Microsoft

Microsoft's new "strategic partnership" with Nokia is not its first. For a decade the software company has courted and consummated relationships with a variety of companies in mobile and telecom. Here are the ones I can remember:

• LG. In February 2009 Microsoft Corp. signed a multiyear agreement for Windows Mobile to be included on devices from LG Electronics Inc. LG would use Windows Mobile as its "primary platform" for smartphones and produce about 50 models running the software.

What happened? LG made a few Windows Mobile devices but with WinMo uncompetitive, they abandoned the platform and moved to Android losing years of market presence and all their profits.

• Motorola. In September 2003, Motorola  and Microsoft announced an alliance. "Starting with the introduction of the new Motorola MPx200 mobile phone with Microsoft Windows Mobile software, the companies will collaborate on a series of Smartphone and Pocket PC wireless devices designed to create a virtual "remote control" for the Web-centric, work-centric, always-on-the-go mobile professional." In addition, the alliance includes cooperation on joint marketing and wireless developer programs.

What happened? Motorola launched a series of Windows Mobile phones culminating in the Motorola Q "Blackberry killer". As Motorola hit the rocks in profitability new management reached for the Android liferaft. The company now relies exclusively on the Droid franchise.

• Palm. In September 2005 Palm and Microsoft announced a strategic alliance to "accelerate the Smartphone market segment with a new device for mobile professionals and businesses. Palm has licensed the Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system for an expanded line of Treo Smartphones, the first of which will be available on Verizon Wireless’ national wireless broadband network."

What happened? Palm shipped a few Windows Mobile, famously dismissing Apple's potential entry as something "PC guys" could never achieve. A new CEO, a private placement and an acquisition later the company is a division of HP making its own operating system.

• Nortel. When Steve Ballmer was famously laughing at the iPhone and saying that he likes the Windows Mobile strategy "a lot" he was sitting next to the then-CEO of Nortel (Mike Zafirovski formerly of Motorola) with whom the company had just closed a strategic deal.  "an alliance between Microsoft and Nortel announced in July 2006 ...  includes three new joint solutions to dramatically improve business communications by breaking down the barriers between voice, e-mail, instant messaging, multimedia conferencing and other forms of communication".

What happened? Nortel declared bankruptcy two years later.

• Verizon. In January 2009 "Verizon Wireless has selected Microsoft Corp. to provide portal, local and Internet search as well as mobile advertising services to customers on its devices. The five-year agreement will go into effect in the first half of 2009 when Microsoft Live Search is targeted to be available on new Verizon Wireless feature phones and smartphones." The deal would ensure Bing distribution to all of Verizon's smartphone customers.

What happened? Bing did ship on some devices but in October 2009 Droid came to Verizon.

• Ericsson. In September 2000, "Ericsson and Microsoft Corp. today launched Ericsson Microsoft Mobile Venture AB. This previously announced joint company will drive the mobile Internet by developing and marketing mobile e-mail solutions for operators. The first solutions are expected to be on the market by the end of the year. The company is part of a broader strategic alliance between Ericsson and Microsoft"

What happened? Ericsson divested itself of the mobile division forming a joint venture which would go on and make more strategic alliances with Microsoft over Windows Mobile culminating in a loss of profits and eventual flight to Android.

• Sendo. In February 2001, Microsoft announced a partnership, in which Microsoft bought $12m of Sendo shares and a seat on the board. Sendo was to be Microsoft's "go to market partner" for the Stinger smartphone platform that would become Smartphone 2002.

What happened? Sendo after litigating IP issues with Microsoft went bankrupt in 2005.

And finally,

• Nokia. No, not this OS deal, but in August 2009 "The worldwide leader in software and the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer have entered into an alliance that is set to deliver a groundbreaking, enterprise-grade solution for mobile productivity. Today, Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop and Nokia’s Executive Vice President for Devices Kai Öistämö announced the agreement, outlining a shared vision for the future of mobile productivity. This is the first time that either company has embarked on an alliance of this scope and nature."

The plan was to bring "Microsoft Office Mobile and Microsoft business communications, collaboration and device management software to Nokia’s Symbian devices."

What happened? One and a half years later the same Stephen Elop announced that Symbian will be deprecated.

The juxtaposition of HP's strategy of increased independence and Nokia's new strategy of increased dependence can't be more striking.

