Tag Archives: technology

Reviews

Leading Digital (2014) by Westerman, Bonnet and McAfee

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I read Leading Digital with a mixed sense of anticipation and suspicion. Heightened anticipation was there for a reason: I think that it is not common to read some rigorous, organic, extended, articulated analysis focused on how traditional corporations face the changes brought about by digital technologies. That slight suspicion came instead from the frequent déjà-vu that often happens to me when I get hold on something on the subject. This is an old debate now. Two decades have gone by since the New Economy highs and lows; some of the very same questions have been raised there, and left unanswered I’m afraid. Then, a few years into the new Millenium, with the advent of Social Media and the much awaited mobile explosion, and the new wave of enthusiam and investments that ensued, we got into the same discussion once again, especially in the professional service realm (where I have been working for a long time, as an agency guy – perhaps I should specify “digital agency” – or as a freelance). Sometimes this debate has turned into a rhetoric, or worst a trade event kind of cliché; paradoxically, it is often addressed to people already convinced of the importance of the issue – very much preaching to the converted, as they say. So, beside the debate and all of the digital “evangelism” (how dated it sounds!), now I would really like to read some systematic overview, have research results, and examine well founded reasoning. This is the promise of Leading Digital, and I think that to a large extent it delivers on that promise.  The book is the outcome of a collaboration between the MIT and Capgemini. It has been written by three authours: two of them have an academic profile, George Westerman and Andrew McAfee (the latter is also co-author of The Second Machine Age, with Erik Brynjolfsson), while the third, Didier Bonnet, is one of the global leader of the French-based consultancy.

The book is based on a three-years research work, from about 2010 to 2013 I would say (it is not specified but the book has been published in 2014). First, Westerman, McAfee and Bonnet, with the help of a team, have interviewed about 150 executives and managers at 50 large corporations that don’t have technology as a core business. This is an important distinction, as it specifies the generic term of “traditional corporation” I have used above. Secondly, they have run a survey involving almost 400 large corporations in 30 countries (“large” it means with revenues in excess of 500 million dollars). The authors are very clear about their global perspective, not centred on the United States. In fact, even if most of the major technology leaders are indeed from the US, as a matter of fact a vast number of large and very large corporations are based outside of the US in Asia or in Europe (where I’m based, en passant).

The focus on “traditional corporations”, defined as the ones that don’t have technology as core business, is a cornerstone of the all work: these firms make “the 90% of the economy”, so it is of outmost importance to understand how they react to the tecnologies brought on the market by the global platform leaders or by the all range of startups  – many of them coming the Silicon Valley or the US. The strenght and momentum of this wave of digital technologies, platforms and services are such that nobody can escape it. Westerman Bonnet and McAfee have no doubts: the firms that choose not to react are going to face obsolescence and decline.  Here it comes an analogy that has been made many times in these debate: digital technologies are the Second Industrial Revolution. Nothing can resist their momentum. It’s a warning for the executives out there: we have come to a point in which it is possible to discern between the corporations that have undergo a successful transformation, taking advantage of these technologies, and those that haven’t. The analysis of these outcomes has allowed the authours to devise an approach or a transformation roadmap that others can follow too.

En passant, Leading Digital is also the book of choice to get a synthesis of the many scholarly articles and white papers coming out from the cooperation between the MIT and Capgemini on the “digital transformation” idea. The expression has been quickly adopted by the industry jargon but it could be that many are not aware of the original formulation, or, better yet, of the formulation that has got the widest adoption. A 2011 MIT and Capgemini document reported the following definition:

Digital transformation (DT) – the use of technology to radically improve performance or reach of enterprises – is becoming a hot topic for companies across the globe.

I think it’s important to start again from here – it’s not about defining something once and for all but bringing some clarity about the context in which has been shaped. The first Altimeter report on the topic (published in 2014) says that in their instance digital transformation is analysed from the customer experience lens. A second Altimeter report on the same subject credits an earlier formulation by scholars Erik Stolterman and Anna Croon Fors. For what I can read through Google Books scans, they were pretty distant from an interest in corporations performances. In that discussion, “Digital transformation” is an emergent phenomena that calls for a critical scrutiny, it is a novel focus for information technology research – they might even quoting Marcuse if I’m not wrong.

