Most of the press coverage of Microsoft recently has obviously been focused on their on-off pursuit of the coy Yahoo!. Followed by lots of analyses of what Redmond needs to do now to catch up in Search and Advertising.
Mr Ballmer has also spoken a lot about how they understand that software is moving to cloud based services and that they are responding to this too.
But, as readers of MobHappy will know, the cloud is only half the future.
The other half is that the mobile will become the most important digital device on a number of different levels; more people have web connected mobiles than connected PCs - and that’s already happened; outside N America and Europe, the PC itself is going to be either leapfrogged or annihilated, which will profoundly affect the way that digital data is consumed everywhere; and in the words of my ongoing mantra, the mobile will do to the PC, what the PC did to the mainframe*.
This means that mobile needs to be central to Microsoft’s strategy if they are to have a future and a lack of success in this area means that their current problems are going to seem trivial in comparison.
Which is why their current sales on Windows Mobile must be worrying them more that they’re letting on, with their recent admirably jaunty “What? Problem? Us?” press conference, where they admitted missing their target by 10%, or some 2 million units in real money. However you spin this - and they tried with this great quote “It sounds like a large number of units, but actually, it’s less than about a month’s worth of a run-rate.” - it’s bad news.
There is some comfort in the rising market share - currently at 13% of smartphones. But let’s just look at that. According to AdMob Metrics which measures consumption of mobile web pages in the wild, yes 13% of pages were viewed worldwide on Windows Mobile devices, out of a potential 3.5 Billion. But already iPhone has a 5% share and don’t forget these Metrics (and Windows Mobile results) were before iPhone 3G kicked in and before it was available in so many more territories, which surely must take a chunk out of the future sales. They’ll also have to contend with Symbian going open source (who already dominate the market with a 58% share based on these Metrics), the rise and rise of the Crackberry by the besuited amongst us and possibly the launch of Android, although I’m not sure how influential that’s going to be now.
It actually gets even bleaker than this. As I observed above, some of the great changes in mobile are going to be led by markets where the mobile is already, and will continue to be, the primary digital device. But outside the US, Windows Mobile is nothing. Look again at the Metrics and while Windows has a healthy slug of 27% of the US, in the other top markets for mobile web consumption, it’s insignificant, with the best success coming in the UK, where they have a measly 4% share**.
I don’t wish to add to their troubles and certainly take no pleasure in observing this. However, it’s far more important that Microsoft gets their mobile strategy sorted out than worrying about Search - as it’s no less than a matter of medium-to-long-term survival. I’d suggest that Windows Mobile probably isn’t going to be the answer and they need to think of a radical and brave new direction to assure their future in a world where the mobile is rampant.
* If you’re not a regular reader, please don’t bother to point out that the PC is irreplaceable for tasks like writing a document, preparing a presentation or editing video. If you dock your mobile into a monitor and keyboard combo (using today’s technology), you don’t need a PC.
** There may be other markets where Windows Mobile might be doing better and please let me know in a comment if you have access to knowledge that I don’t. But overall, I don’t think this is unrepresentative of the state Windows today.
Years ago, I read a scifi novel (can’t remember who by) where the author referred to an all-too-common crime inflicted on women. Saddo blokes would call them on video phones (while blocking their caller ID), with the camera focused on their genitalia and sort of gig about a little.
It actually sounds pretty harmless, albeit very irritating, if it happened to you a lot. But perhaps, on first consideration no more than say, a persistent window replacement sales person calling repeatedly.
I read this story this morning about a poor women who this is happening to now, in another case of scifi proving to be an accurate portrayal of the future. She’s been receiving pics of a penis sent anonymously to her phone. The thing is, her husband was killed about a month ago (in a completely unrelated traffic incident) and she understandably finds these photos really upsetting.
A Penectomy should put a stop the guy doing it, if that doesn’t sound too extreme. No, I don’t think it does, on reflection - you can’t waggle your bits if they’re not there anymore and perhaps we need some new creative solutions for new creative types of crime.
One of the Autumn events that I’m speaking at and is shaping up to be very interesting is Informa’s Mobile Web Europe. Lots of great speakers and officially a hot topic these days - at long last.
In fact, now that even mighty media organisations like the BBC (”Boom Times Ahead for the Mobile Web”) are starting to cover it more seriously, I think we’re going to see a frenzy of coverage like we saw back in 1995/6 for the PC web. It’s been a bit of a puzzle for me in the last few years that usage of the mobile web is higher than the PC web back in those days and yet the media has been curiously silent on the subject.
However, once the media weighs in, we’re going to see explosive growth. It’s already growing at 100% year on year according to some recent tracking we did at AdMob, but there’s plenty of potential yet.