HP is probably Microsoft's biggest customer. As the largest licensee of Windows it probably generated more revenue for Microsoft than any other company. The fact that HP invested in a new operating system for its mobile efforts shows a level of discomfort with the lack of strategic leverage.

Nokia, on the other hand, has been resolutely independent in its software strategy. For over a decade it held out against licensing any OS, especially one from Microsoft. The pantomime theatrics that took place over that decade will make a great case study some day.

But now we have a complete reversal of roles: The abandonment of platform independence by a mobile giant at precisely the same time as the acquisition of platform resolve by an IT giant.

It seems almost poetic. And that should be a clue. Whenever you see poetry, you need not look far for some truth.

These chess moves are taking place in the context of a greater game: the collision and disruption of IT and Telecom. It's not surprising that massive market forces are causing incumbents to react. HP, Microsoft and Nokia are in the throes of fundamental disruption. Even if these moves may not be all in the same direction, they each react in ways that make sense to them.

It's also very likely that all the moves are for naught. Incumbents rarely win with reactions. Let's not forget that the entrants came with different business models. Apple and Google are not making money in the ways of Nokia and HP (who are channel dependent) or Microsoft (who is license dependent). The reaction must itself be asymmetric. So far it's not clear where the asymmetry lies.

Read more:

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Predictions on Nokia’s new platform strategy: new OS for the US | asymco.

Here are my predictions from January 27 for the February 11 Nokia strategy announcement followed by the actual quotes from Nokia's press release:

• Prediction: There will be a multiple OS strategy.

Actual: The following sub-units [make up] Smart Devices: Symbian Smartphones, MeeGo Computers, Strategic Business Operations. To support the planned new partnership with Microsoft, Smart Devices will be responsible for creating a winning Windows Phone portfolio.

• Prediction: The US market will be the first to see a new non-Nokia OS. I would guess Windows Phone with AT&T.

Actual: "Plans for a broad strategic partnership with Microsoft to build a new global mobile ecosystem; Windows Phone would serve as Nokia's primary smartphone platform"

• Low end devices will remain with Symbian due to price considerations for the chipsets, components.

Actual: "Symbian becomes a franchise platform, leveraging previous investments to harvest additional value. This strategy recognizes the opportunity to retain and transition the installed base of 200 million Symbian owners. Nokia expects to sell approximately 150 million more Symbian devices in the years to come."

• Prediction: MeeGo will be phased out in phone products but development will continue for tablets

Actual: Under the new strategy, MeeGo becomes an open-source, mobile operating system project. MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences

More details to follow, but so far it looks like there are no surprises.

The world's largest PC company just launched a "media tablet[1]". Conflating the iPod Touch and iPad brands into "TouchPad" HP joins RIM in announcing an integrated OS/device product to compete as a platform vs. iOS and Android (and to some degree even against Windows).

There are others waiting in the wings. Presumably, Microsoft is hard at work to release a tablet-compatible Windows sometime near the middle of this decade. MeeGo is also going through its gestation period targeting Atom-based tablets. John Gruber notes the excitement around tablet platforms in his article about this post-PC renaissance in computing alternatives. I also noted that the end of the PC era was marked by the end of WinTel at CES.

In that context, yesterday's WebOS event was perhaps anticlimactic. But it's still remarkable. Consider how far we've come. Step back now and remember the dark days only one year ago when, right after the iPad announcement, a  nearly unanimously chorus was pouring derision on the concept.

AAPLinvestors is still maintaining the iPad death watch which I took a snapshot of back in March 2010. To reminisce: It was exactly one year ago, on Feb. 10th 2010, that Bill Gates was quoted as saying "It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’" On the same day, Shannon Zimmerman of The Motley Fool wrote: "[Apple's] hamster-wheel of innovation ... may have hit a snag with the iPad." Those are just two of dozens other memorable quotes.

I noted last May that the secrecy surrounding the iPad prior to launch was unnecessary. Nobody understood the product for months after it launched (and many still don't a year later).

Apple keeps a tight lid on new products so that competitors don’t get a head-start on copying, but in the case of the iPad, advance knowledge would not have had any impact. Competitors look at the iPad and see nothing.  They’ll only react once the market explodes and they start to feel belated pain.