… the most crucial challenge for IS [information Systems] research today is the study of the overall effects of the ongoing digital transformation of society. The digital transformation can be understood as the changes that the digital technology causes or influences in all aspects of human life. This research challenge has to be accepted on behalf of humans, not int their role as users, customers, leaders, or any other role, but as humans having a life.

This was about 2003. Fast forward to 2014 and typing “digital transformation” in the Google bar will get you a couple of ads from big and huge consulting businesses (Accenture, to mention one), followed by a deluge of organic results. Anyhow, my point is that for all of these mentions there is little research, so it’s worthwhile to have a close look at the book from the people that triggered the most informed debate.

I think the book offers three main original results and contributions. The first is a set of models and categories that frame and define the all question; they are the tools that allow to investigate its dynamics and produce practical recommendations. The second set of results includes the case  and example reviews, the corporations that have been analyzed, with all of the excerpts from the research interviews. The third is a proper “discovery”, so to say, regarding the fact that the best corporations from the digital transformation angle show also better business results.

Let’s have a look at the first and at the second point. One key categorization or model makes a distinction between three dimensions relevant to the digital transformation concept: customer experience, operations and business models. These are different but interdependent aspects, so that changes in one would influence the others, to some degree. All of the corporations cases mentioned in the book can be mapped to these domains. So Burberry and Starbucks e.g. are explored mostly in the customer experience perspective. Very distant businesses like Asian Paints (India), Codelco (Chile, mines) or Zara are in the spotlight when it comes to the operations dimension. Hailo, Uber, Airbnb, Fujifilm, Zipcar, Car2go and many others illustrates the business model discussion. So this is about how corporations react to digital technologies in one or another of these key three dimensions, or all of them at once. Then the authors introduce also a typology based on another distinction. There are digital capabilities or competencies and leadership capabilities. Here you get a typical two axis matrix with four cases, in which the upper right quadrant is for “Digital Masters” . I think that these are the most analytical parts of the book. Combining these models with real cases offers a very rich material, interesting per se and useful as the basis to build advice for other corporations. In fact the book offers plenty of checklists, summaries and an entire final “playbook” addressed to executives that want to face the digital transformation challenge. Those are not at ease with the business book flavor might be slightly annoyed at this point, but the authours have been impeccable in pointing to the many scholarly or public sources in the endnotes (to testify again the research rigour).

By the way. The book has 9 mentions of the term “advertising” and 8 of the term “campaign” (just 7 in the proper advertising context) and just one of the expression “digital advertising”. I am aware that this is nothing scientific but this rough count made me think that the research has not been conducive to the discovery of some distinctive way of doing advertising by the digital leaders. It is as if a smart, sensible usage of digital advertising is taken for granted, just as a necessary element of a broader framework. In other words, where the digital transformation is in place digital advertising will be   a part of it, but simple budget shifts from one channel to another don’t make a big difference.

Let’s move to the third result. Here we have a very sharp and interesting conclusion, based on the research empirical work combined with the typology created by the authors. “Digital masters” make more revenues and profits than their competitors.

[…] Digital Master outperform their peers. Our work indicates that the masters are 26 percent more profitable than their average competitors. They generate 9 percent more revenue with their existing physical capacity and drive more efficiency in their existing products and processes.

Even though Westerman, Bonnet and McAfee are keen to stress that this conclusion indicates a correlation and not a causal factor, it is evident that these are big figures (think about the 10% of a 1 billion in revenues). So here the authours are really zooming in on an opportunity, a huge one. Grab it is open for everyone – every company that is willing to. There is no need to be based in Silicon Valley, no need to have hundreds of software engineers, no need to have onboard some one of a kind maverick pioneer. For sure it will be an endeavor, more or less challenging depending on the starting point, and the honesty of your initial self-assessment, but it is something attanaible by every company with adequate willingness and practical means to go forward.

Once again, it is not just about a big opportunity. Beside the call for action to grab it, there is another take running through the book. Westerman Bonnet and McAfee warn readers that they need to get moving anyhow, since the transformation has just begun, and its effects are barely starting to emerge.

