One of the more ridiculous fallacies that have been floating around the mobile world is that the number of apps available for a platform will dictate the winner. I am hearing this once again as RIM shows off a prototype of their new BlackBerry 10 devices yesterday and kind of guaranteed $10,000 to developers that write apps for it. At the same time, Microsoft announced over 80,000 apps available for Windows Phone 7.

So, to remind everyone why apps doesn’t matter, I’d like to point you to exhibit A. In 2007, Apple’s iPhone had zero apps available for it.

When iPhone launched Microsoft’ Windows Mobile platform, Palm’s operating system and RIM’s Blackberry devices had well over a hundred thousand apps available for them combined. And Apple had zero. Yet here we are five years later and those three companies combined have less than 10% market share (with one of them not even in business anymore) and Apple is either #1 or #2 in the US and the world [1].

How is it possible that Apple won? For all we have heard in the past few years, it is the one with the most apps that wins!

It has nothing to do with which device has the most apps. It has everything to do with the value proposition right out of the box. Apple’s value proposition was different and clear: phone, iPod and incredible browser all in one package.

So tell me? What is Microsoft’s device differentiating value-proposition? What’s RIM’s? … Crickets. The answer is there isn’t one.

Android, at least, had one. Android’s phone differentiating value proposition was that it wasn’t iPhone. This meant all kinds of things to all kinds of people. To Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile it meant a smartphone that had similar customer benefits to iPhone but ran on their networks. To the technorati it was “open” to Apple’s “closed”. To most buying customers it meant “cheap knockoff,” like Gucci handbags on New York street corners, or in many cases it meant “phone” because feature phones have mostly gone away [2].

Again… RIM? Microsoft? There is no differentiating value proposition. And that’s why your market share numbers are in the low single digits, not because you don’t have enough apps.

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[1] And, more importantly, #1 in the world in profit share, what I consider much more important for the long-term viability of the platform.

[2] Google, by the way, this is why Android has no tablet market share. You have no value proposition in this segment at all.

As reported by Reuters:

[Jim] Balsillie [former co-CEO and co-Chariman] hoped to allow major wireless companies in North America and Europe to provide service for non-BlackBerry devices routed through RIM’s proprietary network, a major break with the BlackBerry-only strategy pursued by RIM since its inception.

The plan would have let the carriers use the RIM network to offer inexpensive data plans, limited to social media and instant messaging, to entice low-tier customers to upgrade from no-frills phones to smartphones.

I find this very interesting. Obviously the “hardware” portion of the company won out and maybe that was the right choice. We will know for certain in the next few years. But what an interesting turn of events this would have been.

Part of what I find amusing about this report is that RIM has never been able to, in my mind, take advantage of this carrier relationship in the past to do what Balsillie is advocating now, even when he was CEO and had control over the strategic direction. RIM always had two different systems in place. The first, called BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES), was aimed at corporations, making it possible for them to sync Exchange and Lotus Notes calendars and contacts all over the place and allowed IT departments to control devices. The second was BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), which is the piece sold through the carriers.

I always found BIS to be weak. Yes, it handled BlackBerry Messenger but I always thought it should do what iCloud does, sync individual’s contacts and calendars across devices, but do it across all devices and all carriers. I think that ship has sailed.

RIM continues to fascinate me like Apple did a decade and a half ago. It feels like a company with promise that just needs to find its way.

Back in January I proposed a hypothesis that, as a developer, we no longer consider writing for an operating system. Instead, we focus on writing for a device family. For instance, you don’t write for Android. You write for Samsung phones that use Android. I’m seeing more momentum in this direction.

The first was a story sent to me by a friend entitled “The shocking toll of hardware and software fragmentation on Android development.” In short, developer David Smith released AudioBooks, a free app, into the Android market. With 1.3 million downloads it has been run on 1,443 different Android devices. This, obviously, is insanity. There is no way to guarantee compatibility with all these devices with all the various versions of the operating system on them.

As I said in January, with Samsung owning huge market share among smartphones, does it make sense to develop for other Android smartphones? And with Amazon owning (presumably) huge market share among Android tablets, does it make sense to develop for other Android tablets?