One of the ways to get mobile is to set up a .mobi site and as part of the conference, The .mobi Advisory Group are sponsoring the ILovetheMobileWeb Awards, which will showcase the very best .mobi mobile websites. So if you have a whizzy, wonderful or wacky .mobi site, get entering (free) before 22nd August.
You might find this previous post useful, where we looked at 10 Rules for Mobile Website Creation.
You’ve probably seen us talk about Alfie Dennen and all the cool stuff he and his team have done at moblog:tech before, but he never fails to turn up with cool new things. His latest trick is a brand new platform that’s powering their moblog community. You can check it out in action at Leave No Trace, a moblog put up by Greenpeace, Oxfam and WaterAid about the recent Glastonbury festival.
You can also see it in action at We Love Your Accent, a cool site that shows off one of the new features — integration with the Spinvox service. People in the UK can call in and leave a voice message about their favorite British accent. Spinvox converts it to text and makes a new blog post that also contains the audio file. The best caller will win a free Nokia N82 (my current mobile of choice ) and a year’s subscription to Moblog and Spinvox, along with some Moo cards.
There’s a lot of good stuff in this new release: the ability to users to put their moblog on their own URL (such as Alfie’s at moblog.4lfie.com; easy changes to the styles of both web and mobile sites; support for audio and video, which get displayed in inline Flash; SEO enhancements and plenty more.
A big part of the new platform is the support for group moblogs, as used on the Leave No Trace site. It uses SMS/MMS keywords — so anybody can set up a group, grab a keyword, and start their own campaign. Lots of possibilities there, both for brands and individual users.
So much good stuff here on top of what I’ve mentioned: GPS support, Twitter autoping — and there’s an API coming so people will be able to build their own apps and services on top of the platform. Be sure to go on over to moblog.net and see what Alfie and company have knocked up.
However, if Italians feel that their local food retailer is charging unreasonable prices, they can now call on a new service to help them haggle or walk away. Thanks to a short message service (SMS) text system set up jointly by the Italian agriculture ministry and consumer associations, shoppers can check the average price of different foods in northern, central and southern Italy.
Users fire off a message to the SMS Consumatori service, and they get a response showing the average consumer prices in different parts of Italy, as well as wholesale prices.
Interesting — another example of mobiles being used to spread information so markets function more efficiently. We’ve seen several examples of this in Africa, where farmers and fishermen use mobiles to check on market prices and get other information. Reuters is testing a similar mobile market information service in India.
I’m not sure how directly this Italian service will benefit consumers, though it could help keep produce sellers in local markets from over-inflating prices. But I’m interested to see these sorts of services that provide consumers with more information, in particular, about their food, flourish. There have been several services in Japan that use QR codes to provide information on provenance of different food items — something that could become popular given peoples’ concerns over contaminated or GM food, and their desire to eat more organics or humanely raised meat.
I was out in San Diego a while back for Qualcomm’s annual BREW confab. It’s pretty easy to think of Qualcomm as this monolithic and slightly nasty company that does little more than bully its way to profits with patents and intellectual property and some chips, and is only interested in things that lead to more CDMA device sales so it can grab more royalties. That may or may not be the case, but I do think there’s some pretty interesting stuff coming out of the company’s Internet Services unit that’s not solely CDMA-centric and is genuinely cool.
One thing that caught my eye is the Plaza widget technology it announced. On the face of it, Plaza is YAMWP — yet another mobile widget platform. But this is one that definitely bears watching for several reasons, but one of them being Qualcomm wants operators involved. That’s likely to cause some kickback right away, because for many people, operators have a reverse Midas touch. But it’s important to remember that they still play a huge role as gatekeepers to the mass market, and their support of one widget platform over another, and the ability to give it a prominent place on the devices they sell, give them a lot of power as kingmakers.
Plaza is not a BREW-specific solution, it’ll be available across multiple platforms, and the QIS exec I talked to about it went to lengths to stress that Plaza and BREW are separate, but complementary technologies. That said, it’s easy to see how some of the lessons and strengths of BREW could be rolled into Plaza and strengthen it. For instance, BREW offers a pretty solid end-to-end application discovery and download solution. It’s completely closed, yes, but it’s probably about the closest thing out there to the iPhone App Store (which, of course, is closed too).
The BREW marketplace is really good at monetization, especially from the operator perspective. So it’s easy to see how Qualcomm could put some similar stuff into Plaza, and create this widget environment that operators would love, charging users for each widget and all the content coming through them. But, they don’t want to. They get that for widgets to take off, they can’t work that way. They see the monetization for the operator coming indirectly, and forsee the widgets themselves being free to download. That said, if an operator wanted to offer their own widgets as gateways to pay services alongside the Plaza gallery of free widgets, that’s an option. But Qualcomm sees Plaza as primarily being a tool for operators to improve the user experience, increase takeup of data services, and reduce churn.
