app

The 200+ million iOS devices have caused 14 billion apps to be downloaded in less than three years. The iTunes music store caused 15 billion songs to be downloaded over a 7 year period.

The two media download totals are shown in the following chart:

About 9 months ago I predicted that Apps would overtake song downloads. I was off on the timing by a few months. The app download rate slowed down in the last few months. However, the crossover point is imminent. The song download rate is running at about 12 million per day while the app download rate is at about 30 million per day (the iBook download rate is still growing but is only at half a million per day). The following chart shows the three media types and their download rates over time.

Although it took about 35 months for Apps to reach 14 billion downloads, the equivalent time for the Songs was about 80 months. You can see the different "ramp rates" (cumulative totals indexed to the same starting date) for the three media on the following chart.

Given the large numbers involved, a better view might be had looking at a log scale chart of the same data:

What I would point out is the emerging pattern that the three media ramps are separated by about an order of magnitude. In other words songs are 10x more downloaded than books (at a given point in the life of the media store) while apps are 10x more downloaded than songs. You would see this pattern emerge within the log chart as the three lines run parallel and equidistant.

Obviously, apps are going to be more popular than songs since many are free. And obviously songs are going to be more popular than books because many are much cheaper.

But painting this picture with price is only a rough sketch. The ways that these media are consumed (and consumable) fills in the details. The amount of energy needed to enjoy each varies greatly. The "digestibility" of the material is different. In a way, these are the same factors which are drawing consumption toward tweeting, blogging and browsing and away from paper based media.

The new technologies are allowing consumption to conform more closely to people's lives. They are like clothes that fit a bit better and are more comfortable. They may not look as good as formal attire, but in the end casual always wins.

The following interview was conducted by Bruno Ferrari a writer about technology for EPOCA, the weekly magazine of Organizações GLOBO, the largest Brazilian media company on March 30 2011. The article (published in Portuguese here) is an edited subset of the following exchange.

Q: In your analyses, you mention tablets as part of a new era, the “Post PC era”. Why do you think the PCs will be replaced by tablets?

This is not quite correct. Post PC does not mean the end of the microcomputer. The way to think about it is this: The stone age did not end because we stopped using stones. Same with the iron age and the industrial era. The era of jet travel did not end automobile or even ship travel (though that changed to recreation rather than transportation for passengers.) Each phase of technology does not fully replace its predecessor. It offers a new set of solutions and perhaps a slightly different way of solving old problems. We'll still have PCs but we will use a new type of computer, an even more personal computer. The world still uses the microcomputer's technological ancestors.

In terms of what new jobs will we hire the tablets to solve, they will vary greatly from what we used PCs for. Just like we used microcomputers for different things than we used time-shared minicomputers and mainframe computers. I expect social interaction, media consumption and entertainment will move from a PC to a tablet. New uses will emerge from the vast experiment that is the app phenomenon.

Q: What are the new ways to interact with machines? With gestures? How will this change the market?

Each major disruption of computing came from a new generation of input and/or output methods. Terminals (vs. punch cards) enabled minicomputers. The GUI enabled the rise of the microcomputer and touch is enabling the rise of the tablet. Perhaps this era will last decades perhaps only years, but there will be new input and output methods available. The world's research laboratories are filled with ideas from projection screens (from high brightness LEDs) to motion sensing (as implemented partly by Kinect) and even novel voice control methods. I believe that each major innovation will create a new wave of growth and, if coupled with a new business model, a new set of companies and platforms.

Q: What are the main differences between PC and Post PC era?

The main difference will be in the context in which the product will be used. Tablets and smartphones allow "computing" to be done in previously non-consuming contexts: while standing, while in the active company of others, while commuting or while lying back and relaxing. It will also allow more individual use. Like the transistor radio allowed teenagers to listen to rock-and-roll out of hearing range of their parents who had control over the family stereo, a truly personal computer will allow people to "escape" into a world of more intimate consumption and communication.

Q: Do you think physical keyboards and mouse will be extinct?

Even physical keyboards have been evolving dramatically. If you look back to the earliest IBM PC keyboards, they were mechanically complex and had a rich feel. Modern laptop keyboards are flimsy things with barely any feedback. Early PC keyboards were patterned after the needs of professional typists (aka secretaries). Current keyboards are designed around space constraints. Same with mice. They went from two to three to one to no buttons. With laptops we ended up with track balls,  little knobs in the middle of the keyboard or with trackpads. Users adjusted over time.

