Picking a Niche

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I spent time the past few weeks hanging around some folks that have inside knowledge of Microsoft and I’m amazed at how bad it sounds.

Take the Windows Mobile group. Please. 2000 people working on Windows Mobile. It’s staggering. And the story goes that that’s where good MS people go to die. Hmmm.

The battle is on, and right now the old hats are being left behind. Apple and RIM, consumer and enterprise darlings, respectively, are the cream of the crop. Android’s coming up fast with a plethora of new devices.

Where does that leave Microsoft, Palm and Symbian, the former heavy-weights of the mobile space? And what niche are each one carving out?

Each needs a killer feature. iPhone, of course, is the entertainment beasts. Games galore coupled with web browsing make it a killer device. RIM, of course, does business email and IT better than anyone else. And Android, besides being the platform for hardware-only companies everywhere, will now have turn-by-turn directions to kill off the GPS companies.

If I’m Palm I head back to my roots and make the beast tool possible for organizing my life. If I’m Microsoft, I probably admit I screwed up and buy RIM, which dominates the market MS should, making MS an enterprise juggernaut with Exchange, BES and devices under one roof.

Searching For Change

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I received a call from the Oregon Democratic Committee a few weeks ago asking me for money. I said no. I’ve gotten to the point in my life that I can’t relate to either party and, after this call, finally filed the paperwork to become an independent.

I don’t usually talk politics here but feel so strongly about what’s happening to our country. I’m worried. David Brooks wrote a tremendous article recently that gets at the crux of the problem. As a nation we have moved away from the hard work and thrift ethos that made us the world’s greatest.

Personal debt has gone from 55% of GDP to 130% of GDP over 60 years. Finally, in the past year, we seem to have gotten the message and are saving more. But the government can’t stop spending. We will be closing in on $1 trillion per year in interest payments alone by 2020!

It’s both parties. The control-spending Republicans seem to be all but gone now. Instead of fighting the Democrats urge to spend, the party seems to have devolved into a spitball throwing organization. Instead of smart conversations about affordability of health care and the smartness of government hand-outs, we get lunacy like “death panels.”

And the Democrats, never one to say no to a government hand-out, must be drunk with power, handing out dollars to everyone who asks without requiring anything in return. (Yes, I’m talking to you, car companies and financial institutions.) The party owned by fiefdoms of lawyers and unions and PERS programs can’t say no to the very people that put them in office.

I get the sense that there’s a backlash coming. And I get the sense that those of us who care about such things are struggling for a way to fight back. Running a start-up (in essence) as we re-invent Infinity Softworks for the third time, I’m working and supporting a family of four on less than the median US wage, while I save money each month at the same time.

And it seems, with each passing day, that doing what’s best for me and mine is not nearly enough. It seems that something more is needed. The problem is I don’t know what to do.

Troubling Signs for iPhone App Development

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I follow about 30 iPhone developers’ blogs who, until a month or two ago, were writing prolifically. Now, silence. This is a bad sign.

Who were these people? Many of the early developers for iPhone, many of whom wrote “productivity” or other apps aimed at business (instead of entertainment, although there were a few of those also). But now none are writing.

Could this be because they are so busy they don’t have time to write? Could they be head’s down on their next great app? Could they have all been on vacation since July and just not writing?

All are possible, but I don’t think that’s it.

I think they’ve gotten discouraged. I think they aren’t making more than a few hundred, maybe a thousand dollars a month, and that the sales have been so inconsistent that they’ve stopped caring. Maybe they started doing custom work — one of the few bright spots in the mobile app economy for the 13th straight year — or maybe they went back to their day jobs. But I don’t think they are writing apps for the App Store anymore.

This is a troubling sign, to me. I’m concerned that the small, independent developers are disappearing. Who’s going to be the Google and Facebook and Twitter of mobile? Or is the market not even capable of supporting a company like this?

I’ve come to a different conclusion over my too many years in mobile. I’ve come to the conclusion that mobile development needs to be a part of a bigger company strategy, but it by no means should be the only focal point. In other words, saying you’re a mobile company won’t get you two pennies to rub together. But focusing on being a web company or products company that will utilize mobile, now that’s a different conversation.

Private/Public Company Too Polar, Need a New Option

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There was a great spitting contest a few weeks ago that I greatly enjoyed. It went something like this: a company named Mint, a web-based personal financial manager a la Quicken, was purchased by Intuit for $170 million. Jason Fried, a well-known bootstrap proponent who runs 37 Signals, said that it’s too bad that the investors would force Mint to sell as here was a chance for a lasting brand. A few people then shot back calling Jason bad names and saying there was no way the investors forced Mint to sell, which is true (straight from the mouth of one of the lead investors). (read here and then here)

The reality is the founder is young (under 30) and saw a chance to cash out and wanted to do it. The investors had no choice but to back him up, even though they saw much greater returns if the company waited into the future.

Tough problem, of course, for the entrepreneur. A chance to live a life without worrying about cash! (My assumption on his feelings.)

And that’s why, as has been suggested in the past, it’s time for a national exchange outside of the stock market. We need middle ground between private and public companies, a market where only qualified investors can participate, meaning that you’d have to be in an asset class to participate in angel and VC rounds of funding.

This would have allowed the Mint founder (or the investors) to pull some value out of the investment and allow a company a chance to be the enduring brand it might be destined to be.

Sidekick Disaster: Bad for Users; Great for Web Apps

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At heart, I’m a contrarian. When someone says it can’t be done, my overwhelming urge is to prove it can. So when I heard the news that Microsoft or T-Mobile lost user data for as many as 1 million Sidekick users over the weekend, I thought while that’s horrible for all those Sidekick users who were affected, it’s great news for all of us who are working on web apps/mobile web.

Here’s the summation: the Sidekick does no desktop backup like the iPhone and BlackBerry, it only backs up to a web service (the “cloud”) and all those servers reside at Microsoft. Microsoft screwed up and lost all that server data and then, when devices connected to the server, it wiped the device clean.

Now this has created an avalanche of controversy about web apps and people are starting to ask whether web apps can be trusted. After all, this makes it possible for one company to screw everyone.

And this, I think, is perfect. Controversy! For those of us creating web apps, we need some controversy because it means web apps have gone mainstream!

With every generation of the web, we’ve had controversy. In the early days of the web it was fear of entering a credit card on the web. Copious amounts of film and paper were wasted discussing this lunacy. (That’s right: you’ll hand your card to a stranger in a restaurant who walks into a back room with it, who enters it into a machine that transmits the data across a telephone line to the… wait for it… servers of some bank.)

Then came Web 2.0 and the fear-mongering of online predators and putting your drunken pictures in plain view of your boss received copious amounts of press, except this time it was digital so all we wasted was electricity.

I’ve been feeling like the mobile web and web apps were left out. Where was the controversy? Finally it’s happened!

For the record, this is just more fear mongering and like all fear mongering, it has a hint of truth to it. The truth is that the risk of trusting someone else with your data means you are at their mercy. The problem is this has always been the problem! How many times has Word ate my documents? Photoshop crashed half way through editing? My PalmPilot screwed something up and wiped contacts off my device? Had a hard drive crash? Too often to count!

So has web apps/mobile web hit the mainstream? Not yet — this controversy isn’t loud enough. But we are getting closer. And that’s a good thing for everyone.