Indeed, responses only came after sales figures started to cause consternation among competitors.

How did these presumably keen observers of the market fail to notice the sea change under way? This is not just a rhetorical question. It really is hard. Students of disruption know that spotting such change is a difficult skill to obtain. But it is a skill, not a gift.

So here we are, 12 months later and the derision has turned to flattery by imitation. The only scorn I hear about the TouchPad is that it can't come to market fast enough.

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1. I find this term repugnant and highlight it here only to ridicule those who coined it.

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.

Motorola—like HTC—is thus a bellwether for makers of Android phones, whose sales have now caught up with those of the iPhone—about 300,000 a day worldwide. Some industry analysts doubt that it will be able to create a big market for its devices and make enough profits before cheaper providers move in. If they are right, the smartphone market may eventually become like that for personal computers: a handful of huge competitors with tiny margins. The difference will be that these firms will hail from around the world rather than being mainly American.

via Motorola: Breaking up | The Economist.

When I argued that the meek shall inherit Android, the profitability data was the core evidence. That argument, made in August, was:

So here we have the real challenge to Android:  partnership with defeated incumbents whose ability to build profitable and differentiated products is hamstrung by the licensing model and whose incentives to move up the steep trajectory of necessary improvements are limited.

In other words, Android’s licensees won’t have the profits or the motivation to spend on R&D so as to make exceptionally competitive products at a time when being competitive is what matters most.

The surge in emerging market Android entrants has been the latest setback for branded Android vendors. What should be the long term strategy for companies like Motorola and Samsung?

Paradoxically, Motorola, being the weaker, has the best chance for successful recovery. The clue lies in both what Palm (now HP) and Microsoft did: starting with a clean sheet of paper and building their own platforms.

This might seem futile given the network effects that current platforms are gaining, and there is a big execution risk, but the alternative is no alternative at all. The big incumbents cannot fight against the clone makers.

Technically, building a new platform is not as daunting a challenge as it used to be. Palm, a small company, managed to do it in about 2 years. Microsoft, a large company, took 18 months. Google built theirs in about 2 years.

They all took advantage of existing code bases (Linux or Windows CE). They also rely on web standards for their APIs (.NET or Java or HTML5).

The challenge is bigger in attracting developers, though again, some core set of apps and developers can be obtained on the promise of brand power alone. Intel and Nokia is using this power for MeeGo.

Motorola's advantage today is its new autonomy and singular focus on mobility. It has hit the reset button. There is no better time to be courageous and there are no sunk costs to confuse investment priorities. Android was a necessary stop-gap measure and the Droid timing was very good (before the clones and before iPhone distribution expanded). However, now would be a good time to start building a Motorola platform for the future.

At this year's CES two unthinkable things happened:

1. The abandonment of Windows exclusivity by practically all of Microsoft's OEM customers.
2. The abandonment of Intel exclusivity by Microsoft for the next generation of Windows.

Many of Microsoft's customers chose to use an OS product from Microsoft's arch enemy. Some chose to roll their own. Microsoft, in turn, chose to port its OS to an architecture from Intel's arch enemy.

These actions confirm the end of the PC era. Although most people would characterize the era as exemplified by a particular form factor or market, for me the definition of that era is the way the value chain was structured and hence how profits were captured.

That era was marked by the condensation of profits around two companies, Intel and Microsoft, with the simultaneous evaporation of profits from all other participants in the value chain.

To achieve this, Microsoft maintained a monopoly on the distribution of operating systems and Intel maintained a monopoly as the single supplier of chip architectures for that operating system.

These monopolies are both over. And they both ended at the same time. And it happened this week.

Who says CES is boring this year?

When reading the comments disputing the possible end of the voice-phone era I'm reminded of similar comments disputing the end of the PDA era.

Although the Apple Newton pioneered the market in 1992 and John Sculley came up with the acronym, the Newton did not sell in significant volumes. It wasn't until 1997 with the Palm Pilot that the PDA market took off. Microsoft quickly followed with a licensed OS based on Windows CE. In 2001 Microsoft launched the Pocket PC brand to cement its attack on the PDA market. The first phones using a Microsoft OS were using something called Pocket PC Phone Edition. The first Nokia smartphones (Communicators) were built like mobile PDAs.

