Laptop, but they are still interacting with a whole host of offerings that they used to do on a laptop (or not).  It could be streaming Netflix.  Browsing the web for a great deal on sports attire.  Listening to  music.  With everything going digital how we view and interact with technology is about to explode well beyond where we are today.  Flat screens will be on and in everything we buy or utilize.  Our home appliances,, our transportation (private or public).  All the lines are becoming blurred and in doing so things are becoming much more interesting as a wave of new devices become available and better yet they are all mobile,  They are thin, sleek and in color.

For technology companies to be successful, in particular in the consumer space, they must pay heed to this fact.  If they want to be successful if they want to take market share, they have to get the “cool” factor going.  They need to pay attention to design.  Those consumer behavior studies that discuss things like emotional response are relevant.  They should be scrutinized and thoroughly studied, not in a effort to disprove them but to learn from them in intricate detail.  Most people in the world are not engineers or software designers.  It’s Bobby Joe who is a mechanic. Terri who is a nurse.  Jack the insurance salesman.  They may seem drab to some but they are a large part of the economy and they want and use technology, is it wrong for them to want a sleek silver mobile device with cool apps?  Do not dismiss their opions as irrelevant. Respect them or lose them.  And if you lose them watch all you have worked for wash away with the tide.

We are numb to technology.  It has become pervasive and we are seldom wowed by what we see or experience. What will catch our eye is how it makes us feel. How it makes us look.  It is all in our basic human emotion.  So deep yet so shallow.  When I see the latest iPad are people wowed by the operating system?  I honestly doubt anyone really thinks about that.  The fact is technology is becoming more and more an extension of the human experience, it is becoming an ingrained part of that experience.  In some instance blurring the lines of fiction and reality.  Those lines will only become more blurred moving forward as technology accelerates, we accelerate.  But one thing is for certain we want to feel good about where technology takes us and we want to look good doing it.  We want to be cool.  It may be shallow but it’s who we are.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann May 2, 2011

Proprietary vs Open Source – who cares? Consumers don’t.

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In technical circles we love to have these propeller head debates.  Should code be shared?  What about the right to make a fortune off of ones intellectual property? Then there are patents to be protected.  How do I license my open source code?  How should I license my code?  Which governing technical bodies should I listen to?  It is like a love fest for lawyers  I will try and break this down into layman’s terms and then explain to everyone why you should not care.  As consumers do not treat technical folks like a deity.

Proprietary:  This is where the company owns everything soup to nuts and has control on what developers, engineers can access in terms of source code.  The most proprietary is Apple as they literally own everything from hardware design to the software.  Microsoft often is called closed but one of the reasons for it’s success in the early days of the PC industry was licensing it’s operating system to every hardware maker who was building a personal computer. Developers got access to part’s of Windows not the whole thing.  This is what made Open Source advocates so hateful towards Microsft as they want access to all the source code.  The advantage of these proprietary models is if you look at the balance sheets of these two companies today financial clout is not an issue.  These companies will be around for along time to provide high levels of supports to their respective communities.  Despite calls by some to make their trades secrets free to everyone cash is king.

Open Source:  Really the brain child of a Finnish engineer named Linus Torvald’s and his Linux operating system.  There are others but for now we will focus on Mr Torvalds’s community model.The code is posted on the internet and anyway can make additions or changes to the underlying source code.  Provided Linus approves it.  I find it ironic that this so called democracy is run like a dictatorship.  The advantage of Open Source in is you can tap into the talents of thousands of software engineers.  It creates an abundance of innovation and their is nothing better to get a software developer motivated then a technical challenge, which there is an abundance of in open source forums.  It’s free and easy to get access to what you need, which to me is why open source has really appealed to the aspiring developers on the planet.

Now that we have that brief explanation behind us, should you Mr or Mrs consumer care?  Absolutely not.  Let those techno losers go have their fun in tweetle dee and tweetle dumb land.  All you want is technology that works for you.  If Product A (let’s say a iPhone) is better than Product B (A Windows Mobile 6.5 Phone) or Product C (one of those Motorola Linux Phones) you will gladly pay more for Product A.  Why not?  It’s your choice.  I really highly doubt the source code model factored into the purchase.  To those who say sales and marketing do not matter I think they are misguided individuals.  Great Technology and great Sales and Marketing go hand in hand.  Apple in my opinion has done a great job in creating very accessible technology while conveying the message that the technology is colorful and fun and a part of an individuals lifestyle.  The Android folks have gone a bit more technical in their approach but still have been able to partner with companies to make cool consumer devices while providing a  dynamic ecosystem.

