Everything you always wanted to know about web community, and then some

It's been a long time since I posted, and I apologize. In addition to doing a bunch of work for clients at Rubicon, I have been preoccupied with a big strategy project we just finished, on online community. We released the results today, and I think you might find them interesting, so here's a summary.

In our strategy work with tech companies, we're frequently asked about web communities -- how they operate, what they can and can't do, and how a company should work with them. The companies we deal with generally fall into three camps when it comes to community:

--Many companies are still learning about online community and don't know what to do or what to expect.

--Some companies have already tried some online community activity, but were disappointed -- often because they attracted only a few enthusiasts rather than the masses of end users they expected.

--And of course some companies run successful web communities, either as a sideline or as their core business. They're very hungry for information on how other communities operate, and insights on what they could do better.

To help deal with all of those questions, we conducted a study of online community in the US. We surveyed more than 3,000 US web users on their overall internet usage, and then dived deep on their use of online communities and what impact those communities have on their lives. I know some of you will be disappointed that the survey is US-only; we'd be delighted to repeat the research in other parts of the world if anyone wants to sponsor it ;-)

Meanwhile, here are some of the key things we learned:

--Small groups of enthusiasts dominate most online conversations, but that doesn't mean online communities matter only to a narrow segment of people. Most web users read community content rather than contributing to it, and are strongly influenced by the things they see there, especially product reviews and recommendations. Those reviews are now second only to word of mouth as a purchase influencer for web users.

--Because most web users are voyeurs more than contributors, if you're running an online discussion, you should think of it as theatre -- it's a performance in which the community leader(s) interact with a small group of contributors for the education and amusement of the rest of us. All the web's a stage, but we're not all players in it. At least not equal players.

--This means companies that turn away from web communities because they're populated mostly by enthusiasts are missing the point. They've mistaken their fellow actors for the audience. If you're running a community, you need to take care of the active participants in a community so that the rest of the audience will watch and learn.

--If a company needs more incentive to work with the Internet, it turns out that the web has also become the number two source of product support information for web users. After checking the manual, web users are more likely to check a company's website for information or search the web than they are to take traditional steps like calling the manufacturer or asking a dealer. That will be comforting to many companies that want to reduce their support costs, since phone support is very expensive. But how many of those companies have bothered to put detailed support information online, and make sure it's well indexed by the search engines?

--There are an enormous number of tidbits in the study regarding web use. A few items that stood out to me include:

• -About a quarter of US web users say they have dated someone they first met online.
• -Although Twitter and SecondLife get a lot of press, their audiences are very narrow when you compare them to major social sites like MySpace, Facebook, and even LinkedIn.
• -Yahoo is the second most valued website in the minds of US web users, after Google. It's ahead of major web properties like YouTube and Facebook. All of the negative press about Yahoo sometimes makes people forget how strong its user base is.
  
• -The major social networks are much more satisfying and useful to teens than they are to adults. In fact, satisfaction with the social sites declines steadily after age 14.
• -Since we're coming up on an election in the US, it's interesting to look at political ties on the Internet. Democrats are more active online than Republicans, and say the web has a greater influence on their behavior, including voting.
• -Young people dominate online conversations, with people 22 and under producing about half of all user-generated content and comments. So if you sometimes feel like you're dealing with kids online, it may be because you are.

A full report on the findings is available in PDF format here (link). I know many people don't like to read PDFs online, and besides you can't easily comment on them or link to sections in them. So we've also posted the report online, cut into several sections for easy reading:

Part one summarizes the report, and gives detailed information on the use of community online, and what that means for business (link). This is the section that gives information on community usage rates and the "most frequent contributors" who dominate online conversations.

Part two discusses the leading web destinations in the US, measured in several ways, and discusses the role of community in them (link). This is where you'll find learn about the remarkable membership rate of Classmates.com, the #3 social community site in the US when measured by profiles. We also answer questions like: "Is Facebook more popular than MySpace?" "What do web users value more, Wikipedia or NYTimes.com?" and "What are the top five most-visited types of website?"

Part three talks about the role of community sites in the social lives of Americans (link). This is where we compare Republicans and Democrats online, and look at how different age groups use the social networking sites. We answer questions like: "How many young people lie about their age to get access to websites?" and "How many web users create fake identities online?"