What changed with tablets is the removal of an on-screen pointer. The pointer was there because the mouse/touchpad was one layer of abstraction for controlling what was on screen. Without a pointer you have direct manipulation. I'm sure many people who never used a mouse would find the direct method more intuitive and in a generation people will wonder how we put up with mice. Conversely, those who are used to a mouse will find it uncomfortable at first. Remember that in the 80s many keyboard experts found mice something that slowed them down.

So I believe that people will adjust to a world without mouse pointers. I suspect children born today will grow up without ever using a mouse (or a phone with a wire permanently attached to the bottom).

Q:  Apple has more than 90% of tablet market worldwide. Do you think Apple will be the leader of technology market in the next few years?

The challenge for Apple is that they cannot serve the whole world. They can only grow so fast. On one hand we have their inability to meet demand and on the other we have alternative products which can. Market leadership may not be sustainable just because the market is so big and no single company can supply it. I do believe that Apple is not sitting on its hands however. Their culture promotes pushing forward.

Q: At smartphone market, do you believe on a risk of a new duopoly, Apple-Google? Some analysis says that they’ll control the channel sales of software, content and hardware. The conclusion is companies like RIM, Nokia and HP (Palm) will not be able to keep up.

Analysts differ in their opinions. IDC just released a forecast that shows Microsoft growing beyond iOS in four years. I don't try to make this type of prediction. At least not to a high degree of precision. I do believe that there will be more than two platforms. This is because the market is so large and so diverse and there are so many ways to reach customers (through operators, through retail stores, through online).

Q: Can we compare the beginning of the tablets with PCs? Apple developed the interface and made ​​the first computers nice and easy to use. But Windows has allowed hardware manufacturers to invade the market, popularizing it. This will be repeated with Android? Or with other systems?

Innovations are always copied. Even when protected by all sorts of laws or patents. What makes a company successful with innovation long term is to always keep innovating. Often coming up with the next big thing means damaging the old thing. That's hard to do for many companies so they don't do it and somebody else does. This is why great companies end up as formerly-great companies. As I pointed out above in the discussion about input methods, innovations are always bubbling up. As long as Apple takes these ideas and polishes them and brings them to market, they'll do all right.

Q; How about Microsoft? Do you think the company will lose the podium in Post PC era?

Microsoft already has lost its position as leader in personal technology. The end actually came in about 2000. Once Windows became "good enough" and did not crash so much, they have had a hard time finding something to improve. If you go back and watch every CES keynote that Microsoft presented since then it's been a litany of dead end ideas.

Every major innovation since 2000 has been in consumer technology and that's never been an attractive business for Microsoft (with the exception of XBox which was really aimed at Sony and Nintendo without the intention of creating a new market.) Microsoft struggles not because they lack talent (engineering or management) but rather because their business model is relatively rigid. They make money through software licensing. You can see how that's a hard thing to sell to consumers ("I'm buying what?") Consumers tend to pay Microsoft through the purchase of another product. If the market demands hardware/software integration (like in a phone or tablet) or making money by giving software away (like Google), they struggle. This business model rigidity is present in almost all companies, so Microsoft is not uniquely troubled.

Q: Most of the tablets will use mobile networks to connect to the internet. Do you think the world is ready with an infrastructure that supports this growth in access via mobile networks?

This is a good question because the growth of mobile broadband is a major enabler (or constraint) on growth. Fortunately, the roll-out of mobile broadband is fairly predictable and it looks good. There are some challenges for operators long term in paying for the infrastructure, but they don't lack for financing today and the business case for more infrastructure seems to be very attractive. It will take time and it won't be even globally, but the incentives are clearly there. A lot of value is being created with mobile computing and much of that value will end up paying for the bandwidth.

Q: How about the App Market. You posted recently a chart showing how fast developers are buying thickets for both Google and Apple developer events. You said that it is one signal of the Post PC Era. What will be the importance of apps on the next years. Do you think Apps market will be more important than hardware, content and OS market?