We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

This is not secondary, as said above. Moreover, it highlights a sort of paradox, a relative lack of solid knowledge about the possible negative outcomes of the transformation as depicted by this research. If we accept that at this stage the impact of digital technologies and platforms is only beginning to take shape, and much stronger changes are to come, then the reason to react is not only the opportunity to have more revenues and more profits (as Digital Masters have), but first and foremost companies is about the companies survival and essential prosperity. So what are the “traditional corporations” that prove the point? Yes, the authors mention Kodak, or cabs (“Uberized” as it has been said), and then? Talking about the standard verticals, or categories that have lost their descriptive power (say “telecommunications”, “advertising” or “newspapers”) is of little help I think. Here again what is badly needed is solid research, well organized reviews, structured cases, empirical evidence and models. After so many years of debates about the effects of digital tecnologies, how one can’t see the paradox of not having a great pars destruens in the library? If you know it, please tell me where it is, and I’ll get it straight away (likely via Amazon Prime).

Apps & services, Design critique, News & miscellanous

Last stream for allothercountries.fm (including Italy)

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Likely you scrobbler or even occasional Last.fm listener have already heard the bad news: on the 15th of January 2013 Last.fm stops streaming to a large number of countries, including mine – Italy.

The announcement came to me first as an almost unnoticed clickable display on the top of the personal page (not linked here because I’ve never been there with my real name), which at some point I decided to check, with inevitable disappointment. Judging from the related thread on the Last.fm forum, this decision has upset a good number of folks in “all other countries”, i.e. all over the world except the US, the UK and Germany (where Last.fm will keep also the ad-supported free Web radio), plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Brazil (where radio has been and remains a subscription feature only, as they say). Link to the official announcement.

I won’t delve here into considerations specific to Italy (if you are from my country, I have a few lines on the other side); instead, I jotted down some general commentary. And let me copy here a pic of the pin that I got as a gift from Alberto D’Ottavi @dottavi brought back from London after his brief interview with Last.fm co-founder Martin Sticksel published in English on infoservi – (the blog has also more Last.fm and related themes coverage, in Italian). Well, that pin was something!

Last.fm pins

Others keep streaming anyway

In short, what came out for Last.fm is that licensing costs for streaming music and insufficient ad revenues are pushing them to this new restricted geography. Have a look at the Paidcontent or Techcrunch posts for more. Anyway, it’s not new to anyone that streaming music on subscription models have stll to find solid business ground. But it’s also a fact that there are a number of services pushing it — to name two European-based big players, say Spotify (from Sweden, not available all over Europe though) or Deezer (from France – I started using it right now). Then there are also a few more already well established brands and startup, all with its own history and positioning, from Pandora to Rdio, from Soundcloud to whatever you can pick. The thing is, while they are different, all of them seem to pursue an enlarging trajectory when it comes to geographies, even if at different paces.

Going down

As it can be read easily all around, I also think that Last.fm is not new to a downwarding spiral since when the founders left, sometime after the well remembered 280 millions pound acquisition from CBS, a historic name of the media business (and big in radio as well – but as people noted, no visible result in that regard yet). And by the way, the two co-founders and former leaders are now up for a new general-purpose content discovery startup called Lumi, as I just learned from another Techcruch post.

Proud subscriber

Seeing this decline unfolding over time has been quite sad for people that have been hanging around for years (2004 in my case). I’ve always been a service enthusiast, praising and recommending it to friends at all times, and paying the subscription not just for the add-ons, but also for support. Not only Last.fm has been the eponymous streaming music machine: I think that their mix of music discovery, community and recommendations has made it quite unique for years – perhaps still unique in some respects.

Best jukebox ever

By encouraging people to be creative with tags and personal stations and following in the listening steps of others, be they “neighbours” or “friends”, with the variety of custom stations that the service has offered over time (some unfortunately well gone, from the famed loved tracks radio to the tag ones), I think that Last.fm has been incredibly good in exploring new music consumption paradigms. Now “consumption” might appear reductive: actually it’s not. What I mean is that Last.fm to me was still very much a music consumption machine, a place primarily for listeners, novice or expert, fan or not. Last.fm was and still is a kind of uber-jukebox, an entertainment machine. In this respect, it’s not very suitable for the music connoisseur, for those that want very high quality sound and even more the orderliness and quietness of album listening; but that entertainment is not trivial, nor it passive. Quite the contrary: on top of music there is an all set of added meaning that is distinctively social and interactive, as opposed to other more traditional types of music-related experiences, such as, say, going to a concert or chatting about your favourite album or song over a beer. Beside shouts and messages, not particularly original as such, e.g. I think that groups on Last.fm have often created very nice sort of music venues, especially when it is about getting across conventional music genres of even cross-linking media bridging different services, e.g. with ANobii+Last.fm books&music groups (or viceversa; then I noticed that some of these hangouts turned into social games, not always that funny).