What does it mean to mobile?

I always get that question when I post something that's not directly related to the mobile industry. In part, my answer is that I think this information's useful to anyone who's interested in technology. You're soaking in the internet, and it's good to understand how it works.

But community users don't limit themselves to only PC access, so online community will have a big effect on the mobile industry. It's important to understand what's really happening in the wired internet so you can sort out which mobile web opportunities have the best prospects. For example, I saw a presentation by someone senior at a mobile company the other day, and he was touting the importance of Twitter as a driver for the mobile web. I almost laughed out loud, because I had just been working on our report, and I knew how tiny the Twitter audience is. It's a classic case of people in the tech industry assuming something they use a lot is also being adopted by the masses.

That's not to beat up on Twitter specifically; they have a great base of users. But mainstream they ain't.

The other thing mobile people should think about a lot is the huge role that young people play in the generation of online content. As a group they are vastly more active online than older people. We aren't sure exactly what the cause is. Some of it may be that high school and college students just have a lot more time on their hands, and they spend some of it posting to the web. But probably also some of it is generational. Whatever the cause, it's likely that young users will be some of the heaviest drivers of use of the mobile web, especially the uploading of content and comments.

Not that Apple needs another advantage, but that probably plays to the strengths of the iPhone, because Apple has such a good franchise with young people in the US. It also helps to explain why RIM is trying to reach out to young people. In Europe, I think Nokia and SonyEricsson have a better chance at those users, because their brands are strong with young people. But they'll need the right products as well, which is a subject for other posts...

App stores and APIs: It's the ecosystem, stupid

If you make a web application or mobile platform, one of the trendiest things you can do is add APIs and a software marketplace to it so developers will extend your product. Google is previewing its application market for Android (link), T-Mobile USA has promised a new applications store for its phones (link), and many people I've spoken with believe Microsoft bought Danger in order to get its software store technology.

The idea of encouraging third party developers dates back at least to the early days of MS-DOS, but it was associated mostly with operating systems until Web 2.0 applications took off a few years ago. Google played a big role in that change, by exposing APIs to Google Maps that made it possible to embed maps in other web applications. That helped Google Maps quickly blow past established mapping services like Mapquest, while the installed base of Google Maps extensions made it hard for Microsoft's web mapping product to gain traction.

The drive for web APIs got another big boost when Facebook enabled developers to extend its functionality, driving an explosion of widgets for Facebook that helped it grow past MySpace to become the #1 social network in the US (at least according to Alexa).

The web app people all noticed Google's and Facebook's success and furiously started adding APIs to their products. Today it's unusual to hear about a new web app that doesn't have some sort of API story or future plan to add them.

In mobile, applications have an interesting history. Lately some new mobile players have generated huge attention for their application marketplaces. The chart below shows the one year growth in the developer base for a certain well-known mobile platform:



If you're like most people in Silicon Valley, you probably think that's an Apple iPhone developer chart. But actually it's Palm OS ten years ago, from 1998 to 1999.

Disturbing, isn't it? The idea that a platform could take off like that and then crash and burn...makes you wonder if the same thing could happen to the platforms that are popular today.

And in fact, if you look at the history of APIs on both mobiles and web apps, the failures are more numerous than the successes. If you're a developer trying to pick the right platform to create your apps on, that choice is very dangerous -- you're betting the success of your company on something that has a better than 50-50 chance of failing.

If you work at a web or mobile company creating APIs or an app store, the news is equally disturbing: The odds are that you won't succeed.

So it's very important to look at the history of those failed platforms, to figure out what goes wrong and how to avoid it. When you do that, the answer is pretty clear:


It's the ecosystem, stupid

The success of a developer program is not driven just by the beauty of the APIs or the store, but by how the overall ecosystem works to enable developers to prosper. The two parts of the ecosystem that are most important to developers are the ability to create something cool, and the ability to make money. Coolness gets developers to try your platform in the first place. Most developers, especially the innovative new ones, gravitate to a platform that lets them easily create something cool that will impress their friends. But as those developers get older and more responsible, they eventually get tired of drinking lemon drops with Mark Cuban (link). They need to pay rent, buy food, and do other things that require money. If they can't make money from a platform, they will move away to the next one. So the financials are what makes developers stick around over time.