Developers are one more sign that something big is happening. It's not the only sign and may not be the cause of the change, but it's yet another signal. But apps are a phenomenon that will result in something bigger than we can imagine. The way to think about apps is as a new medium, similar to the emergence of radio, television, cinema and even books. The app is a new art form as well as something that provides functional value. We don't know whether the app phenomenon will be tied to one platform or will evolve to something like HTML5, a common standard. But the value of having an app for everything is plainly evident. The economics, creative energy and dynamism of apps cannot be overestimated. I will write more about this subject as I think it's one of the most important consequences of the post-PC era.

Q: What’s the destiny of the PC? Are they on their last years?

Again, it's not so much that PCs will disappear any more than mainframes or servers have disappeared. What is more likely is that they will be used for isolated, focused jobs. The "end of an era" is the end of growth, not the end of existence. The PC has arguably reached end of growth in most developed markets. There is still strong growth in emerging economies but even there, much of that growth will probably be replaced with smart devices growth.

Q: We had the Mainframe Era, the Terminal Era, the MiniPC Era, The PC Era and now we starting the PostPC Era. Do you imagine what Era we'll se after the tablets? When do you think is it going to happen?

I don't try to be a futurist who can see with clarity technological change. I try to see the patterns of markets through the motivation of companies. With that in mind, my answer will be that large companies will acquire promising new technologies from start-up companies and implement products with global distribution. To see the future you therefore need to look at what small companies are doing today. I note that there is a lot of innovation in new communication methods (social media) and new input methods around gestures and display technology. I am skeptical about the power of voice controls.

I'm most confident that there will be a re-definition of television, a "socialization" of almost all media. So I'll abstain from answering directly what happens after the Tablet Era. Perhaps something more personal and more of a companion than a tool.

Yesterday I wrote about the growth in Android vs. iOS. The two platforms' can be said to be enjoying healthy growth, though in markedly different patterns.

The consequences of this growth are being felt across the telecom and computing industries. There are almost 300 million platform devices in use today that were not even dreamed of three years ago. Operators are transporting petabytes more data and dozens of phone vendors are scrambling to meet demand. There are tens of billions of app downloads and hundreds of thousands of apps being sold by tens of thousands of new app publishers. There is a lot of hay being made while the sun shines.

But what about the poor saps that are funding the development? What about the shareholders of the companies behind these platforms. Are they being rewarded or punished?

The following charts tell the story:

I took the platform growth data published yesterday and overlaid it on the share price data (source: Google finance). Each plot begins at the point in time when the respective platform was available in the market and ends today. There are two vertical axes: the left side axis shows "activations" or units sold and corresponds to the thick blue line; the right side axis shows share price and corresponds to the area chart. Overall date range and growth in share price is shown in the upper left corner.

What can we interpret from this superimposition?

1. Both Apple and Google shareholders saw share price appreciation during the two platforms' histories. Apple shareholders benefited more (+172% vs. +41%)
2. Apple's share price appreciation seems highly correlated to iOS growth but Google's doesn't. Google share price had dramatic growth during 2009 while Android was moribund and was flat to down during 2010 when Android growth was explosive.
3. We can also interpret the difference as Google's fortunes being far less dependent on mobile platforms than Apple's. Google has been subject to selling pressure this year due to corroding cost structures irrespective to platforms growth. Conversely, Google may not benefit from mobile computing as handsomely as Apple.

Correlation is not causation and clearly there are many factors at work in share price changes but I think it's fair to say that Apple is obtaining fuel for growth with iOS while Google is in a more precarious situation with mobility--partly benefiting but partly threatened. The market behaves in bizarre ways in the short term but in the long term one can see logic and reason.

I spent the last few days in Hong Kong at a conference discussing the smartphone industry. The participants were mainly investors or investment managers. One of the most frequently asked questions was how to spot investable trends in this notoriously unpredictable sector.

The data I presented did not offer much of an answer. If anything, it showed just how much the industry has changed and how unlikely it is to remain a facsimile of what it is today.

But theory allows us to still make some bold claims. Grounding your investment thesis in pattern recognition rather than extrapolation should be the better strategy. So here are the telltale signs I recommend watching for investable ideas.