Getting kicked out is not like opting out

Now that these days I’m really stopping using the service, there are a couple of phenomena that caught my attention. The first is related to the nature of this specific interruption for all of those “in all other countries”. Usually the big drama in this consumer internet world is getting people use something, more and more, or provide a decent way to opt out if they want to. I mean, the usual problem is getting users *in*, not *out*. And this is quite different from the paywall concept, where you can still have a (premium) chance to get in. On the other hand it’s reasonable to expect that this is going to happen over and over again. Service and companies can obviously fail the deliver to all of the intended markets. Yet it’s utterly frustrating from the user point of view, and surely very bad for branding.

Plus, UI habits can get very deep, and sometimes emotional

Moreover, to me some of the Last.fm UI distinctive features, namely those of the desktop player, have become such a strong element of my music listening habits that I feel like something rooted in my daily routines is being stripped away. Once you have hit the love, skip or ban buttons a few hundreds or thousands times, that’s get really deep. And it goes beyond routines. It’s well known that some of the best physical design features nurture some form of emotional attachment, as the thing becomes part of our mental landscape, and of our social realm.

Online services tend to continually evolve over time, and paradoxically keep being unstable, forcing people to change habits from time to time (at some point Last.fm redesigned its Web UI spurring waves of protests and a number of “bring back to old Last.fm” groups), except that some very characteristic aspects might continue to stay and they become the hallmark of the service, a sort of “experience anchor” that one can’t remove altogether easily. In this respect, it’s interesting to see how these emotional qualities perhaps are finally beginning to transit from the mighty world of “pure” physical objects to the relatively more fragile and liquid world of software and services. I guess that the interaction design and service design literature will have already papers and papers on the topic… just don’t know so if you have readings to recommend, please do, much appreciated.

Playing with it

Last.fm APIs have also provided a playground for many inventive minds. Last.fm has held a series of hackatons in which they invited people to build on top of the service. As for me, I have a very vivid memory of @jnkka showing his Last.fm+YouTube visualization mash-up exploring Italian oldies like Venti chilometri al giorno transformed into 00s cult pieces with the voice of Mike Patton. Go for a break with this amazing cover of Nicola Arigliano.

It was in a Bergamo hotel conference room, if I remember well; after Jukka’s speech we started chatting about the thing, sharing our common enthusiasm for the service and the inspiration it provided for new ways to listen to music and enjoy it, as for instance it somewhat could do with new and promising combinations of audio and visualizations. We moved from there to writing a project idea with a number of friends & colleagues. It was about music and media “trails”, or hyperlinks of sort, an idea still causing a bit of Vertigo to us (project paper here with all references and credits).

Research folks, look here for a moment

Even before, I think it was 2005 or 2006, I presented Last.fm as an early, brilliant and simple socially-aware content discovery case from the consumer internet at one of the large WWI R&D mobile&wireless projects meetings, raising bright gazes from the youngest guys in the workpackage team and some skepticism from others (“yeah pretty interesting but mobile is different, these Internet models are not going to change everything”). When later on Last.fm got that huge 280 millions pounds CBS cheque I had the minor satisfaction of saying, you see? it seems that they are on something relevant…

Better must come

Now of course those skeptics might come back and point to me that the Last.fm decline proves that the model is wrong. Well, I think they are still wrong. The fact is, this stuff is so still in its infancy. As said, for a Last.fm retiring back to its song-tracking scrobbling roots, there is a very lively squadron of others already battling for music streaming leadership, not to mention the likes of YouTube and others. Clearly there is a big question here on licensing costs, business sustainability, industry changes and everything, but to me it’s difficult to argue that music streaming is here to stay. All of these providers will compete based on prices, sure, but also on the service, the interaction qualities, the user experience, call it as you like. In this respect, I think Last.fm has done quite a lot.