The logic was quite compelling. The original PDA was built to mobilize contacts, calendars and notes. They replaced bulky paper organizers and seamlessly synced to PC productivity software like Outlook. It was a compelling product in the US where small business customers needed to keep track of hundreds of contacts. Users could even 'beam' contacts to each other via infrared. The idea of adding a phone function to the device made sense insofar as contacts could be immediately dialed from the contact app rather than typed into another device's phone keypad.

By the early 2000's PDAs were forecast to sell by the hundreds of millions. There were millions of dedicated users who downloaded apps and thousands of developers being courted by platform builders. Palm even invented the word "ecosystem" as it refers to mobile platforms.

However, I remember reading sites dedicated to this community and there were many people who rejected the concept of a PDA with an integrated mobile phone. They liked the fact that the PDA was not bundled with a phone plan. They upgraded PDAs in a different cycle from phones and besides, phones are for talking and PDAs were for something else.  It was even more difficult to justify the conflation of the two products when considering the corporate purchasing of PDAs. PDAs were procured by IT departments and phones came with contracts that were managed by a different department.

What's a device vendor to do? The most avid customers of PDAs did not like the idea of burdening the product with a phone. RIM was doing its thing with moving pagers to include voice, but that was a different job to be done. The story is picked up here by this comment:

I was hired by RIM in 1999 just before they began work on their first phone .... Coming from a two-way pager background, RIM decided that phones should have two-way push synchronization of pretty much everything that Exchange provided along with a limited WML browser. The general thought was that phones would never have sufficient power density or radios sufficient bandwidth to allow anything more. That was incredibly predictably wrong, but it's how things went down.

Along with RIM was Ericsson, Palm, Motorola, and Qualcomm. Motorola came from a similar background as RIM and went on to build very similar devices. Both Nokia and Ericsson had come from phones and had decided feature phones should have far more sophisticated PDA functions. Palm started with PDAs then moved to the phones, but adamantly dismissed ideas like wireless synchronization for years making their first attempts at smart phone far more like early Nokia Communicators than early Blackberrys...

So the point is that all these companies were fighting over what amounts to overgrown PDAs with phones and wireless stacks strapped on. Everyone assumed power density was no where even close to what was needed for general computing, that a full featured browser and heavy duty Internet services were impossible due to bandwidth and latency. Take a look at how our Java expert groups named standards, how people at the time talked about what features smart phones should have, and its clear that no one thought an iPhone was possible. Even Danger, which eventually went on to work on to create Windows Phone 7 and Android, was just working on a better Blackberry.

via: shacknews

But what does this have to do with the future of voice-phones?

The problem is that the vendors that lost this game failed because they listened to their customers. Like with PDAs or with the original mobile phones or first generation of PCs, early adopters are not the audience that should be consulted on how to improve the product.

Early Windows Mobile users were ecstatic about the platform and rejected new UI metaphors because they wanted a "mobile Windows". Palm fans stuck with the PalmOS even though it was well past its shelf date in the Treo because they treasured the original PDA metaphors.

Every company paying attention to the market in 2005 would have been eagerly pursuing corporate buyers of PDAs and aiming complex products at enthusiastic PDA users.

And yet, non-consumers should also not be trusted with their opinions. Most early surveys would show that the vast majority of consumers found that mobile phones were not good value for the money. Later the same audience would declare that smartphones were not worth buying.

There are many voice-only users in the world who are happy with their products and not interested in any new options.

So what's a marketer to do?

If you can't ask early adopters and you can't ask non-consumers for hints then where can clues be found?

What history shows is that consumers have been happy to trade up to technology that offers more option value.

• Television went from cheap/free over-the-air broadcast with limited channel options to expensive cable with large option value in channels. Even if most of those options went unused, they are still valued.
• Telephony went from low cost reliable landlines to high cost, less reliable but with much more option valuable mobility. Having the option to call a person vs. calling a place (where a person might be) changed the calculation of whether you make the call. Calling became much more popular.
• Data as well went from metered dialup to unmetered high option valued broadband. From a luxury, to the least likely service an unemployed user might give up.
• Emerging market users hungered for mobile phones even though they cost more than several months' wages because they gave access to information and increased the option value of their labor.