If the ecosystem breaks down anywhere in the chain, the developer community will eventually collapse. You can see this in process driving the history of some prominent web and mobile platforms:

Facebook. Earlier I said Facebook apps were a success because they helped the company grow. That's definitely true from Facebook's short-term perspective, but if you talk to Facebook developers the story is much more mixed. Some people online say there are lots of ways to monetize Facebook apps (link), but other reports say it's difficult to actually make the revenue come in (link). The online attitude toward this when Facebook's platform launched in 2007 was pretty dismissive. One commentator wrote (link):

The problem of not making money with your app is not a Facebook problem. It's your problem!

That's the right attitude for a developer to take: Control your own destiny. But monetization becomes a Facebook problem if nobody can make money. Developers poured into the Facebook platform like the tide in the Bay of Fundy, but a lot of them couldn't make money and promptly poured back out. I can tell you from personal experience that some are pretty bitter and unlikely to do anything with Facebook again.

Mobile Java's problem was that it's not a real platform. Handset vendors and operators were allowed to break compatibility between their implementations of Java, forcing developers to tweak their java apps almost endlessly, dramatically raising their costs and making it hard to scale their companies. The selling model for Java apps was also seriously broken -- to get prominent placement on a phone, developers often had to cut special deals with carriers. Some of the most successful mobile Java game developers have survived because they're great deal-makers; they figure out how to develop for a big brand that wants to create a mobile presence, or they hook into the promotion of a movie. This business model favors a few companies with the skill and contacts to cut the deals; the current mobile Java world is not an ecosystem that can support huge numbers of developers.

Palm and Windows Mobile both succeeded at first in enabling developers to create a lot of interesting applications. Although both operating systems had technical flaws, they were reasonably open to any developer, and the "write once run anywhere" idea mostly worked. Unfortunately, the marketing and sales model for those applications started out mediocre and got worse over time. There was no software store on device, so users had to go out on the web to find apps. This cut the number of people looking for applications. Those who did look online usually landed in the mobile application stores, which over time took a larger and larger share of the developer's revenue. Eventually, the stores' cut grew to more than 50% of revenue, making development uneconomical for many companies. When sales of Palm OS and Windows Mobile devices failed to grow rapidly, the financial model for many developers fell apart, and the ecosystems faded.


What to look for in an ecosystem

If you're a developer looking to find a viable ecosystem, or a platform vendor looking to build one, here are the things to look for.

How easy is it for developers to create something cool? How powerful are the APIs? Can the platform be programmed using standard development tools? Eclipse seems to be the preferred platform among much of the web app crowd, and it's free.

Is the platform programmed in a language that's obscure or difficult to use? This has long been one of the big barriers to Symbian native app development.

How do applications get visibility? Is the store displayed at the first level of the smartphone? How easy is it for users to navigate the store? Online stores like Handango are notoriously hard to navigate; the user experience is about like walking through a flea market.

Can good apps rise to the top? In some software stores, the developer has to pay for prominent placement on the store. This is incredibly corrosive to the ecosystem. The big software companies with money to pay for placement are often the least innovative. So users see an app prominently featured, try it, are disappointed, and never try another one. If web search worked this way, there's a good chance that the web as we know it would never have developed. The practice of pay for placement is a self-defeating, regressive tax -- it penalizes most the small developers who are most likely to create compelling new apps that make a platform more successful.

Ideally, placement on the store should be based on independent user reviews, so the best new apps can rise to the top naturally.

What are the terms of business? Can a developer bill for an app through the user's phone bill? Forcing people to input their credit cards separately slows adoption of software. Can the developer choose different forms of payment? Developers should be enabled to experiment with freeware and subscription payment systems, just as they do on the web. How much of the developer's revenue does the store keep? The ideal cut is no more than 20%.

Are there restrictions on the application's functionality? This is a sore point for iPhone developers. Apple won't allow intermediate platforms that run other applications. So no Java, no Flash, and no emulators like StyleTap's Palm OS emulator (link). This also inhibits other developers who want to expose APIs within their applications.

What is the overhead for security? Some platforms require applications to pay for a new security certificate every time the app is revised. The cost is typically a few hundred dollars, which doesn't sound like much to a big operator or OS company, but is a huge burden to a small company with several apps. They're basically punished every time they fix a bug, which is very unwise -- you want developers to fix bugs instantly, because that increases user satisfaction and reduces support calls. Basic security certificates can and should be issued automatically by the software store, at no charge.