The corporation & the startup

Oh, of course I think that all of this story can also be cited as an example of yet another brilliant startup gone down when ingested into the huge corporate world. Some coverage offers support for the argument. But who knows, it’s easy as well to bash the bad big guys. If one wants to stay away from easy generalizations, the only way to go would be proper investigation and analysis of the company history.

Best of luck to the Last.fm team

As for the change and its possible effects on the future of Last.fm, I wish all the best to the team. Honestly I think that I’ve really got a lot of music & media pleasure for a few euros (I’d have given more, that’s sure, at least something closer to what you pay for proper on demand services).

Stay calm and keep scrobbling

So, at least for me that’s the end of the unpredictable, but very often enjoyable streaming story: no more love, skip, or ban, it’s a stop — with Last.fm I mean, thanks God there are alternatives out there. For sure, Last.fm has made me addicted to 1, music streaming in subscription mode and 2, scrobbling (i.e. tracking) + tagging + getting music suggestions + enlarging my (virtual) library as core aspects of the whole experience. I suspect it happened to many others, “in all other countries” as in the lucky ones. I’ll try to see if scrobbling keeps me attached to the place. It’s like one of those old bars long gone from the fashionable list, but where you keep going, because you get used it, and you have spent endless hours in good company, and well you just like it too much. “We’re ugly, but we have the music”.

Minutes, Research

“Smartphones”: market share & usage data

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After every quartery release industry analysts, experts and all comment on the latest market share data, based on sales in that timeframe — something a bit misleading if you think about the expression “market share”: in fact, these numbers does not tell much about the actual distribution (i.e. platform share in a given period: look e.g. at the market share of Symbian, RIM and iOS published alongside this FT piece on Nokia CEO troubles, in which you have Symbian declining from over 60% in 2006/2007 to slightly above 40% in 2010, RIM moving from less than 10% in 2006 to 20% in 2010 and Apple iOS raising to something like 15% after the 2009 slightly higher peak; sorry for not being precise but the chart is very small… precious exact figures are missing ofc).

Update: via @tomiahonen I just found a Reuters infographics, Strategy Analytics data, that shows the general dynamic very well.

This is not to say that this information is not important: of course it is, 100%, for a number of obvious reaasons. But there is big but here in my opinion: if we want to look at the “user” side of the coin (end-user or business), then discussing smartphones market share makes sense as long as they are accompanied by some data on the actual usage of the specific capabilities that make them different (supposedly “smart”) when compared to “dumb” phones: i.e. online applications usage, be they related to Web app/mobile sites or native apps. Even in this case, we would still be at a very high level, unless we discuss about some sort of activity or product/service category: e.g. search, games, social networks etc.

To make the point clearer, look e.g. at the chart below, taken from a MocoNews.net post on a recent Pew survey:

In other words: we might well have a relatively small number of iPhones around, but if iPhone users (or Android users, or whatever) are those mostly actively browsing the mobile Web, using and spending on mobile apps, searching and possibly clicking on those paid search ads etc. then this is what matters most from a business and marketing perspective.

Now, data on mobile products/services usage vis-à-vis actual smartphone penetration divided by platform do not seem easily available, at least in the public domain — or am I wrong?

Update (27-7-2010): cf. e.g. these conclusions from a Yankee Group report (Why iPhone matter; premium access only, the following quotation is from the public executive summary): Two-thirds of iPhone owners use the mobile Web daily … Plus, iPhone owners download more apps, are more interested in mobile transactions and conduct more mobile e-commerce than users of other [smartphone platforms I guess — it’s truncated right there!]

PS: I put the quotation marks on smartphones in the post title for the same reason: Wikipedia tells that a smartphone “allows the user to install and run more advanced applications based on a specific platform” and then that they “run complete operating system software providing a platform for application developers”. Still you can use a smartphone pretty much in the same way of a dumb phone, as perhaps one went for it for other reasons than the possibility to use apps, the mobile Web and the likes. In short, couldn’t be this one the case for so many Nokia smartphones around? (especially in Europe) Smartphones are not created equal…

News & miscellanous

In memoriam: William Mitchell

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William Mitchell, MIT dean and professor, architect, urbanist and theorist, widely regarded as one of the most prominent thinker on “smart cities”, has passed away; see here the official MIT obituary.

