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.

Now There’s An App For That

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For years, we were the only ones.

Sure there were other calculators made by shareware developers or guys in their living rooms who tried to compete. But no one came close. After all, we had an advantage. Teri Graf, my long-time VP of Sales, and I went out and completed bundling deals with everyone selling anything related to the Palm OS (back when that was the only game in town). We bundled stripped down powerOne calculators with Palm, Sony, Garmin, Franklin-Covey, SUPRA Products (now GE Security) and other company’s hardware devices. And if we couldn’t own the relationship, we bought out the guy who wrote the software, as in the case of Rick Huebner’s Parens, bundled with Handspring devices. (An extremely accomplished developer, Rick’s still with me a decade later.)

We didn’t earn much from the bundling, mind you. In fact, most of those 15 million+ units were free give-aways. (My friend and co-worker Dick Luebke called us the greatest charity in Oregon for the millions of dollars of free software we gave away.) But we earned a small company’s income from those residual sales to higher functioning calculators and those sales, coupled with Angel funding, gave us the freedom to try to topple the kingpins of math education, TI, Casio and HP.

That didn’t work out. Our plans were dashed by Palm’s shifting focus. And when we came back to mobile, the landscape was different. In essence, we needed to start over.

So we spent a lot of time thinking. What makes powerOne unique? Why do our customers keep telling us they can’t live without it? Why could our products demand and get 3 to 6 times per copy what other calculators were getting? Was it the breadth of calculation? Was it the template form factor, so nice on a mobile screen? Was it the all-encompassing nature of the app?

But it wasn’t until we spent a year in the hyper-competitive world of iPhone that it became clear. It’s the ability to create.

In the desktop world we have spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are amazing products for letting people with little or no programming skill write an application. It was intended for computation, a next-generation calculator. But it became way more than that. It’s an application for writing your pro forma financials. It’s an application for creating an expense report. It’s an application for tracking your calories. You name it and the spreadsheet was used to create an app for that.

In  the mobile world that didn’t exist. There was no good way to satisfy the insatiable need for personal or business-oriented apps except to shoe-horn an existing app for your need, squeeze a spreadsheet into that tiny screen, or hire a developer to write one for you.

Except with powerOne.

Now this used to be simple stuff. Modeled after HP Solve, you could enter a formula and it’d turn it into a little, simple application for capturing and analyzing data. But even we never gave our customers the full power of creating templates as sophisticated as ours. And we never really gave our customers the ability to do things with that data.

And that was the realization. Welcome to the new powerOne. With our iPhone version leading the way, we now give our customers the ability to write sophisticated, mobile data capture and analysis applications and to share those results via email. And if you aren’t into writing? No problem. We have created hundreds for you to just download and use.

Now there’s an app for that.

Today’s Leaders Are Not Tomorrow’s Winners

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Last week in a post I was writing primarily to discuss why Amazon’s pending Android Store and the launch of Windows Phone 7 were good things, I made an off-handed comment that we are currently selling about 200 million smartphone units per year in a six billion unit market (every person on earth). That’s roughly 3% market penetration.

Is that enough to know the eventual winner?

Let’s look at a little history: the personal computer market. Jeremy Reimer put together this excellent web site with data, up to 2005, of desktop and laptop computer sales. In 2005 manufacturers sold 197 million desktop and laptop computers. 3% of that number would take us, roughly, to 1984 when 6.3 million personal computers were sold. In 1984, the leader in the market was the Commodore 64 with 40% market share. The PC operating systems (variants of DOS, I am assuming, although probably predominantly MS-DOS) was second at 32% of the market and at #3 was the Apple II at 16%. Of course NONE of these operating systems are around today and Amiga (who owned the Commodore brand) doesn’t make computers. Windows took over from MS-DOS and Mac OS took over from the Apple II.

In the smartphone space today, Symbian controls 41% of the worldwide market with RIM, Android and iOS all bunched together at 18%, 17% and 14%, respectively ¹.

Like I said last week: anyone who tells you this fight is over is selling you something. Chances are, when the dust settles, not only will the major players change but so will the operating systems we are using.

