New Platform Development Challenges

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The big customer question that I wish we had a better answer to is I just moved to XYZ device with a different operating system on it. Do you support it? On many occasions the answer is not yet. Since we have had some disconcerted replies to that answer, I thought I would share with you a little peak under the hood of what it takes to develop for a different operating system and why we can’t just pop these babies out.

There are three major problems:
1) The operating systems for mobile computers all use different operating systems and development languages. This means that we have to re-write the entire product from scratch with each new operating system we want to support. When we made the decision to develop powerOne for BlackBerry devices, for instance, we started from scratch, re-developing everything that we had done before but for a different platform. Even if my developers don’t have to learn a new language they still have to learn an entirely new way of interacting with the device and that device’s capabilities to create the calculator and templates that are at the heart of the product.

2) Our product is complicated. The intricacies of our software — the math engine, the templates themselves, the ability to create templates — all require vast amounts of work to complete. Very little of this is portable, meaning it can easily be moved from one operating system to another. It takes lots of time. Our small team of developers can take up to a year to port a single product.

3) So why not add more developers? Easier said than done. One, the way these products work, bigger teams don’t pay off except to work on multiple platforms and products at the same time. More importantly, the cost to do this is high. There was a time when we could market to people buying these devices. We used to buy ads in the box and in trade publications. We bundled on devices and retail suites of software. Those opportunities have shrunk because these devices are now sold through carriers instead of retail stores and carriers have constructed walled gardens into the devices. 8-10 years ago it cost us 20% of the product’s price to sell on the web. Now resellers charge as much as 75% with a big chunk of that going to the carrier.

These three do not take into consideration the regular challenges of developing for new systems: lack of documentation, different development tools, poor ability to test because of the tools and the plethora of devices with minor differences running the same OS.

I am not saying we won’t develop for new platforms but we need to see a clear method for getting the word out about our product to a large group of customers before we can even consider it.

Peering Into The Future

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I have decided, this week, to break out my crystal ball and gaze into the future.What’s the trend for mobile computing? What is likely to happen? What things do you, as a user of these systems, need to be thinking about as time passes? I will take a shot at a few here.

1. Breadth of Offerings

I don’t see the trend in breadth of offering changing any time soon. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were a multitude of computer operating systems available running on hardware from different vendors. Some systems were proprietary, like the TRS series from Radio Shack/TI, and others were open, like DOS. By the end of the decade, there were in essence two worth discussing: MS-DOS/Windows and Macintosh OS.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, by the end of next year there could be ten mobile operating systems, and that doesn’t include the plethora of proprietary OS’ that run handsets not considered smartphones. I would like to see this trend changing so we are dealing with two or three key operating systems in the next couple of years but I just don’t see that happening. More choice means more confusion for you, as a user of these systems, and for us as we try to figure out which to support and how.

2. Connectivity

More and more, these devices will be connected. Users are demanding it and carriers — starting with T-Mobile and Sprint here in the States — are starting to supply it. The iPhone has Wi-Fi built in. This will put tremendous pressure on all carriers to include wireless connectivity through wi-fi and cellular networks. I am betting this trend will accelerate over the next year with the majority of devices will have built-in, high speed wireless.

3. User Interface and Software

iPhone has raised the bar. I expect better browsers and email programs from all vendors. I expect more touch screen devices without keyboards. RIM has raised the bar. I expect better data plans and “push” email to be standard. I expect the market to diverge between larger screens sans keyboard and smaller screened, keyboard-based devices, with the middle devices — like Treos and Windows Mobile devices — squeezed out.

Conclusion

My bet is on 1) better connected devices that have 2) better software that is more in line with expectations of a desktop system on 3) a wider variety of device form factors and operating systems.

What does this mean for you? It means you will have to do your homework before deciding on your next phone and/or stick with a favorite brand which will force you to adopt a specific operating system.

What does this mean for software companies like Infinity Softworks? It means either picking and choosing which devices we work with or moving our development to the web so we can more effectively support a wider array of devices.

Mobile Video: Broken Business Models Spells Doom for Network TV

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So I picked up a friend’s iPhone the other day to play with it and saw the YouTube application that’s pre-installed. Interesting, I remember thinking at the time, but didn’t think much more about it. Until last week.

My wife and I don’t watch a lot of television. We don’t even have the basic cable package, opting instead for the clear-reception-only package that gives us the local channels and a handful of cable ones coupled with a NetFlix subscription. Even the TV that we watch tends to be things like the Simpson’s and MASH reruns on Fox and Hallmark, and our all-time favorites MythBusters and Dirty Jobs on Discover Channel. So it took us both by surprise when the TV show Pushing Daisies caught our attention.

The problem, though, is the commercials.

Man, are we spoiled by Netflix. I remember 10 minutes of show and 3 minutes of commercial growing up. This show pushes the limit, though, giving us 5 minute of show and 5 minutes of commercial. I turned to my wife last week and said, “Forget it. I like the show, but I’ll wait for Season 1 at NetFlix instead.”

Well, this got me thinking about mobile video and broken business models. I believe strongly that tigers don’t change their stripes and, in the TV world, this means revenues via commercials. The problem is I will never sit and watch TV on my phone because on my phone I want instant gratification and no commercials. Commercials take too long, they eat up too much battery life, and they are, well, annoying.