William Mitchell
Photo Webb Chappel from MIT obituary page

Right now a Twitter search shows a flow of related messages. My personal impression is that Mitchell is being remembered by a really diverse big bunch of people, ranging from fellow specialists to an original crowd of professionals, scholars and students of different disciplines, all sharing the appreciation for his work and intuitions. It’s not something that I can prove with the numbers, but I feel it’s quite right. And I think it’s a mark of oustanding intellectual achievements.

Update: Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware, now at Nokia, has a short but intense post in memory of Mitchell: “Bill’s optimism about technology and cities was infectious, even if (like me) you thought of yourself as the kind of person who’d been inoculated by experience against anything as uncritical as everything implied by that word.” There is an upcoming book from Adam on technology, the city and “networked urbanism” titled “The City Is Here For You To Use” (see more on Speedbird, his blog).

I first heard about Mitchell quite late; it was end of 2004 or beginning of 2005. I was attending the first public meetings of what then became the network of Living Labs, a mixed formal and informal coalition of various organizations engaged with open innovation (see the site of ENOLL, European Network of Living Labs). In that context, Mitchell was credited as the one that originally forged the concept at MIT Media Lab. I remember especially references made by Veli Pekka Niitamo (Nokia, CKIR Helsinki) and architect/professor Jarmo Suominen. See e.g. this definition reported in a presentation given in Budapest by Niitamo (I can’t publish it right away as it reports a copyright notice; likely the document has been just shared between meeting participants — can’t remember exactly):

[The Living Lab idea] [O]riginates from the MIT, Boston, Prof Wiliiam Mitchell, MediaLab and School of Architecture and city planning. ‘Living Labs as a research methodology for sensing, prototyping, validating and refining complex solutions in multiple and evolving real life contexts’.

I found the idea quite fascinating. The “living lab” image was very powerful, if anything. Perhaps it might appear as nothing big when one considers the amount of books and scholarly work produced by Mitchell, but I think that these concrete imagery is badly needed in the research and innovation discourse. It helps a lot in communicating the vision, it creates the opportunity for more articulate conversations.

At that time I also started following a bit the Living Labs community, and I tried to kick-start an interest group in Milan, but without much success (see the archived page); anyway, I haven’t been much involved in the community as such since then, even though I managed to keep some contacts alive.

Photo source: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2010/obit-mitchell

Minutes, News & miscellanous, Research

Latest “Internet trends” from Mary Meeker

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Mobile business and online advertising enthusiasts have welcomed this latest deck from Mary Meeker, perhaps the most famous Wall Street Internet analyst to date (see the Wikipedia bio). I noticed it on the blog of London-based mobile agency Addictive (their weekly Mobile Fix is also worth reading).

The presentation has been given at a major industry event in New York just a couple of days ago. I read somewhere that Meeker has been often credited with an outstanding capability to capture big trends early on. So, her takes on the “unprecedented early stage growth” of the mobile Internet are of particular interest for all of those concerned with mobile things.

Meeker co-authored a seminal report on then emergent Internet industry more than 10 years ago — “The Internet report”. There is a digital version available from the Morgan Stanley web site but it comes also in book form from Amazon. The picture below is from KPCB site.

Mary Meeker portrait
Mary Meeker (pic from KPCB site: http://www.kpcb.com/partner/mary-meeker)
Minutes

Apps are suburbia, the Web is downtown (or Chinatown)

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Chinatown by Atomische – Tom Giebel 2006 Creative Commons

The analogy is by Virginia Heffernan, television critic and columnist for “The Medium” at the New York Times — it is included in “The Medium” dated online 17 May, but it appeared the day before in the Sunday supplement. I think the article title is somewhat misleading: The death of the Open Web; well, to me she does not argue very much about the actual or desirable death of the “open Web”, but rather she contrasts the differences between the more closed enviroment of the App store, the iPhone, the iPad etc. on one side and the more open, or totally open Web. But I had better report here the synthesis of Leo Laporte and Jim Louderback, from which I learned of this article; it’s clear and funny (as always with Leo Laporte’s TWiT):

Jim Louderback It’s almost like we are seeing 1990 played out again with the Mac and the Windows, or 1984, or whatever.