¹ (Q2, 2010, Gartner)

Amazon, WP7 and Market Competition

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Competition is good… as long as it is really competition.

Some interesting news the past few weeks. Amazon is set to announce their own Android App Store, which is great for the Android market. We worked with Amazon for years selling packaged software. They were always a solid partner who paid on time and were reasonable with their fees. I would expect no less here.

And of course we have the big Microsoft unveil, launching Windows Phone 7 and a handful of devices. I look forward to seeing their new OS in person. The images and videos I have seen so far are very promising.

While some have been lamenting the rise of another store and another OS, I see both as positive.

  • Amazon has a history of making the buyer experience exceptional. Reviews, cross-promotion, detailed information are all hallmarks of their store front. The Android market could use some good ol’ fashioned selling after all, as the Android store front is a mess.
  • When you want to buy a toothbrush there isn’t just one place to do it, right? Why should the Android world be any different? Now we’ll have choices: the carrier stores, Android store, Amazon store… this is all good AS LONG AS they are not exclusive, as long as I can download an alternative store front to my device and purchases made in one store front are available to my new device, whether I am on the same carrier or not. Since none of the details are known, I won’t speculate. (I know, it is easy to do so.)
  • Same for Microsoft. A choice for hardware partners who may or may not like the Google Android game, now those partners have an alternative choice. As for developers we should be rooting for WP7 as it means consistent UI and interfaces to develop toward with exceptional developer tools, at least if what Microsoft is saying and their history is any indication.

One final thought: anyone who tells you this market has been decided this early in the game has something to sell you. We are a couple of hundred million units into a 4-5 billion unit market. That’s about 5% smartphone market penetration. We have a long way to go before this fight has been settled.

And The Award For Best Vaporware Goes To…

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Before we announce the nominees, let us define vaporware: the act of announcing a product or service that isn’t shipping but is intended to keep a customer from buying an alternative product or service.

So without further adieu, here is our 2010 nominees:

  • The Crunchpad/JooJoo Pad
  • Random Android Tablets (Dell Streak, Samsung Tab)
  • White Apple iPhone 4
  • RIM PlayBook

And the winner is… without even a fight… the RIM PlayBook!

This was a tough fight, I have to admit. There were some worthy competitors here. The CrunchPad, a Michael Arrington at TechCrunch production, was a full-blown court drama after all with he said/he said allegations, etc. But it couldn’t win because it really didn’t keep us from buying an alternative. It was just sad and was quickly eclipsed by the iPad. (Besides, it happened too early in the year. And you know how Oscars work: it is better to be one of the last dramas of the year than the first to win the big awards.)

The Android tablets, too, don’t quite qualify. While they have been rumored for a long time, their official announcements have come within a reasonable time of shipping (although they haven’t shipped here in the States yet as far as I can tell.) Got to give these hardware guys some credit. It is not like you can announce and ship on the same day… or at least they never have.

The white iPhone is worthy of the prize but I think it has probably cost Apple more than anyone else. After all, how many people were waiting to buy an iPhone 4 in white instead of black. (My wife is.)  This means they froze their own customers, and not competitors, which is quite not the point of vaporware. (I can only imagine how mad Steve Jobs is over this.)

And that leads us to the only true winner: the RIM PlayBook. Don’t get me wrong, it looks like a nice device. But they don’t expect to ship this thing until early 2011! That’s at least 4 months from now! 4 months in this market is a lifetime!

So we get the endless comparisons of these vaporware tablets against the first generation iPad and, at least RIM hopes, that it will keep people from buying the iPad this holiday season. I don’t think so. Customers don’t like technology products they can’t touch and feel and play with (see Google, Nexus One). And besides, as John Gruber pointed out yesterday, Apple will likely announce if not ship version 2 of the iPad by then, making all the comparisons moot.

I will say one thing: at least we have markets interesting enough for vaporware again. Vaporware was a very popular play in the 1990s as the market for computing hardware and software was heating up, then went dormant for most of the 2000s. With the rise of smartphones and now tablets, the games become interesting again!