So the question becomes how does this stuff move to mobile devices? Is it really that people won’t watch TV on these devices, as some have said? Can companies like YouTube add commercials to the front end of their videos without alienating the viewing public? Or is it, in my opinion, that none of us are willing to put up with the garbage that goes along with watching this stuff?

Someone will figure out a better model — just like Google did for online advertising. And when they do, they will be the masters of mobile video distribution. Because if I know anything about Americans, we love our television.

UGH! 3 Million Platforms with 100 Users Each

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Okay, I exaggerate a little. Okay, I exaggerate a lot. But the point should be well taken.

In essence, the PC was created in the late ’70s and by the early ’90s had two dominate operating systems. You either developed for Windows or Macintosh or both.

By all accounts the mobile world was created in the early ’90s and in 2007, about the same length of time as the PC world’s OS slimming, the number of operating systems is expanding, not shrinking.

Even as late as 2001 and 2002 it seemed the trend of less operating systems was taking hold. In that year, the Palm OS was on 85% of devices sold in the U.S. The other 15% was Pocket PC (now Windows Mobile Classic and Professional) and Symbian OS, a leader in Europe. Sometime in 2008 there will be no less than ten operating systems, and it doesn’t look like the splintering will end (in no particular order):

  1. Palm OS I
  2. Palm OS II (if Palm doesn’t cancel it)
  3. Windows Mobile Class and Professional (both based on Microsoft’s Pocket PC operating system)
  4. Windows Mobile Standard (based on Microsoft’s Smartphone operating system)
  5. Windows Vista and XP for very very small laptops and tablets
  6. Apple OS X version for portables (iPhone, iPod Touch)
  7. Symbian OS
  8. RIM’s BlackBerry operating system
  9. Google’s rumored operating system (if it is more than a rumor)
  10. Sun’s rumored Java OS (if it’s more than a rumor)

UGH! What’s a software developer to do? See Infinity Softworks has highly technical applications that are very difficult to port from one platform to another, all of which, in essence, uses different development tools and languages. And even if we could easily port the math engine for our applications, we would still have to re-develop the user interface, not a trivial task in and of itself.

So this is the problem that confronts me as I ponder the future for Infinity Softworks and how we move ahead. This is also why I am convinced that the company’s developing mobile applications specifically are almost all very small — the market is too fractured for big companies to dive in and make a profit. For years every penny we have made has been dumped into developing the next platform product instead of improving the products on the platforms we have.

And this is why Apple’s decision to release software tools for developers last week so we can write native applications for it is concerning me. Yes, I know, I blasted Apple earlier for this and now I am doing an about face. But over the past few months I have come to think of Apple as an innovator for software developers, someone who can finally force a mental change in developers and a mental change in consumers.

See, all of these devices have browsers and all of these devices connect to the web, whether cellular or wifi or both. Apple’s decision to force developers to write web-based applications that ran in the browser meant that consumers could only get applications this way. And for us developers we were finally freed of the multi-platform approach to writing applications and could focus on writing great products that ran in the browser instead.

Instead, Apple announced its software development kit for iPhone and iPod Touch and alas I am left to ponder the conundrum further.

I am longing for simpler days, when there were two or three platforms that I needed to care about. Maybe this will come some day again, maybe not. I thought Apple was going to help get us there sooner. I guess not.

Economy In Flux: Creativity as the Third Wave

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I have suddenly seen a number of articles written about how our economy is fundamentally changing. Starting in the early 1900s, the U.S. led the industrial revolution, the making of things. For about 80 years, the industrial revolution was at the center of our economy.

In the 1980s, the advent of computers and the Internet, the rise of cheap labor overseas, and the ease of which it became possible to move goods all over the world changed this dynamic. The U.S. economy was no longer built on the backs of people who create goods, but instead on the idea that knowledge is power and he who controls the knowledge centers becomes economic powerhouses.

Now, we are in another transitional stage. The rise of social networking, the rise of web-based communication, the rise of user-defined content (wikis) and the use of the web as a shared platform to distribute information is changing the nature once again. The next phase, believed by many (see Business Week and October 15 article in Fortune for examples), is the rise of the Creativity Economy.

The idea is that he who controls the creative centers, she who invents and comes up with the concepts that companies are built upon, will be the world’s economic powerhouses. If this is true, it indicates that the U.S. can continue to be an economic powerhouse. We have continued to lead the world in innovation, even if we make it somewhere else.

I’m not certain that this is really new but instead can be seen as a refinement of economists’ beliefs. After all, the industrial companies (examples: GE, 3M and GM once upon a time) were built on ideas and so were the knowledge powerhouses (examples: Microsoft, Verizon, Comcast, Bank of America).

But it does highlight why, given all the measurements we use for successful economic activity, the U.S. can still be at the forefront. To me, it is a refinement of the definition of what makes the U.S. economy so powerful. It also, in my mind, re-emphasizes the role that education plays in our country and how, in this day and age, it is even more important that we figure out how to educate our children effectively.

What does this mean for you and me? It means, to me, that those of us who control information and make our living dispensing that knowledge are in serious trouble. Much if not all of those business models will be swallowed whole by web-based resources, assessable from your desk or laptop or cell phone anywhere in the world.

It means to me that we have to get busy creating and innovating, finding new avenues to create value for our customers. At the end of the day, those of us successful at doing this will be the economic powerhouses of our time.