1. In hardware look for what's not good enough. The smartphone is great. But it's not good enough for many jobs that we can recognize with little effort. For example, smart devices never seem to have enough battery life. Storage, screen quality and speed are pretty good, but battery life is worse than what voice phones offered years ago. Companies dedicated to improving battery technology or charging technology should be worthy of a bet. Breakthroughs in power saving will be much more valuable than breakthroughs in storage or processing speed or screens.
2. Pricing needs innovation. Phone pricing is opaque, user unfriendly and often leaves buyers confused and angry. I use the word innovation instead of reduction because it's not about making prices necessarily lower, but removing complexity and defining value clearly through price. The challenge is not just for devices but for service providers as well. Companies innovating by abstracting pricing complexity will do very well. Interestingly, pricing innovation is not as easily copied as it may seem. It is often coupled with business model innovation and cost restructuring.
3. Applications currently conform to platform needs but there will come a time when platforms will need to conform to application needs. By applications I mean not just apps but the app/service bundle that will drive consumer purchasing behavior. If we consider social media, entertainment and shopping as applications, it will make sense for those applications to eventually take some control or equity in the platforms. Android is the first sign of this: search and services associated with search and advertising sought control over platforms. Perhaps Facebook, Amazon and Baidu will feel a similar need.
4. As a new medium, apps will eventually be more valuable than the tools used to render them. The global app brands are probably not yet born, but some day they will be as important as Disney, News Corp and Universal Pictures in their heyday. The App Store is the incubator for these embryonic megabrands.

I realize that these are not specific enough investable ideas but casting your eye on patterns should yield better returns than selecting winners from a set of "current players".  After all the great returns from smartphones to date have come from bets on entrants (HTC, Apple, RIM) and not from incumbents (Nokia, Microsoft or Motorola).

 

Yesterday RIM reported their quarterly earnings. The results were mixed to slightly negative and the shares were down 10% in after-hours trading.

I'll work through the smartphone market data at a later time but for now what I want to focus on is RIM's strategy which really means understanding RIM's intentions or their approach to the market. For that we have to go straight to the source: what management actually says. Trouble is, management often speaks in a jargon that is unfamiliar to people (sometimes unfamiliar to anyone outside the company).

Strategy analysis involves translation. So here follows the interpretation of Jim Balsillie's remarks during the conference call (transcript sourced from Businessinsider.com).

What Balsillie Said	My interpretation
First of all, what we announced is Gingerbread. This is not Honeycomb. I don't know what the number of Honeycomb apps is, but it's not very many. Whereas Gingerbread they've got lots of them.	RIM will support Android apps in the PlayBook tablet. As there is not one Android, I need to clarify that RIM will not support Android tablet (Honeycomb) apps but Android phone (Gingerbread) apps. So RIM's tablet will support Android phone apps even though our tablet does not actually have a phone in it, but requires tethering to a BlackBerry for cellular data.
You've got the volume of the handset apps, so if you're looking for the tonnage of apps, or some kind of long tail stuff, you've got it.	This support means there will be many apps including apps that are not very popular. We don't like supporting unpopular apps. We like a few good quality apps but this approach allows us to offer all kinds of apps.
At the end of the day, people are going to want performance.	However, many apps will not run smoothly.
You're just not going to get things like gaming and multimedia, you're not going to get the speed going through a VM interface. If you want content, or Flash type stuff, or you're looking at AIR-type, evolving web-type assets, that's what you're going to do.	Games and graphics will not run well through emulation. For processor intensive experiences we will have native execution options or browser apps.
There's no compromise here. You've got the tonnage of apps. And you've got the performance. Do I think the tonnage is overplayed? Yes.	By supporting emulation of Android apps we can offer a large catalog of so-so apps while having a small portfolio of high quality native apps.
But if you think it's about having a couple hundred thousand apps, there you go	For people who value large selections, they can go to one store.
Do we believe it's about super high performance? Yes	But for those people who value quality, they can come to our store.
I'll just offer that observation that today broadly in the world without any specific comment on us or our competitors, there are multiple ecosystem patterns that need to be considered	Beside emulation and native we also think there are many other ways to deliver applications.
Do we believe it's about full web fidelity? Yes.	For example, Flash.
These are concepts that were really relegated as not technically possible, which we're doing here. This is a no compromise environment.	Because of Moore's law, Flash is becoming viable on a mobile device.
If you want to work on Android, great. Do we think people will want to migrate web assets? Yes	Then there are browser apps.
Do we think they're going to want super high performance native assets with the SDK? Absolutely	We will have our own native SDK.
You think they're going to want to use their Flash based stuff for an offline Flash/AIR type environment? Yes	And support Flash.
I'm just not interested in these sort of religious application tonnage issues.  I really think we put that issue to bed.	We have a new platform but catalog sizes can no longer be used against us.
And if you think the whole world's going to want to develop for Gingerbread, fine. Do I think that's going to happen? Then why is there a different environment for a tablet? And you know about the performance issues and you know about the app volume issues, cause it's tough. And that's why QNX matters	Google's ecosystem is fragmented, Android apps are not able to rely on competitive hardware and there is too much competition. That's why developers should target QNX (which is unfragmented, built on fast hardware and there are few apps on it).
Is this stuff going to go more in the browser and HTML 5 and more native? These are going to be strong trends. But if you want these app players for different VMs -- and don't forget we have 25,000 BlackBerry 6 apps	Browser apps will increase in value and we also have legacy BlackBerry apps.
So, at the end of the day, we believe this is going to be about performance. It's going to be about enterprise greatness.	But we believe in a future with native applications running on QNX.
Things like multi-threaded capability, symmetric multiprocessing. We believe it's about an uncompromised web. We believe it's about enterprise security. True multitasking, not with suspension -- and that matters because you're going to want to run these things in the background.	Because QNX is a robust operating system with PC-like performance. It also supports a good browser.
But I'm out of the religious war on tonnage, which I'm delighted.	However, before QNX takes off, we will provide access to catalogs of apps which are built for other platforms.