Throughout my career I have seen and listened to numerous propeller heads go through their wiz bang demos. Everyone seemed to have a higher purpose.  Sometimes I would look on in amazement as some technical wizard would show me a mobile demo (pre iPhone) and say how cool it is they could look up and find a cool bar on their phone while on the golf course.  It sure was cool to watch that person click ten times and after each click wait 30-45 seconds for the page to load.  In the end the demo took 5-6 minutes.  Time in my life that I will never get back but the memory of the useless mobile app lingers.  We tend to use the term “main street” America too much and too loosely these days.  But I think if we were to start trying to create a definition we could probably agree that the person that represents main street America is not a technologist.

At the end of the day people want items that add value to their lives.  Sometimes that value can be concrete like a automotive vehicle.  It gets me from point A to B in a manor that is useful to me.  That same item though can be purchased on emotional appeal.  I want the Ferrari for what it says about my importance in society.  The latter is hard to quantify and even harder to program for.  But one thing is clear in either scenario no one cares how it is made, it just needs to work.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann April 25, 2011

The Death of the Operating System Revisited

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Part of the joy of writing a technology focused blog is seeing where you are and are your predictions on the path to reality, or at least bits and pieces.  Which brings me to a piece I wrote  9 months ago titled “Death of the Operating System“. We could probably tie this also to my last post on the Tablet as they seem mutually inter-twined.  It is amazing what has happened in that short amount of time, but I see no reason to alter my previous projection, which is the desktop OS as we know it will is slowly dying unless the folks in Redmond make some radical change in direction.  Three things in my view continue to drive this monumental change: The Cloud (web), mobility and interactivity.

Not a day goes by where we do not hear something about thee cloud.  Either directly or indirectly.  Some services are designed for the cloud and though the desktop is still useful the cloud is where all the action is.  There are enterprise apps where you have a browser interface and access content stored,  only god knows where on the planet.   An example would be SalesForce.Com which is fast becoming the premier Customer Relationship management system (CRM).  All data resides in the cloud, nothing is loaded on your desktop.   There are also plenty of consumer based applications, some you might say “I did not know that was a cloud application”, but Facebook and Twitter certainly fall in that category.  Try finding your friends profile on your desktop…not there.  it is somewhere on the planet just not in your house or office.

Then there is mobility.  We all want to be free to be productive where we want and when we want,  We do not want to lug a heavy laptop around that we need to sit down, flip open the monitor, press a bunch of keys and that is just to boot up (wait 3 minutes).  We want the device to be in in an instant so we can start doing whatever it is we need to do.  We want longer battery life as we may not be near a power outlet for sometime.  We may want to pass around our device and have it be user friendly for our friends.  We want to be connected, just not by a cord.  We are a society on the go, moving at an ever increasing pace.  The beauty of mobility is it allows us to live.

Finally there is interacting with our devices.  The idea of sitting down at a desk and using a mouse is just not that attractive anymore.  The tablets we have today in the market are all touch screen driven.  Most phones today are touch screen (thank you…Apple).  People are flicking their fingers as fast as they can rather than struggling to find where their mouse pointer is on the screen.Next up I can foresee better voice interaction with our devices. It has been around for a while, it just has not been very good.  How we interact seems to be more and more an extension of our physical presence.

In the end it is not so much about what is the “best” OS, but what enables life’s experience.  It’s not that the operating system is dead, but we need to think of it differently.  There will be no “Windows 95” moment.  That is dated and will not happen again.  There are some who keep waiting for it, but they will be left shuddering in the cold rain, what hey wait for is something called nostalgia  There are going to be lots of breakthroughs in technology in the near future, but as I highlighted they will be in the cloud, in mobility and in the end user’s satisfactory experience, they will enable freedom and they will be fun!!

In titling this “The Death of the Operating Systems” I may be misleading the reader a bit.  I am not saying that you will no longer need an operating systems, but maybe more accurately you don’t care about the operating system.  Though an integral part of enabling the experience no one spends time in their “operating system”.  People spend time on Facebook or writing lengthy blogs that millions of people read (or maybe 10 people read).  Technology has become a great form of self expression.  What the desktop provides is a window to the web or the network (remember the network is the computer?).  To the Facebook, Twitter or whatever experience you want.  The desktop enables these end user experiences but in the end it is not the final result.  There would be those that it would be wise to understand this current phenom or perish in its every increasing velocity.

Good Night and Good Luck

Hans Henrik Hoffmann April 11, 2011