Charlie Kindel also wrote an interesting article on Google and what he believes is its Android strategy. He believes that Google will de-emphasize the Android brand in favor of its new Play brand, including releasing its own tablets under the Play brand (emphasis his):

Google will start distancing itself from the Android brand completely. Why? Because Android has become an ill-defined mess of a brand that Google does not control. If Google wants to create a phenomenal end-to-end user experience that has a chance of competing with the iPad juggernaut in the tablet space they need to control all aspects of the experience. If they are smart (and I think they are) they will recognize that brand is as much a part of the end-to-end experience as the user interface, device, OS,  apps, and services. 

Of course, this doesn’t help Android fragmentation at all (which Charlie addresses), but it does once again focus the mind of this developer. If I decide to write Android software then I’m going manufacturer by manufacturer, not platform by platform.

I meant to write this morning and next thing I know it is this evening. That seems to be happening a lot lately. What I wanted to link to today was a great article by Michael Mace on Rebuilding RIM. In it Michael prescribes the steps moving forward for RIM. It is instructive for any big company in trouble, I think. In step 4, Create Differentiation, Michael advocates focusing on three core features that RIM can do better than anyone else. Michael’s writings on RIM very much match my own thoughts, although he is a little softer than I am. 🙂

I have a soft spot for RIM, although I’m not certain why. I really want to see this company survive and thrive. I’m pulling for them like I didn’t pull for Palm or Microsoft in the smartphone space. I think it is because, unlike everyone else in the mobile computing market, RIM is actually focused on a different group of people then the rest. They aren’t a consumer company; they are a company focused on busy professionals.

These are the same people I sell to. I acknowledge that the company went sideways, forgetting the date that brought them. But if a smart company like RIM can’t focus on the professional market and succeed then maybe none of us can.

In 2005 Palm release its last handheld computer: the T|X. It was, in short, one of the nicest devices Palm ever made (the Palm V was the nicest) and finally had the features everyone wanted: built-in wifi, full screen mode (you could hide the keyboard), a nicely designed product, good battery life, at least for the time. But that was it. From that point on out it was smartphones and every one of those smartphones had a physical keyboard.

Between 2003 and 2007 every smartphone shipped had a physical keyboard. No one at these companies thought that the future was a soft keyboard. Microsoft, Palm, RIM, Nokia all had physical keyboards. Even Android was originally written for a physical keyboard.

As we all know in 2007 Apple announced the iPhone and the iPod touch and the whole world remembered that physical keyboards, to many, was a pain in the rear end, that it would get in your way. RIM came out with touch screen devices, some with and without physical keyboards. Palm did the same, all with slide out physical keyboards. Android was quickly re-written for devices with soft keyboards. The world, short of a few BlackBerry models, dropped them all together.

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As always Horace Dediu wrote an excellent post taking RIM to task on dropping consumers to focus on enterprise sales:

The idea of focus has huge benefits. Focus and the art of saying no are keys to greatness. However, you only succeed if you focus on the right thing. “Enterprise” is not the right thing. It’s not a valid target. Enterprise support is a feature, not a product. I don’t mean that as opinion, but as a point of fact. Focus on a set of customers whose only characteristic is a job description is missing the whole point of focus.

I am in complete agreement with Horace. There is no enterprise market. To lend credence, I started a conversation with a guy on the street last week, a guy carrying a BlackBerry. His comments went something like this:

I can’t carry an iPhone. I need to type for a living. I can’t answer emails fast enough and text messages fast enough by typing on glass. And my wife! She has long fingernails and couldn’t use an iPhone or Android if she wanted. The screens won’t pick up her finger presses correctly.

RIM: this guy is your customer. He is an info worker who needs access to stuff quickly. He’s not going to carry around a junk device that looks like crap. He still wants the web and music on the go. But he needs email, messaging, phone calls, security and everything else your standard issue info worker needs. He needs all that stuff syncing seamlessly across his systems. And guess what? He needs a physical keyboard, which you excel at. The beauty of the cell phone world is one size doesn’t need to fit all. There is room for a physical keyboard and you are in luck since everyone else abandoned them.

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I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written a variant of this post before. The odds of Thorsten Heins pulling it off, in my mind, are slim to none. Not because RIM isn’t capable with excellent engineers. But because the company’s management seems to have its collective heads stuck up their asses.