By one estimate (Gartner), about 81% of apps downloaded today are free. The way free apps are able to generate revenue is through advertising. 16 percent of application store markets' $5.2 billion revenue was generated from advertising.

But advertising what?

It seems that most of the ad dollars spent on in-app ads are spent by developers to promote other apps. I'd like to get hard data to prove this, but assuming it's true, we have to ask if the apps being promoted through ads in apps are free apps seeking more revenue from ads...from other apps.

To put it bluntly, the $816 million that "comes from advertising" is not coming from consumers but churning around the ecosystem like a hot potato. This figure is said to triple this year.

It's arguable that this is only logical. App users are pre-qualified as app downloaders so it makes sense to target them through apps for more apps. But where does value actually flow into the ecosystem from consumers? This problem of commerce through apps being nothing but virtual app goods implies that there is a bubble forming. This is more likely to be a problem for Android as the ratio of advertising to purchase of Android apps is higher than on iOS, but it's a problem for all app advertising.

It's even more ironic that the developer looking to create revenues through their app is promoting competing apps seeking the same user.

I don't see how this can end well.

The only way ads really work is for users to transfer cash for underlying value. Aside from paid apps which have entertainment or functional value, how much spending from traditional ad buyers (brands) is targeting apps? Perhaps transitioning ad buyers is what Apple had in mind a year ago with iAd. Signs so far are not encouraging that their approach is working. That may be bad news for Apple, but it's worse news for AdMob.

We removed the malicious applications from Android Market, suspended the associated developer accounts, and contacted law enforcement about the attack.

via An Update on Android Market Security - Official Google Mobile Blog.

It's great to see that Google is quick to call law enforcement to prosecute those who took advantage of its open(!) market. Now I wonder what Google will do about policing copyright infringement on the same market .

In September I wrote a note about how some of the top applications in the Market seemed to be infringing on copyrights (and attempting to hide the fact). Today I went back and searched for "Disney". I was offered about 350 apps and I am pretty sure that none one of them is endorsed by Disney.[1]

While there is a vast amount of copyright infringement on YouTube, Google is actively working with video content publishers to either compensate them or to take unlicensed content out. This after extensive legal maneuvering.

I'm not sure how policing or licensing deals will be struck for content on the Android Market. Apps are content, but of a different sort. It's not so easy to scan for infringements. It's not easy to draw up a compensation contract. The revenue model is ad-based (by and large.)

The fact that there seems to be little activity[2] to filter the material today indicates that it's not a burning issue for Disney. Could it be because Disney is unaware of the success of Android Market, or could it be that Android Market is not big or successful enough to become a priority at Disney legal?

---

1. You can do the same search in iTunes and get about 120 iPhone apps, though at least half are clearly sanctioned with most of the rest being related to the parks franchise.
2. There might be activity to police the copyrights as, unlike in September, there don't seem to be many infringing apps in the top seller or featured sections.

