Category Archives: Favorites

Those posts that I like (unique perspective, interesting writing), get referred to others often, or have been popular in the community.

Apps Are Not Software

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There used to be a thing called software. In fact we still buy software for Windows and Mac computers, but it also used to be purchased for Palm and Windows Mobile handhelds.

With software we spent a month or more making a purchasing decision. We downloaded a trial, installed it and played with it. We emailed or called support to see if it did this or did that or whether the bug that was found would be resolved soon. And then, if the stars aligned, we bought the software.

What Apple did was invent something new called apps. Apps are disposable, simple products that we buy and discard at will. Some apps we use for a long-time, like our calendar and instant messaging apps (and powerOne!), and some are temporarily retained until we move onto something else.

With apps we buy and then play. If there is a problem we just discard and move on. It is not unusual, with apps, to buy three or four products in a category, discarding the ones that didn’t serve the purpose.

Apps are descendent from software. To refer to it biologically, apps are to software what humans are to monkeys: we share similar DNA and are in the same family but they aren’t the same. And just like humans and monkeys we shouldn’t confuse the two.

As a developer, I still tend to think like software. We create extremely flexible products that run on smartphones and do any kind of calculation. Some people want that, these very powerful and flexible apps that are meant to solve a broad range of problems for a broad range of markets.

But most don’t care. They want an app they can use right away, use for their purpose and then throw away when they are done with it.

Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t a negative post. I am not bemoaning this split between software and apps. Software is still thriving, especially on the web where we have apps to extend those web versions to local devices. All we need to do is look at the Evernotes, the Dropboxes, the 37Signals of the world.

My points is that there is a software descendent now called apps and, frankly, all of us developers need to consider that, especially in this brave new mobile world.

Fighting The Wrong Fight

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We have been distracted by ridiculous arguments and fabricated “wars” for too long. We have been distracted by thinking that Google is Microsoft and Apple is Apple in a doomed fight already fought 20 years ago.

But that is not the fight we should be caring about at all. The fight we should be talking about, but aren’t, is the fight between mobile device makers and the carriers. This is the only real fight that matters.

Why should we care? Because carriers have been standing in the way of excellent user experiences for a long time. For years, Palm and HTC and Nokia and RIM have been kowtowing to the carriers. Carriers sell all the devices and the services, decide what software is available and what isn’t, decide what you can do with the device you paid $3000 or more for (over a two year contract). And who is punished? We, the consumers, with lousy service and controlled devices with crappy experiences.

I’ve been in this business for 13 years now. 3 years ago I had lost faith… until the iPhone. It wasn’t Apple’s designs or devices or user interfaces that excited me as much as it was their revolutionary business model (although the former excited me, too). Apple controls what apps are installed. Apple controls where the device is sold. Everyone — Apple, AT&T, developers — gets a cut of the revenues and the consumer gets an amazing experience and exceptional support.

I was just as equally excited when Google announced Android. The two most powerful companies in tech could surely go up against the four major carriers, reducing them to what they should be: regulated pipe providers just like your gas and electric company. And maybe, I thought, this will get Nokia and RIM to finally grow a pair and butt heads with the carriers. (Didn’t happen as RIM’s own mobile app store is still not pre-installed on their devices.)

But this pipe dream is being crushed quickly. The carriers, after giving up ground initially, are fighting back. They are using Android’s openness against the company. The carriers refuse to carry the Nexus. Verizon cuts exclusive deals with Skype. Slowness in “approving” new Android OS releases. AT&T locked devices from side-loading and the removal of the Google Marketplace. Secret (and ridiculous) deals on net neutrality. And now, insult to injury to Google who expected to make most of their money from selling ads like they do on the web, removing Google Search in favor of Microsoft Bing as the only and default search option on certain Android-based smartphones.

My goal here is to re-focus the conversation, put the attention back where it belongs. This is war. And this war will go nothing like Apple v. Microsoft. This is about who controls the experience; who gets to interact with the customer.

The stakes are a lot higher.

The 5.94 Billion Person Market Opportunity

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A local group of mobile technologists got in a lengthy, interesting and occasionally heated conversation spun off from Apple’s license agreement changes. I think most conversations about smartphone and tablet, open v. closed, Apple v. Google, misses the point. Some of you can be upset by the changes and talk about Apple stifling innovation (with or without proof). But these are all tactical details. I’m far more interested in the big picture. What I wrote:

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I think history is actually on Apple’s side. (And Microsoft’s apparently as they are planning on the same closed store infrastructure for Win Phone 7.)

At the turn of the 20th century you had to be very wealthy and a tinkerer to own an automobile. Most layman owned horses and they were relatively low maintenance (feed a horse and it could pull your family around for a decade or more) in comparison, and I would bet most layman said what do I need an automobile for? Starting a car was silly, right? Get out of the car, go to the front, and crank this metal poll around. There were no mechanics so you had to fix it yourself. The first autos catered to the 1% of the world’s population that liked this kind of thing.