Each of these huge technology transitions came associated with increased costs for the consumer, but that cost went toward the purchase of a far larger option value.

The problem is that users cannot calculate option value in their minds when faced with a market research questionnaire. How can they envision all the ways they would use a new product they've never used before? How can they "get it" without observing it in use or spending time thinking of "how they would use it" or asking someone who tried it? In a nutshell, users are willing to pay for option value but can't envision or quantify this value without observing a finished, polished product in use.

This is the problem faced today by branded phone vendors. Asking or observing current users of smartphones does not provide any incentive to sell low end versions. Asking or observing non-consumers seems to indicate no interest in newfangled complex or costly products.

But the calculus that must be made is one of option value. Does the new product offer significant option value? Will this option value be easily realized? This is not easy to determine, but it's a method that is far more promising than asking users their opinion.

The PDA was not a product that was introduced by the incumbent computer vendors because their customers did not ask for it. Once established, the PDA was not replaced by a product that PDA users asked for either.

Smartphones are following this well trodden path. The high end devices are evolving into computer replacements nobody asked for (but everybody will use). The low end products are adding data option value to voice-oriented users who never asked for anything more.

Windows Phone 7 launched on 10 devices over 60 carriers in over 30 countries with 1.5 million of channel inventory in 6 weeks. Given the breadth of distribution, that number is not huge, amounting to less than 10k phones per operator.

Curiously, Windows Mobile was still selling in significant volumes last quarter. Maybe even higher than WP7 is selling now. In Q3 2009 Canalys reported 3.6 million WinMo units sold. In Q3 2010  Gartner estimated 2.3 million were sold through to end users. Even nine months ago Windows Mobile was running at 3.7 million units or over 1.8 million every six weeks.

Microsoft also announced they have 18,000 developers with 4,000 apps on the WP7 marketplace. That's one developer for every 83 devices in inventory.

Microsoft's Achim Berg:

our numbers are similar to the performance of other first generation mobile platforms...

We're comfortable with where we are, and we are here for the long run; Windows Phone 7 is just the beginning.

In terms of first generation platforms, I assume he is referring to Android and iPhone. That claim of similar volume growth is perhaps a bit too optimistic. However, he's very wrong about WP7 being the beginning for Microsoft's efforts in mobile. Not even close.

Microsoft has had mobile software products in the market for over a decade. In 2003 Gartner declared that Microsoft would sweep Symbian aside. In 2006 they were the odds-on favorites to win the mobile platform game on the basis of developer support.

Microsoft's Windows Mobile was selling more in 2003 than Microsoft's Windows Phone is selling in 2010. At the time, Microsoft also boasted of having a huge developer base (larger, in fact, than the number of users of the product; their .NET developer base being counted as mobile developers.)

Furthermore, prior to the launch of iPhone's App Store, Microsoft spokespersons scoffed at the idea that Apple could field a catalog larger than Windows Mobile which led with over 13,000 apps in August of 2008.

Dragging out these old figures isn't meant to deride Microsoft. They were not alone in failing to capitalize on early leads in mobile. Palm, Nokia, DoCoMo and Qualcomm all failed. RIM is arguably failing as we speak. Some have argued that Apple is also about to be undone by Android.

The point is that dramatic, violent change was possible even five years after foothold markets were established.

The question for today is: Is it still possible? Can a new platform still gain traction?

Microsoft is clearly betting that it can. Their seemingly quixotic attack on the market can only be justified on the basis that it's still early days. They must reason that un-penetrated markets are huge and that the existing platforms are not sticky enough to prevent switching.

At least one analyst agrees. IDC made the forecast that 32 million “Windows Mobile/Phone” devices will sell during all of 2011. I took issue with those forecasts at the time but if they deliver that volume they will get around 10% share, enough to stay on the map. If they don't then Microsoft will look more like Mobile Zune than Mobile Windows. The stakes are high.

So even though they may have airbrushed Windows Mobile from history, Microsoft's current strategy is a direct consequence of them having failed with a seemingly strong platform.

In the latest version of Android, Google shifted from bitmaps to vector rendering for maps.  The shift is probably more a function of available processing power on the device than a strategic shift to position value on the device rather than in the cloud. Vector maps, which are much more efficient in terms of bandwidth and local storage, have been the choice for in-car navigators but Google has always been using bitmap tiles which are fetched from a server and delivered only if the device is using a data connection. The downside for vectors is that they require a bit more local processing power.