Leo Laporte Well it come down to – do you read Virginia Heffernan’s article in last Sunday’s New York Times where she said apps are the suburbia of the Internet. She said the free and open worldwide web is essentially like downtown where anything goes, there’s ads, there’s scummy people…

Jim Louderback Chinatown…

Leo Laporte It’s dangerous, it’s Chinatown Jake.

Jim Louderback Forget it.

Leo Laporte Forget it. And she said, but apps have become the suburbia, the place that you go…

Jim Louderback It’s a strip mall.

Leo Laporte It’s a little nicer, it’s a little cleaner, there’s – and so – but it has the same problem where if you have everybody leaving the city, the city goes to hell, you stuck with these apps and I think this is the problem. I think we are seeing a fight now between open and closed. Open is always messy, it’s dirty, it’s not – it’s got little issues with the UI. But closed is dangerous in the long run, that’s what I would submit.

Jim Louderback Yeah, I can see that. I can see a good parallel there of Apple’s app store and Android’s app store for that matter being like the strip mall, where you get individualized…

Leo Laporte You get porn.

Jim Louderback …sanitized choices…

Leo Laporte Right.

Jim Louderback …that are very easy to get to, get on a [indiscernible] (43:50).

Leo Laporte Yes, yes, yes. But Apple’s especially, not so much Android’s.

Jim Louderback But you are not going to be able to find the chalk that gets rid of the ants or the weird ethnic food or…

Leo Laporte Right.

Jim Louderback …any of the cool stuff.

The (wonderful) TWiT 250 transcript is from Podsinprint

I recommend the reading of the NYT piece, not just for the point under discussion but really for the analogy as such. I think we need more of this to make sense of what’s happening. Concrete images, communicative and inspiring.

Then, the idea of apps as suburbia might be more or less appropriate, but it certainly conveys some values or desires and expectations of people living in suburbia. This is the most interesting part, as it leads to a discussion about culture and technology. Then one might consider that “suburbia” are not the same all over the world…

PS the hint on “porn” in the transcript might be not very clear– shortly after this part Laporte and friends went on with an amusing exchange on porn on iPhone etc. — but it was too long to be included here… play TWiT if you are curious about it (I also recommend TWiT in general; I wonder sometimes how many listeners they have here in Europe).

Minutes, News & miscellanous

Android surge vs. iPhone repeats Windows vs. Apple pattern

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This is not the blurb of some Google enthusiast or Apple hater but the reasoning of Fabrizio Capobianco, the CEO of Funambol and a leading voice in the industry, especially when it comes to mobile and open source. See the original post (published about one week ago. 9th of November 2013 update: failed to open page…) for the complete commentary on the NPD data on US 2010 Q1 sales reported below (again, copypasted from Fabrizio’s blog 9th of Nov. 2013 update: same data and image now taken from this post at Android and Me blog by Taylor Wimberly).

smartphone operating system unit share trend circa 2010

In short, the parallel drawn by Fabrizio is about the contrast between better but closed operating systems (the ones from Apple) on one side and not vertically integrated / somewhat open alternatives on the other side (Windows in the past for the PC, now Android for mobile — yesss, not open source on the MS side 😉 The end result is that Apple’s share in the PC market never reached high marks.

Any pattern recognition? I bet. That’s the PC business. One Apple operating system which was closed, and one Microsoft operating system that hardware manufacturer could adopt and ship at “low” cost (for the time). Apple was better and now they have 4% of the PC OS market share.

via Mobile Open Source

Two personal takes:

1, We all have heard the argument that you can run a very successful company with a small share of the market; but it can be counter-argued that the perspective of the analysis above is not focused on a single corporation as such, but on general market dynamics, which at some point in the future could indeed impact the performance of any company in the arena.

2, I know that I am mixing (real 😉 apples and pears, but the surprising NPD data are a striking confirmation of the expectations about future mobile OS diffusion expressed by the respondents to the RTM survey on which I blogged about a while ago (it was: Android first, iPhone second, but now it looks like it could be a very distant second).

Update: I noticed that Apple has publicly reacted to the NPD data claiming that “this is a very limited report on 150,000 U.S. consumers responding to an online survey”, as reported by Reuters and others. Furthermore, Apple reference to another report by IDC on global market sales for mobile vendors in 2010 Q1 highlights also how big is the difference for Nokia penetration in the US vs. the global markets. BTW, perhaps analysts shoud measure (OS) platforms and device vendors together (terminology discussions on “smartphone” vs. “mobile converged devices” might be interesting but they are not very practical).