I think the parts of BREW that Qualcomm hopes will most show through in Plaza are the relative ease of the developer experience and its appeal to operators. By embracing operators and making them part of the value chain, Qualcomm can steal a lead over other mobile widget platforms.
My good friend Tarek Abu-Esber wondered earlier this week when the mobile web will hit mass adoption, and more specifically, what would define that:
While I might not go as far as using the term “critical-mass” I definitely agree with the overall idea of their report. The traditional barriers to the Mobile Web are all being broken and this is helping drive Mobile Web usage: Walled Gardens, Data Charges, Connection Speeds, Device & Browser Technology, compelling content.
All this got me wondering, how long till the Mobile Web hits mass-adoption? More specifically, what would be defined as “mass-adoption”?
Interesting question he’s asking, wondering what the criteria will be. I’ve got no idea what objective one — a number of users, devices, or traffic — could be used. Subjectively, I think it will be when I can make reference to the mobile web with normobs and they know what the hell I’m talking about With that in mind, I think we’re getting there. Even if people aren’t using the mobile web, they’re certainly becoming more aware of it.
One number jumps out from that IDC release: they say 40% of internet users worldwide have mobile internet access. Keep in mind that having access isn’t the same as actually using it, though.
Though almost every discussion at the MobileBeat conference in Sunnyvale, Calif., on Thursday centered around the iPhone, venture capitalists told mobile entrepreneurs to broaden their focus and build applications for all phones. Still, all anyone wanted to talk about was the Apple App Store, from which users have downloaded 30 million applications for the iPhone this month.
Startups should “intelligently hedge their bets across multiple platforms,” advised Richard Wong of Accel Partners. His firm has invested in mobile games and application site GetJar, “the store for the other 3 billion phones that aren’t iPhones,” as Mr. Wong put it.
Interesting stuff. VCs (one of whom created an iPhone-specific fund) reminding Valley developers to think outside the iPhone — hard to argue with that on a market share or geographic basis. But the ease of development for the iPhone is pretty alluring for many of these guys, so the CEO of Loopt suggests they first develop for the iPhone and use it as a proving ground, then go to other platforms. Sounds like a decent idea, but it seems to have a few pitfalls, too. The controlled channel of the App Store doesn’t really replicate the distribution experience in the rest of the market, and the demographics of the iPhone user base may not accurately represent the wider mobile market, particularly if you’re trying to target users in countries where the iPhone’s unavailable. Also, what if you want an app to do things that aren’t possible with iPhone apps?
But, there are still good takeaways here for platform providers, device vendors and operators: make development easier, and make app discovery and download simple and rewarding. More thoughts on the former from Symbian VP David Wood, more on the latter from yours truly.
Sometimes it’s nice to have your gutfeel confirmed and Comscore/M:Metrics’ latest findings do just that. They report that map usage is growing far more quickly in mobile that it is online; 82% on the US and 49% growth in Europe against single digit growth via the PC.
This feel right as the map on the mobile is a very cool tool indeed and naturally lends itself to personal navigation. I also think that the future direction of location based marketing is probably going to be around popping ads up on maps as they are viewed on mobile devices, although we’ll have to see how effective they might be. But this methodology certainly overcomes a lot of the other inherent issues surrounding LBM.
But before we get too excited about mapping on mobile though, let’s just also note that it’s very easy to achieve high percentage growth on anything from a low base. Today only about 8% of mobile owners use maps in the US and only 3% in Europe. This compares with usage online of around 45%, so we have a while to wait before the real potential of mobile, as opposed to PC, mapping can be judged.
However, if I had to make a bet on the future on one or the other, I’d say that mobile maps will be the clear longterm winner.
About three years ago, Russell posted about the ICE phenomenon (and the ensuing hoax email). It’s pretty well known by now: ICE stands for In Case of Emergency, and the idea is to put the letters in front of a contact in your phone, so emergency workers know who to contact should you be in an accident.
The ITU, the global telecom standards body, has picked up on the idea, and mandated that instead of ICE, we should all use Arabic numerals starting with 01, then 02 and on down the line (so you’d have “01your wife’s name”, etc.). By using Arabic numerals, the ITU hopes to create a globally recognized method that’s useful in places that don’t use Roman script, or where ICE wouldn’t resonate as anything meaningful.
Sounds like a good idea, as it also carries the benefit that most phones will list contacts with numerals at the top of the list, making them easy to find. I’m just curious, though, to what degree public-safety people pay attention to this sort of stuff. The ICE idea was already well-established in many places, and I doubt too many first responders pay much attention to the ITU’s standards-setting work. So if you’re in a place like the US or UK where the ICE meme had gone around, what to do? Use one or the other, or both?
) and a year’s subscription to Moblog and Spinvox, along with some Moo cards.
With that in mind, I think we’re getting there. Even if people aren’t using the mobile web, they’re certainly becoming more aware of it.