I doubt that Google's move to vectors is part of a shift to more app-centered/edge-of-network strategy.

How is this relevant?

Google has been riding a wave of re-centralization of value toward the center of the network as broadband made the cloud feasible. Keep in mind that Microsoft rode a wave of de-centralization as value moved to the PC and away from the mainframe. As intelligence was pushed to the edge, Microsoft accrued value from enabling the edge as a locus of productivity. This is no small thing.

Then came apps.

The supernova that is the App Store illuminated the possibility that apps are perhaps a "pushback" on the center. Like all good disruptions this was unforeseen: Apple built the store and the apps sold; by the billions. Apple joined the world in a scramble to react. Something profound was happening, but the very brightness of this explosive growth blinds us to what is actually going on.

My hypothesis is that there is a tug-of-war going on between the mobile cloud and the device-at-the-edge. Both will become better and neither is good enough. Technology roadmaps point to both higher availability of local storage/processing power as well as faster, cheaper and more ubiquitous mobile broadband. So technology insight by itself is not enough to give us a clue to the outcome.

What I would focus on is what is more natural for the user.  Note that Twitter and Facebook both have better interfaces with their apps than they do with their browser interfaces. That and innovations in game interaction points out that apps are as much a disruption of UI metaphors as they are of the locus of power in the network. It would not surprise me if people end up spending a larger part of their lives tethered to device-enabled social media, "firing" the PC from the job of social interaction.

If we believe the app will grow as the preferred interface for the web (and I'm leaning in that direction) then the implications are potentially harmful to Google. Google does not "do" interfaces. Their strategic assumption has been that interfaces are commodities. The browser is the universal interface. Perhaps HTML5 will offer sustenance to the concept, but it's not a panacea. Web apps have a long way to go to become competitive with hand-crafted app UIs. (While web apps have been possible for iPhone since its inception, developers vote en-masse for apps and almost zero popular web apps exist. Ditto for Flash-to-app interface ports.)

This brings us to focus on the asymmetry of business models.

the App Internet

What we end up with is the "app internet": a potential disruption of the browser-as-interface and the re-integration of the user experience around the device. Because the iTunes store allows money to be attached to new interface innovations, developers follow and compete on better interfaces rather than on access to the back end.  The asymmetry ensues from the fact that by attaching profit to the point where the user touches the screen, Apple took the basis of competition for developers away from the cloud.

In other words, the point where the electrical charge of the human skin is detected is suddenly the exact location of value capture from mobile computing.

Of course, Google is responding, but since they did not focus on seamless and curated experiences, developers are not seeing returns for investment in interfaces at the touch point. As a consequence, Google apps developers seek ad revenues. In turn, this is a road that leads to less innovation in interfaces and more innovation in network-dependent services.

I sense a distinct asymmetry in app trajectories between the platforms due to core business model choices. Asymmetric competition causes the great fortunes to be made and great fortunes to be lost.

James Allworth, a Fellow at the Forum for Growth and Innovation at Harvard Business School writes:

Baidu,... has taken an even bolder approach. It's reportedly in negotiations with a number of smartphone manufacturers to remove all references to Google, and replace them with Baidu.

... Microsoft recently negotiated with Verizon that some of the Android phones that ship to Verizon customers will have Microsoft's Bing, not Google, as the default search engine. And the manufacturers are getting in on the act too: Motorola recently released a new phone, the Citrus, based on Android, but shipping with Bing.

Yes, it's Google's operating system. In both these instances, it counts as a "win" in the handset volume war against Apple, Microsoft, Nokia and RIM. But Google will not make a cent on this handset, despite having enabled its creation with Android. All the search revenue will flow to Microsoft.

via Did Google Arm Its Own Enemies With Android? - James Allworth - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review.

Readers of this blog might find these arguments familiar.

Since February this year, I wrote four articles under the headline "Google vs. Android" documenting these contradictions in Google's strategy. There have been numerous other opinion pieces that described how Google's approach was not consistent with an innovation-based disruption.

I've also argued that there is strategic incoherence in building systems software and hardware while selling web services.

Android is powerful, but as Google is finding out, power can be very dangerous without control.