News & miscellanous, Research

“Which [mobile] operating system does your future device run?” (RTM survey results)

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RTM-Remember the Milk has published the results of their Mobile Survey, addressed to the RTM users’ base. With 3.300 respondents recruited only through RTM and no incentives I think that this is an original and very interesting piece of research even beyond the scope of mobile RTM evolution (I joined the survey too as an RTM pro (!) user).

See here the table concerning the question cited in the post title, one of general interest.

table about RTM users responses about their expectations on OS

A previous question on the mobile OS currently in use has Apple first and Google second. So, the very short brutal synthesis about mobile OS evolution could be:

  • iPhone first and Android second, the rest is just fragmentation;
  • then, Android first and iPhone second, same as above, that’s it.

Or is this oversimplification?

News & miscellanous

400.000 people at 4G speed in Nordic Wonderland

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TeliaSonera today switched on LTE networks in Stockholm and Oslo with coverage for 400,000 customers.

via 4G network goes live for lucky few • The Register.

I first heard about 4G technologies when I started attending conferences on telecommunications technologies back in 2004 — at that time we were just starting Mobilife, a big collaborative R&D project about “B3G” mobile applications and services. I travelled quite a lot since then in the Nordic countries, and I have always marvelled at how fast they are in adopting new things, quite simply — and I guess you don’t need to be a technoenthusiast (I am not) to agree. Anyhow, the news from the Register is a worhty and fun reading.  It will be intersting to see what will come out of this.TeliaSonera today switched on LTE networks in Stockholm and Oslo with coverage for 400,000 customers.

via 4G network goes live for lucky few • The Register.

Minutes

Mac elitism? Technology, luxury etc.

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A leveling of class distinctions in Apple products is going to sting people who valued the affectation of elitism that came with using Apple’s top-of-the-line products.

via Gizmodo – When Pro Doesn’t Mean Pro Anymore – MacBook

This review from WWDC 2009 raised my curiosity. The point of discussion is the leveling of prices in the “Pro” range of Macs, especially with the new 13-inch at 1199 dollars. The argument goes like this: showing off a top-of-the-line Pro used to be a clear sign of distinction; pretty much the same with the old Macbook black when compared to the cheaper whites (btw: I am now living with my second white…).

Uploaded on July 27, 2006 by galaygobi on Flickr CC license
Uploaded on July 27, 2006 by galaygobi on Flickr CC license

I have always been intrigued by the idea of elitism and technology, especially mass market technology as it is the case with these machines. The contrast is quite startling: you have the epitome of machine democratization, the personal computer (well, Macs), surged as a symbol of distinction.

Of course it might be argued that something similar happens for so many products and services. The top-of-the-line as sign of distinction. Yes. But I am more interested in the specific case now than the general phenomena.

I guess that there is big value to ripe for a company capable to bring distinction to its products. They could command higher prices, which should bring more margins. This has been historically difficult with PCs, where shrinking margins are the rule I think. I still remember when Dell took over that company specialized in computers for gaming, not only very powerful but also stylish, with fancy cases if I am not wrong etc. (no details from heart, I should check it out again).

I think that the issue might be an interesting subject of research. Scientific study but also market research. Maybe it is already very covered; again, to be checked.

This is also somewhat related to some earlier thoughts on technology and luxury, media and luxury.

In 2002 I scribbled down a few lines about these broader and distinct concepts as I was pondering the idea of “media recluse”, coined in a book about future trends (I can’t remember the title now; and the notes are in Italian, or almost all in Italian… so I will annoy me transalting myself… how bad): “digital divide inteded as the value of media and information… junk media for the poor and premium for the rich, The categories of luxury, value and misery should be applied to information and knowledge, if we hold true that we live in an economy dominated by knowledge and information. Information is equal for all but not everyone has the same access to information… the old ryhme”.

“Media recluse” were described as people that in the future would recede from information and keep themselves shielded from the media noise or the media pollution. A facet of elitism…

Now it come to my mind a paper about luxury in which there is an articulated discussion on technology and luxury; how technology makes luxury “affordable” and move products down the chain. But how down is down? What is the elitist threshold? It might correspond to a certain model of profitability — or digital divide seen from another perspective.