The announcement of $2 billion total for App store payments to developers did not come as a surprise. On January 22nd Apple reached 10 billion total apps downloaded. From that figure and an earlier derivation of the average selling price, I estimated $2 billion was paid out around the same time frame.

We don't know exactly how many apps have been sold at exactly the moment when $2 billion was paid out so we don't have the means to update the ASP of apps (currently estimated at 29c).

We do know for certain however that the app store generated $2.86 billion in sales if $2 billion was paid out.

The new data affirms existing estimates.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

The Passion of Steve Jobs - NYTimes.com

It was almost exactly three years ago that Steve Jobs dismissed the Kindle reader as a futile attempt to change user behavior.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced that the iBooks store served 100 million ebooks in its first 11 months of operations.

So do we have another example of Steve's classic misdirection where he dismisses a category only to enter and dominate it at some later time?

Let's look at the data. The chart below shows the sales ramp of three media types served by Apple: songs, apps and books.

At the same point in time (11 months post-launch) there were five times as many songs downloaded and 15 times as many apps downloaded as ebooks. You can see the relationship between different media consumption more clearly on a log chart:

The conclusion that can be drawn so far is that apps/songs show an order of magnitude more popularity than ebooks. Perhaps Kindle ebooks outsell Amazon music downloads, but we don't have comparable data from Amazon and it would be a challenge to compare the two Amazon media as they are packaged and dlievered in different ways (Amazon's digital music is not an integrated offering while their ebooks are.)

Books are a 400 year old medium. Songs only 100 years old and apps a mere 10. For three centuries, the book medium had a monopoly on solitary entertainment. The download data shows how quickly new media displace the old. Therefore, in this context, it's perhaps fair to say that Steve was right three years ago when he said "People don't read anymore."

Today he could add that people use apps instead. Many of the apps available are hired to do the same job for users: solitary, immersive entertainment.

In a recent answer on quora, I wrote that I did not believe developers are tempted primarily by economic incentives when choosing which platforms to work on. I suggested that they hire platforms because of their star-making potential and that star-making value is not a something that money can buy. Using Hollywood as an example I suggested that subsidies decrease the perceived value of a talent-oriented platform.

The notion that a platform signals meaning to developers led me to think about how mobile platforms signal meaning to consumers. I have a hypothesis that platforms can and should be treated as brands. This point of view allows platform orchestrators to develop a comprehensive market-driven strategy for platforms that transcends technical debate.

First a word about what a brand is.

Brands are vaguely defined. They are identities, names, symbols or attitudes or all of the above. Marketers struggle to define brand value because they are trying to encapsulate what they sell into a single symbolism. The problem is that there are vast varieties of things being sold. Every product or service has different meaning to buyers and it cannot be captured the same way. Because I cannot rely on a single definition I have to create a specific definition of brand to the context of mobile platforms.

I choose to define brand in this context of platforms as the "promise of the platform". A platform is a promise that the products will function in ways beyond what's "written on the box"; that the product is extensible and has value provided by an ecosystem bigger than the original vendor.

For example, although the iPhone is based on iOS platform, iOS is not the brand. "iPhone" encompasses the platform brand and it's a promise to users that they can expect apps and content and an extended flow of innovation to continue well beyond the initial purchase of the device. This brand value is attached to iPod touch and iPad even though it's not communicated as a unified platform. In other words, consumers don't look for "iOS inside" but the implicit value of "there's an app for that" covers all the products.

When looking at platforms as promises or brands, we can observe how some are more powerful than others.

Symbian or Series 60 was never marketed as a brand and Nokia users are generally unaware of what OS or platform their phone runs. Does Symbian make a promise of an "extended flow of innovation to the device" after the time of purchase? It's hard to make that promise when you can't communicate clearly anything but device specs.[1]

Conversely, Android has become a strong brand. The Android label (and mascot) is frequently used by device vendors to signal platform brand value.

How did Google achieve in a year this value with Android while Nokia continued to squander any brand goodwill around Symbian for a decade? The answer lies in marketing decisions. Nokia wanted to focus on the hardware as value (and the Nokia brand as the way that value is encapsulated). Google and Android OEMs wanted to lift their own device brands into becoming smartphone brands and attached the value of Android branding to them.