How big is the user base? This will be a more and more important issue over time. For a developer, the ideal platform would let them sell to the whole base of mobile phone users, not just one brand or model.


Room for improvement

Based on those tests, no mobile platform offers an ideal ecosystem today. Apple probably comes closest at the moment. Here's how I'd grade it:

--Power: A-. The iPhone APIs give developers a huge amount of power, and there was a lot of delighted commentary on the web when the APIs were first revealed. But there is a learning curve for iPhone development; Apple has its own tools and its own variant version of C. And support for some typical OS features (such as cut and paste) is missing.

--Store: A-. The store is built into the device prominently, so apps are easier to discover. And there is a user-driven rating system. Developers can bill through Apple's iTunes system; not as convenient as billing through the carrier, but not bad. Apple takes 30% of revenue, which is not ideal, but is better than the 50% or more cut that burdens mobile app developers elsewhere.

--Terms: C+. There are significant, ambiguous restrictions on what a developer can do on the iPhone. The most onerous terms restrict the ability of developers to add functionality to applications and create software that run other applications. The terms cause a lot of confusion among developers; I'm on a mailing list for iPhone developers where they have been trying to figure out whether they can download content to an iPhone app. The answer: it's unclear as to whether content is a form of functionality, and you should ask Apple's lawyers. That is an incredibly intimidating message to app developers. It feels far too much like doing business with the operators.

--User base: Incomplete. It's relatively straightforward to make money from iPhone apps today because the number of developers is still relatively low. But over time, I think it's unlikely that Apple will be able to grow its user base at the same rate as the developer base is growing. If that happens, life will get much less pleasant for iPhone developers.

The ideal mobile app ecosystem would have the API power of the iPhone and the discovery experience of the iPhone store, coupled with business terms that allow add-on APIs like Flash, Java and Google Gears, all working across a much larger base of devices.


What it all means

If you're a software developer and some platform vendor or web company comes around evangelizing their software store or their APIs, you should evaluate the overall ecosystem they're providing, not just the store or APIs alone. If they haven't thought through issues like billing and discovery, it's a big warning sign.

If you work for a platform or web app company that wants to create a developer community, you need to plan the whole ecosystem and make sure it'll all work. This is especially important for a mobile company that wants to compete with the iPhone store. The way to fight iPhone for developers is to create a superior ecosystem. Apple's weak point is the business and technical restrictions on its developers, and the limited reach of the iPhone APIs. If another vendor -- say, Nokia or Google or Microsoft -- can pair a great store and powerful development with more openness and broader reach, they might be able to give Apple some serious competition. Elia Freedman had some good suggestions on ways to start (link).

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PS: Thanks to MobHappy for including my post on smartphone share in the Carnival of the Mobilists (link).

Conference time

I'll be doing the Grande Tour des Conferences in the San Francisco area next week. Let me know if you'll be in town and want to meet. My contact info is here.

On Monday, I'm speaking at Mobile Web Megatrends in Berkeley. My topics are:

Mobile data: Convergence or divergence?
The press is predicting a clash of the titans as Apple, Google, Nokia, and a host of other players all try to dominate the smartphone market. How is the battle likely to turn out? Will one company dominate the market? And where should a mobile app developer invest?

and

Apps for mobile devices - What happens next?
Apple's iPhone app store is getting a lot of publicity, and some industry players, such as TMobile USA, are rumored to be working on something similar. What's the future of mobile applications? Will the market grow explosively? What are the barriers to growth? Can a competitor beat the iPhone app store, or is everyone just going to play catch-up?

The speaker lineup is interesting, and I'm looking forward to it.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I'll be at the Tech Crunch conference in San Francisco (not speaking there, just taking notes). On Thursday it's CTIA, and then on Friday I'm an un-panelist at the Mobile Jam Session at CTIA. The folks at WIP have set up some very interesting discussion sessions.

I'll be posting some notes on what I hear, both here and at Rubicon's website.

Does anybody really know what smartphone market share is?

An article in Wired online this week had a chart showing US smartphone market share (link). The chart gave more detail than I've seen recently from other research companies, so I thought it was worth reproducing the data here:



The source is Nielsen Mobile, formerly Telephia. The interesting thing about them is that they do much of the service quality monitoring for the operators, so they have much more direct access to mobile usage information than folks like IDC and Canalys, the people usually quoted for smartphone share.

