notes and views on crm, social media, and the human side of information technology

Apple’s way isn’t the only way

Dare Obasanjo made an excellent argument about user experience and the open ecosystem can fail when it doesn’t deliver that. It was particularly painful for me to read and acknowledge. Openness is a virtue but virtue alone doesn’t make a viable business model.

Developers go where the users are. Users go where they can get the best user experience for the right price. Openness of the platform only helps if it improves the user experience, thus attracting more users and reinforcing the virtuous cycle.

He then goes on and compares the Windows Mobile way of installing software versus the iPhone way. Needless to say, Windows gets quite a beating.

As someone who has recently had his WinMo smartphone go nuts to a point it had to be re-flashed, I am not blinds to the faults of the platform. Neither am I turning my head away from the unfulfilled promises of the Linux-based handsets. It’s bad.

Is the Apple model worth following, then? Should Google play their game with Android?

I believe not. Though mobile phones are not PCs (and Windows Mobile fails most when it makes you think differently), they are not iPods either. They fall somewhere in between. So it’s OK if they are married to laptops for the purpose of installing software and/or maintenance - as long as the guy manning the laptop doesn’t have to do much thinking.

It’s the platform’s jobs to make that marriage a success. Everything else can be left to developers. And they will come if that experience makes sense. If Android or any other platform can start making sense, I don’t see why it wouldn’t attract its share of hearts and minds.

September 29, 2008 | Filed Under Software delivery, Telco | Leave a Comment 

Low-tech channels aren’t going away

Is Google making us stupid? Probably not, but assuming that Google is the universe, and hence what isn’t there does not exist, that’s pretty stupid alright.

There are still people who are not on the internet. People with dumb enough phone* they won’t use a third of the features their mobile tariff includes. People relying on the physical channels in their day-to-day lives.

Says James Gardner of the BankerVision fame about the iPhone hype:

[I]f people aren’t going to do the Internet, what chance have we got of getting them onto apps on mobile phones? And last time I looked, no traditional bank has 100% adoption of the Internet channel (and though I don’t have numbers in front of me right now, I’d bet that direct banks also have this problem, though to a lesser degree).

But it not the hype over the mobile channel that fascinates me, because there is always some fashionable channel in the news. It is the fact that everyone has fixated so heavily on one particular device.

You could argue how the iPhone is revolutionizing this and that, but no matter how breath-taking it might be, revolutions in the internet age tend to be short-lived. Who knows what Android can do in a year or two?

The point is, there is always going to be low-tech, simply because the high-tech is advancing so rapidly, and the businesses will need to support the low-tech (or no-tech for that matter) for as long as there are late adopters and people without advanced gadgetry.

Is that something marketing / product managers at banks and telcos are actively thinking about? Or are they primarily focused on launching the next big thing that will push the envelope further still?

*no offense, I got one of those as my personal phone :-)

July 14, 2008 | Filed Under CRM, Telco | Leave a Comment 

What will it take for mobile advertising to take off?

Ajit over at Open Gardens analyzes the pre-requisites for mobile advertising to succeed. He concludes:

a) Advertising on the Web is expected to take off substantially over the next two years

b) By viewing the Web and the Mobile Web holistically – we could capture some of that new advertising revenue on to mobile devices

c) Specifically, services that are present on the Web can be accessed on mobile devices through subsidization by the ad model – this includes content accessed from RSS feeds, email, IM etc(and I think only the ad model will work for these because people will not pay on the mobile for content which is free on the web)

Can we view the mobile and the web through the same viewfinder? I believe there are some substantial challenges, the primary of which is: your phone display is not a miniature version of your laptop screen. Plus: the use cases for mobile web are different from those for desktop web.

The question shouldn’t be, how do we push advertising to mobile users so that we can deliver them apps for free, but rather, how do we make great apps that users will pay for, and gladly so.

Like they pay for mobile access to their corporate e-mail.

Why pay for mobile Twitter client or mobile Facebook? It’s free on the Web! Anything that can help me right now, right here, when I am out there (be it in the city, on the road, wherever) without my laptop, that’s where the mobile app developers should be headed.

July 1, 2008 | Filed Under Telco | Leave a Comment