Which brings me to the question of how to design platforms as powerful brands. Creating awareness of extensible value is the way to signal to developers and all members of an ecosystem that a platform is valuable. Apple did this very well with their iPhone ads which focused on the app value of the product. They showed the product in use and did not rely on metaphors. Developers saw other specific apps being advertised by Apple and it engendered huge star value in the platform. Every developer wanted a shot at being featured in an iPhone ad. The iPhone could and did make stars.

But you can't make the great promise of the platform without the ensuring consistency, reliability and longevity. Fragmentation, malware, copyright infringement and arbitrary termination amount to the confiscation of platform value by the orchestrator. Poor custodianship results in the destruction of both ecosystem and end user value.

--

Notes:

1. The lack of platform promise for Symbian may also explain why Nokia believes they can sell 150 million Symbian devices which have a deprecated platform. Those devices could be sold as feature phones, not platform products. The challenge for them will be to get a smartphone price for a feature phone product.

In the earnings Q&A Stephen Elop used the word 'Platform' once, 'Operating System' three times and 'Ecosystem' 15 times.

Though they seem interchangeable, the three phrases have significant differences in meaning. Briefly put, a Platform is a business model concept,  an OS is a technology concept and an Ecosystem is a marketing concept.

Platform

A platform, as the New York Times recently pointed out, can take many forms. The Barbie doll is a platform as is the US Interstate Highway system. These are products or infrastructure that allow other products to be 'built on top' and can thus charge rents from them. When building platforms, a company needs to think of how to make their work foundational so it can support other structures. Other examples of platforms are browsers, the Apple 30 pin dock connector, Game Consoles and Facebook.

In terms of innovation theory, a platform is a signal to industry that the company is willing to allow its innovations to be extended and thus share in the creativity of adopters. There is however a down side: platform adopters may also create so much value that users will shift loyalties to the layers above the platform thus restricting the freedom of the platform owner to modify or modernize the underlying platform.

This loss of control over the roadmap often forces platform owners to institute draconian limits to the extensibility of the platform (e.g. the iPhone developer restrictions.) In other cases, platform owners have acquired and integrated various core apps or services so that the platform and core apps can be upgraded in sync. This was the impetus to the development of Microsoft Office. Office was motivated by a need to prevent Lotus from slowing the upgrade path for Windows not, as it's assumed, to create a new revenue source. However, again, the effect is the destruction of the ability to innovate on that particular area (no new Word Processor or Spreadsheet programs for 20 years).

It takes a great deal of work to platformize a product. I would guess 10x more than a similar product which does not allow collaborative innovation. Platforms are difficult to build, require delicate balancing acts to maintain but can be enormously valuable due to network effects.

Operating System

In contrast an Operating System has a very clear technical definition. It has been extended to include many applications and services, but it's basically the control system of a computer. An OS may or may not be a platform. For example embedded operating systems typically do not have APIs to support applications. Some basic mobile operating systems support applications through a sandbox like JaveME (in this case the platform is Java) and are therefore also not platforms.

A company licensing an OS may not accept the platform with the license or may not consider it valuable. It's even possible to license an OS and consider the platform value to be a liability to your own strategy (arguably HP fits in this scenario as regards to Windows. HP had its own operating systems and tried to build alternative platforms in spite of Windows).

An example of an OS with minimal platform value may be WebOS which has a very limited API for native applications.

Ecosystem

The word ecosystem as it applies to technology was coined by Palm to describe the app vendors that built apps and the accessories for its Palm Pilot. This is not a common word as it's largely equivalent to Platform. The subtle difference is that it's used in a marketing context to signal platform value. Having a large ecosystem implies the acceptance of a platform by a large base of developers.

For example a platform may not have a viable ecosystem if there are few developers and/or little economic value 'on top' of the platform. Symbian is often cited as being a decent OS, but a poor platform with a mediocre ecosystem.

So these three phrases are overlapping but have a different tone. Although perhaps unintentional, Elop's emphasis on Ecosystem vs. Platform or OS, might signal that what's missing from Nokia's strategy is the motivation or encouragement of developers to participate. My prediction of WP7 licensing may not fit well with this deficiency but perhaps Microsoft's ecosystem building potential is still greater than Nokia's.

I should also point out that Nokia's platform strategy has also included an intermediate layer called Qt that enables cross-platform ecosystems, thus making the OS irrelevant. Technically this may have merit, but it's a long haul to getting an ecosystem for it.