Wired was focused on Palm's loss of market share, which is indeed striking (but not exactly news). But take a look at the chart again; there are a couple of other items that I think are more newsworthy.

The first surprise is that Nielsen shows Apple in fourth place in smartphone share. That's wildly different from what Canalys, the source usually reported, has been saying (link). Here's how they compare for Q4 2007:




What in the world is going on here?

I'm not sure, but I have some guesses. Canalys doesn't directly measure market share, it receives self-reported shipment reports from the manufacturers and then adds them up. That means Canalys measures shipments into the channel rather than sales, and it depends on the hardware companies to be honest.

Riiiight.

Nielsen Mobile doesn't explain on its website exactly how it measures share, but apparently it's using a mix of survey results and the usage data it gathers from the operators (link). So its numbers should reflect current usage of phones rather than shipments. If Nielsen is measuring installed base share, rather than share of current sales, that might explain the difference. Although in that case, share should not be changing as fast as Nielsen shows. So I'm still confused.

If anybody can shed more light on the source of the difference, please post a comment. I've also asked Nielsen, and will let you know if I hear anything.

The conflict in the numbers underlines how ridiculously useless the publicly-available third party sales numbers are in the mobile phone market, and how little attention the press is paying to the inconsistencies. Apple's share varies from 8% to 28%, and no one even notices. Hey, we got a pretty chart and it confirms what we wanted to say, so don't ask questions.

If you want more information on the problems with mobile market share tracking, I wrote a detailed post here (link).

I said there were two newsworthy things about the Nielsen numbers. Can you spot the second one?

That's right, since the iPhone was released, RIM has been gaining share. So much for the folks who predicted at the launch of the iPhone that it was going to take the smartphone market away from RIM. Instead, at least in the first round of competition, we see what you'd expect from a segmented market -- RIM appeals to some customers, Apple appeals to a different group, and both companies do well.

I can't wait to see what the numbers will look like in six months, after the iPhone 3G has been out for a while. Although probably Canalys and Nielsen will still disagree wildly on what's happening.

Only 10% of Japanese people know how to use all the functions in their mobile phones

A Japanese survey of mobile phone users, translated by What Japan Thinks, reports that only about 10% of Japanese mobile phone users say they have mastery (or a good command) over all the functions of their mobile phones (link). About 75% of users say they have mastered less than half of the functions in the phone.

The most confusing functions were e-wallet, applications in general, music player, and Internet access.

What Japan Thinks concludes that few people in Japan "are really comfortable with their phones," which I find reassuring because it says that people in Japan aren't all that different from everyone else on the planet. In many countries there's a tendency to believe that people in Japan (and Korea) use mobile devices so differently from everyone else that there's nothing useful to learn from them. It's as if they're on a different planet. But the reality is that even in Japan, a phone overloaded with features and cryptic menus is confusing to anyone except the most dedicated technophiles.

It is interesting that so many mobile phones in Japan have e-wallet, applications, music, and Internet built in. That's a result of the aggressive rollout of integrated phones and online services by Japanese mobile phone operators -- the real driver that I think makes the Japanese mobile market so different.

(By the way, in case anyone's interested, another survey determined that 14 percent of Japanese cats won't go to the bathroom if someone's watching [link]. Who knew?)

Hypenotized by Apple

Watching the cloud of hype around last week's release of the new iPhone, I was struck by the way Apple's psychological influence over the tech industry continues to grow. I'm having trouble thinking of any recent technology product, let alone a smartphone, that got such heavy coverage for both its announcement and its initial shipment.

Apple's PR miasma is also starting to twist the thinking of people in the tech industry who ought to know better. Apple's gradually becoming the yardstick against which other tech companies are measured -- and since Apple is such a unique company, it's almost impossible for anyone else to measure up.

Case in point: A recent commentary by a CNET reporter, writing about RIM (link):

"There is no RIM hype machine and when a new BlackBerry is released, hardly anyone in the major media outlets care. And if they don't care, neither will the average consumer who doesn't know too much about the tech industry and won't read columns like this; they rely on the NBCs of the world to get by. So if RIM wants to more effectively compete against Apple, it needs to do everything it can to follow the Steve Jobs formula: secrecy, compelling products, and a great PR team. If it does, look for RIM to not lose as much ground as you may think. But if it doesn't, Apple will run amok."

Problem number one with this thinking is that Apple and RIM don't sell to the same markets. RIM's core is middle-aged business professionals; Apple's is hip twentysomethings. I'm not saying there is no overlap, but I've spoken to plenty of RIM users who would be embarrassed to carry a music-playing, video-watching hunk of eye candy like the iPhone into a business meeting. It's like announcing to a client, "I spend my work time on YouTube."

The second problem is that Apple's skill at PR has somehow turned into an excuse for reporters not to do their jobs. The implied message in the CNET article is, "if you don't put on a spectacle, the press will ignore your products." Excuse me, but isn't the press's job to dig out the real value and separate it from the hype? Don't we pay you (or sit through your ads) to look past the PR and fancy speeches and advise us on what really matters? If we just wanted someone to echo the latest hype, we could get all our news from blogs.

But the third problem is the one that worries me the most. Apple is almost uniquely good at marketing. Its communication power is a combination of longtime company history, Steve Jobs' personality, and a culture that values perfection in marcom. Any tech company that makes its goal to match Apple's flash is going to look bad by comparison.

If anyone from RIM is reading this, please listen to me closely. I beg of you, don't be chumps. You're Canadian, for God's sake. You don't do sexy. You do humble and inoffensive.

Steve's from California. He's a pop culture icon from the '70s; the Madonna of technology. If you try to imitate him, you're going to look like mom and dad pogo-dancing when Rock Lobster comes on at a wedding reception.

Not pretty. Not pretty at all.

Which brings us to Microsoft's latest marketing plan.

Word on the street is that Microsoft is planning a huge advertising campaign this fall to pimp its image. Microsoft executives say they have finally tired of taking all that abuse from the Mac vs. PC ads, and they're going to fire back with their own cool advertising this fall.

Remember what I said at the start of this post about Apple twisting the minds of tech company managers? They have done an incredible number on Microsoft, the sort of thing I used to dream about when I worked at Apple.


Welcome, Microsoft. Seriously.

When I was at Apple, one the competitive team's central goals was to goad Microsoft and Intel into targeting us in public. We used all sorts of tactics to irritate them. We printed bumper stickers that read "Honk if your Pentium has bugs." We hounded them in online discussions. We did press and analyst tours demonstrating all sorts of annoying flaws we'd found in Windows.

The whole idea was to get them so pissed off that they would lash out at us in public. Because we knew that when a market leader attacks a challenger, it just makes the challenger more credible.

So what is Microsoft doing? It's attacking the challenger. Microsoft VP Brad Brooks specifically called out Apple in a recent speech (link):

"There are a lot of myths out there in the marketplace today, a lot of myths around Windows Vista...we know the story is very different than what our competitors would like our customers to think.... Windows Vista is the safest OS in terms of security vulnerabilities in its first year of operation, safer than any other commercial or Open Source OS in its launch. Now, I don't hear Apple making claims about security around a product that is that great.... The other big thing that's different this time around is that we've got a pretty noisy competitor out there. You know it, I know it. It's had an impact, been a source of frustration for you, but today, that line, we're going to start to challenge. We're going to get our story back out into the marketplace.... We've got a highly vocal minority out there in Apple. They kind of look at this and say, hey, you know what, you're kind of boring with the mundane message; it's not cool. They tell you it's the "i-way" or the highway. Well, you know what--we think that's kind of a sad message."

Macintosh share is still just a small fraction of Windows' share, but Microsoft is treating Apple like not just a challenger, but as the opinion leader. Microsoft is responding to Apple's marketing, and what's worse, it's bragging about it in public. What an incredible turnaround from Steve Jobs' first days back at Apple, less than ten years ago, when Bill Gates appeared on the big screen and Jobs publicly kowtowed to him.

It's easy to say what Microsoft shouldn't do, but a lot harder to say what they should do. They do have an image problem, and they do need to do something about it. Here's my take: Apple has always been the cool one, and always will be. Microsoft has traditionally been the safe one. Not as flashy as Apple, but dependable and prudent; the choice that'll never get you fired. That's why 80% of the public has chosen Windows over the years. Rather than trying to act cool, which is destined to end in embarrassment, I think Microsoft should apologize for the problems with Vista, give a timeline for fixing them (I think many of them actually are fixed by this point), and then move heaven and earth to make sure people see them deliver on that promise.

The ironic thing is that Brooks actually did some of that in his speech:

"We had an ambitious plan. We made some significant investments around security in this product. And you know what, those investments, they broke some things. They broke a lot of things. We know that. And we know it caused you a lot of pain in front of your customers, in front of our customers. And it got a lot of customers thinking, and even yourselves and our partners thinking, "Hey, is Windows Vista a generation that I want to make an investment in?" "

That's not a bad start, but in today's Apple-soaked industry atmosphere, the snide comments on Apple dominated the coverage. The best example was the Wall Street Journal's business and technology blog, which headlined its article, "Microsoft Ready to Hit Back at Mac Guy" (link).

So now every Microsoft ad in the new campaign is going to be judged on whether or not it's as clever and cool as an Apple ad. I'd like to ask for a show of hands -- who thinks Microsoft can out-cool Apple?

Anyone?

And as for RIM, well, I'm sure you could do a better job of PR than you do today. But don't try to be sexy. A message more like, "real men use a thumb keyboard" is probably the ticket for you.

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Thanks to mjelly.com for featuring Mobile Opportunity in the latest Carnival of the Mobilists.

The end of the dream

No matter how it works out in the long run, the purchase of Symbian by Nokia marks the end of a dream -- the creation of a new independent OS company to be the mobile equivalent of Microsoft. Put a few beers into former Symbian employees and they'll get a little wistful about it, but the company they talk about most often is Psion, the PDA company that spawned Symbian.

Psion never got much attention in the US, but it was a pioneer in the PDA market in the UK, and even to this day I think the Psion Revo is one of the two coolest-looking PDAs ever made (the Palm V is the other one).


The Revo

Psion explored many ideas that eventually turned into major new consumer electronics categories, but it failed to follow up on them. The company was effectively dismembered when Symbian was formed, and many of its best people drifted off to other companies. Now Symbian itself is transitioning to something very different, with most of its people absorbed into Nokia. What the Psion veterans talk about wistfully is how many smart people worked at Psion, how many great ideas the company fumbled, and how successful many of the people have been in the tech industry post-Psion. In this sense, Psion is similar to many other tech pioneer companies that assembled staffs of very bright people, taught them how to work together, and then blew apart like exploding stars, scattering the elements of new companies across the industry. This process dates back at least to Fairchild Semiconductor, which trained the founders of many of the most prominent semiconductor companies (link). You can find similar networks of former employees from places like Apple, Netscape, and Palm. I think Yahoo is in the process of forming a network now, and some day there's going to be a dandy one made of former Googlers.

What makes the Psion story different is that many of the Psion veterans had to leave the UK, or join non-UK companies, in order to become successful. Some are in other parts of Europe, some are in the US, and some are in London but working for foreign companies. This is a source of intense frustration to the Psion folks I've talked with. They feel like not only their company failed, but their country failed to take advantage of the expertise they had built.

There's a big body of academic research on why Silicon Valley has been successful in sustaining itself, and part of the reason is that the Valley recycles companies very efficiently. Failing companies do not last long, but in the process the brightest people and ideas are rarely lost, they are just shuffled around into new configurations.

About a year ago, Andrew Orlowski of the Register wrote an amazing article on the history of Psion, and how company culture and government philosophy failed to take advantage of it to grow a new industry. It's the longest piece I've ever seen in the Register, almost the nucleus of a book, and it's well worth reading. It didn't get enough attention when it was published, and I'm embarrassed to say that I never posted a link to it. So I'm glad to remedy that now. If you want to understand the context what happened to Symbian, and learn a bit about how the tech industry works, go read it here.

If you want to hear more about what Symbian is morphing into, two of its executives have just started personal weblogs in which they are commenting on the migration to Symbian Foundation (among other things). It's an interesting move, and it seems symbolic of the transition they're trying to make into the open source world. Previously Symbian had a company blog that several execs contributed to; now the execs have personal blogs where they talk directly to the industry.

David Wood (Symbian's EVP of Research) link.
John Forsyth (Symbian's Strategy VP) link.