Then along came Ford and brought the prices down. More people bought them, they became easier to use and with more people using them, mechanics and others who specialized in understanding the internal workings of an auto came about. While there were some changes for the next 60 years, none effected the auto like the computer, which basically made the home mechanic obsolete. It is unusual to see someone even change their own oil now, let alone fix more complicated things. But almost everyone drives a car today, or knows how.

As the system became more complicated and the tinkerer was boxed out, ironically, more people became users because the entire system became more accessible.

I think the same is happening in computing. Apple isn’t making a smartphone/tablet/entertainment device for you and me, the 1% of the world that are technologists. They are making a smartphone and tablet and entertainment device for the 99% of people worldwide who don’t know an Ethernet cable from a power cord.

We’ve gone from the days of opening up your computer and installing your own hard drives to having to take your laptop to a specialist to get this done. Apple (and Microsoft and others) are just taking the next step, simplifying the design, ability to add content, and make a system attractive to the rest. Whether we like it or not, this evolution is happening.

Look at the top two smartphone/handheld platforms in the US: BlackBerry and Apple. Both extremely simple at doing what they do best (RIM: emailing, texting and Apple: content, entertainment). Since the iPhone and iPod touch introductions in 2007 the two have combined to sell more than 150 million devices. That’s more devices than were shipped in the 20 years of handhelds and smartphone computing before it. Also compare that to laptops, the tool de jeur of technologists everwhere. Nokia, Apple and RIM combined to sell more smartphones than all laptops sold last year, and smartphones are a tiny percentage of the world’s cell phone usage.

I would argue that their appeal to the rest of world is part of what has made them strong players. Of the 6 billion people on this planet, we — those of us who are technically adept — make up less than 1%. They need us to some extent, sure, but catering to the 60 million of us technologists isn’t carrying them forward any more.

Apple, RIM, Nokia, Google and Microsoft, I’m certain, see that the future is selling to the other 5.94 billion people on the planet.

Of powerOne and Differentiators

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Out with 2009, in with 2010. I’ve barely had time to stop and enjoy the fact that January, 2010, marks 13 years for Infinity Softworks. So to celebrate, we released a brand new web site and a brand new product, powerOne for iPhone and iPod Touch. And we also “released” a brand new focus: When you aren’t a programmer and you need a specialized calculator, what do you do? You now have an app for that: powerOne!

I’ll be honest. The past few years have been a struggle. And this last year — falling prices, crazy device sales and increased competition — has been particularly taxing. But it’s forced me to really think and one question has been circulating through my head: why do people buy our products? I think we’ve been asking this question for years without fully understanding the answer.

When we started out there were so many things different about powerOne than any other: the template format made seeing and entering data on a smartphone so much easier, many of the included calculations are designed in terminology for the market (i.e., mortgages) versus terminology for the technical (i.e., TVM), you can add-on calculations, you can create calculator templates, and you can share the results.

It took me 12+ years but it’s clear to me now why people buy powerOne: it’s programmable. You can create your own — as simple as entering a formula in a spreadsheet cell — or copy one that’s already made at our community site.

That’s its differentiator: creation. The rest are just facilitators  — amplifiers, if you will — to that differentiator.

There are lots of products that can calculate — there must be 2,000 calculators in the App Store alone — and there are lots of products that send results and use your industry’s vernacular. But there are few that use customizability to combine all these elements together.

It’s funny how this happens. Differentiation is one of those funny things. I always thought I knew. But until we got into the hyper-competitive world of iPhone applications and had our brains beat in for a year, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Well, now I do. And when it comes to product and brand building, I’ll never lose site of that differentiator again.

“As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. This is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

– Donald Rumsfeld
former Dept of Defense chairman
George W. Bush Administration

Building an iPhone Business

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Introduction

A week ago I was asked to give a presentation to a local meet-up mobile group called Mobile Portland about my 12 years in mobile and how that relates to the iPhone App Store. I decided to focus this on some conclusions I came to regarding building an iPhone business instead of being specific to Infinity Softworks.

I then gave the same presentation earlier this week at OTBC, a local tech incubator that I’ve been involved with the past few years, for a Lunch-and-Learn. In total over 100 saw my presentation in person or streamed across the web.

I’ve included both the slides and video here for your review. I think I’m taking a very realistic look at the challenges. Most of the popular press and blogs have been so overwhelmingly positive about the App Store and its impact for developers. But the make-up of the App Store is far more complicated than that for the vast majority of us, and the opportunities have morphed substantially over the last nine months.

I hope this helps you with your business decisions, giving you a little more insight into the opportunities and challenges with Apple’s App Store itself. My goal was to analyze this from a business perspective. Obviously my own experiences influence the slides but feel that the presentation is broader than any one company’s experience.

Video

This video was shot with the second presentation at OTBC. The first half, 27 minutes, is my presentation. The second half is Q&A.

You can see it here if you can’t see the embedded video:http://blip.tv/file/2080839/

Slides

If you’d prefer to peruse the slides instead, please keep in mind that the video tells a much fuller story than the slides do: