Apple and RIM and Android, oh my!

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How come when smartphone and tablet news comes it comes in bunches? This time its Apple and RIM and Android. My thoughts on each:

Apple’s WWDC and “Delayed” iPhone 5

Apple opened up the World Wide Developer Conference yesterday morning and sold it out in 12 hours. Google’s similar conference, i/o, sold out in less than an hour the last time it was offered. This is amazingly fast and demonstrates the interest the developer community has in iOS and Google Android development. Horace Dediu over at Asymco wrote another great post on the topic:

Developers certainly seem to sense the way the wind is blowing. They are, as humans, prone to over-confidence but they are also often accused of being hard to please. The most common lament among new platform builders is “How do we attract developers?”  The platforms showcased here had no trouble attracting developers in the tens of thousands three years after being launched.

At the same time, the rumors started to fly about iPhone 5 being “delayed” until fall. (I put delayed in quotes because Apple really can’t delay an un-announced device. They are just releasing it at a different time of year this year.)

Personally I think this is brilliant. WWDC is a developer conference and should be focused on the operating system. It makes perfect sense for Apple to introduce its latest and greatest iOS in June and ship new devices in August and September, just in time for Christmas and back-to-school.

RIM Playbook Supports Every Developer Platform Imaginable

The latest scuttle-butt is that RIM is making it possible for Android developers, among others, to write apps that run in an emulator on the Playbook. Personally, I think this is RIM’s future if they want developers. Most of us developers will only develop for one or two platforms, leaving the rest out. Clearly those two platforms, right now, are Android and iOS. And RIM needs apps for the PlayBook now.

Anyone who has followed RIM for a long time will note that the company has tried to work with other device manufacturers and platforms for years. BlackBerry Connect was such an effort, making it possible for third-parties such as Symbian and Palm to work with BlackBerry’s Enterprise Server (BES).

Does this make RIM stupid as no one will ever develop for BlackBerry and the PlayBook? Not stupid. RIM and others who see advantages to writing native apps can do that while the majority of us who normally wouldn’t consider PlayBook can now make our apps run on the device.

As for only supporting the phone version of Android, version 2.3, well duh. Google hasn’t released version 3.0 to developers yet so RIM can’t make an emulator from it. And that leads us right to…

Google “Closes” Android 3.0

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, Google hasn’t released Honeycomb, its first tablet version of Android (3.0) to developers yet and the developer community is up-in-arms that Google is finally showing that Android is a closed platform, not an open one.

I have used open source software for years now, primarily on our web servers but often in source code. Traditionally open source software appeals mostly to the techno-geeks among us, not to consumers.

Google has to walk a fine line here. Android, after all, is an OS used by consumers (unlike most Linux installs which are used by technologists) and they need it to work well for those customers. Putting out half-baked code that was rushed to market, as Google claims was the case to get a tablet out there, doesn’t help anyone except the technologists who feel they should be able to play with the source code. (The fact that Google released half-baked code is another issue entirely.)

I take Google at their word on this. They have some work to do to clean it up and then will release it openly. Could Google have a developer track release and an official release as suggested by Watts Martin over at Coyote Tracks? Yes but they don’t (for reasons they haven’t made public).

My Past and Calculation’s Future: A Teaser

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I have spent my professional career in the depths of numbers and formulas, financial, scientific or otherwise. It is an odd thing as I was never really a math guy but I always loved numbers, especially when I was a kid. Before I learned to program at age 13 I would create sports games with paper, pencil, and dice. Sometimes those games used baseball cards with statistics on them, other times they didn’t, but I was always striving for a real world approach to those games.

I wrote numerous baseball games, increasing in complexity over time, and even wrote a simple football game. As mentioned, some times these games were stats based and sometimes they were just luck of the roll or draw kinds of games. I always started with a handful of teams — and the Cleveland Indians as my favorite team were always among them. Then I would take the rest of the league, throw every player not already on a team, and let the five or six team league draft. The 1986 Indians just beat the snot out of everyone. They had such amazing hitting and that pitching staff with Bret Saberhagen, Jack Morris and Roger Clemens (Hey! They were drafted fair and square!) was unstoppable.

I programmed through high school but quit for a couple of years in college before I came back to it. While running numbers was apart of my undergraduate business classes and the idea for the template format came from that work, I never dreamed of spending the next 14 years working with calculators and numbers and formulas.

The interesting thing is that as the market has changed from disconnected handhelds to connected smartphones and tablets, as the market has evolved from $160 software to $5 apps, as market leadership moved from two platforms to eight, my ideas around calculation have evolved as well.

The days of large software applications like powerOne that takes six months or more to move across platforms, is a thing of the past*. My thoughts over the last few months have turned to new ideas, light-weight ideas, that we can bring to market quickly and evolve rapidly on multiple platforms. And yes, they still involve calculation.

I hope you will stay tuned.  We have some great things coming that I am particularly excited about!

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* Before I get an avalanche of emails and comments, it doesn’t mean we are stopping work on powerOne or not considering Android. Just working on some other ideas right now.

Computer Science Is a Misnomer

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I was talking with a good friend recently about his start-up company and he was asking me questions about working with developers. I commented to him, off-hand, that the idea of managing software development changes drastically when you think about developers as creatives instead of scientists. Artists, musicians, software developers all spring from the same well.

My friend thought this profound and suddenly understood so many things he couldn’t get before like 60 hour days, a disdain for distractions, odd work schedules, and behavorial hiccups that he couldn’t relate to scientists.

I thought it ordinary, after all I have managed developers for over a decade and have been one of them off and on during that time. I always felt that calling developers computer scientists was a disservice, that placing them within Math departments only described a quarter of the job description.

I learned to program because I wanted to invent. Before programming I used to make dice and baseball card-based baseball games on paper. Programming expanded the realm of possibility, the ability to be creative in a new medium. Learning various languages feels that way to me also. Some artists become proficient in water color or charcoal. Programmers become proficient in JavaScript or C.

The funny thing is I never thought to share this with anyone before, figuring most in the computer industry already knew this. But my friend is a 30 year Silicon Valley veteran who worked with some of the best and brightest. If it’s profound to him, maybe it is profound to you, too.

MS-Nokia Is Deja-Vu All Over Again

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I have been quiet about the happenings in mobile lately, I know. In particular the big news, Nokia-Microsoft “merger”, went without much of a comment, just a summary article on the week’s events. I’m a wait-and-see kind of person most of the time and frankly had no huge reaction to this one way or the other and didn’t feel like they warranted a post.

For the record, I see positives and negatives for the two companies coming out of this, although my feeling is still relatively negative about Windows Phone 7 and Nokia, with or without this deal. In particular I had this vague feeling of deja-vu running around in my head and must admit I thought more than once about how this sounds like the Palm-Microsoft deal a few years ago.

Apparently I was more right than I thought. Horace Dediu, in The Allegory of Treo, took a 2005 CNet article announcing that Palm was licensing Windows Mobile for Treo devices and replaced the names and objects with Nokia, Windows Phone 7, Steven Elop (Nokia CEO), Steve Ballmer (Bill Gates was still Microsoft CEO then), etc. All I can say is Wow! It’s a perfect match and a must-read.

Now, remind me, how did that work out for Palm?

The Entrepreneurial Life

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Mark Suster wrote a post a few weeks ago on what it means to be a start-up entrepreneur. Mark has done both. He started companies and now is a VC so has a unique perspective from both sides of the table.

With this article he did a tremendous job of outlining both “On Being an Entrepreneur” and the roller coaster ride that being an entrepreneur is. Highly worth a read!

It has been 14 years for me now, since I was a senior in college, running Infinity Softworks with probably three to four “start-ups” all in the same company. There have been lots of highs and lots of lows. Mark says it better than most.

His list of what being an entrepeneur is to him is particularly enlightening. I did a lot of head nodding and yeps while reading it:

  • Not very status oriented
  • Doesn’t follow rules very well and questions authority
  • Can handle high degrees of ambiguity or uncertainty
  • Can handle rejection, being told “no” often and yet still have the confidence in your idea
  • Very decisive.  A bias toward making decisions – even when only right 70% of the time – moving forward & correcting what doesn’t work
  • A high level of confidence in your own ideas and ability to execute
  • Not highly susceptible to stress
  • Have a high risk tolerance
  • Not scared or ashamed of failure
  • Can handle long hours, travel, lack of sleep and the trade-offs of having less time for hobbies & other stuff

The only major changes in the last few years has been the introduction of children in my life. I don’t do as much travel as I used to and try to take off blocks of time to spend with my girls. For instance, I try to not schedule dinner meetings so I can eat with my wife and kids each night.

I still have no hobbies (besides working). I have gotten better about getting exercise the last year and that has helped a lot. I lost almost 20 pounds last summer and have managed to keep it off this winter (so far!).

All the rest are pretty true, though, including being tone-deaf to “no”, a little anti-authoritarian and high degrees of confidence and decisiveness. As for stress… I do have a lot less hair than I used to but otherwise no big deal.

My dad and uncle run their own businesses; both of my grandfathers ran their own; two of my cousins the same. When one of my cousins was going to start his own business his wife expressed some concern to me. I laughed and said that us Freedman’s just don’t know any different!

It really is a life style.