IntoMobileGoogle lauds iPhoneIntoMobile, CA - 2 hours agoWhat does Google think about the iPhone? Well, even with the competing mobile platform, Android, that Google is currently pushing to develop, it seems that …Sergey Brin’s iPhone Adventure in Davos New York TimesGoogle's Schmidt: iPhone 'first of a generation' ElectronistaEarnings up at Google but just shy of expectations
Written by unlocker on March 6th, 2008 with no comments.
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“Google on Wednesday said it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset”
You can see the full article here.
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Written by Chris on February 16th, 2008 with no comments.
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Could Yahoo be fixed and thrive as an independent company? I think it could, but now we'll probably never know, because Microsoft wants to buy it. There are reports that private equity firms, and possibly News Corp, also want to bid (
link). Even Google has supposedly offered to help (
link). But by declaring its desire for Yahoo, Microsoft has basically acknowledged that its own Internet business is failing. Now that Microsoft has said that in public, it has no choice but to outbid everyone else.
Which is a shame, because I think the combined companies are likely to fail. To explain why, I have to talk about the right and wrong ways to compete with an industry leader...
How to fight a leaderIn my opinion, the best way to fight a dominant company at the top of their game is not to go head to head with them. You don't launch a competing line of mainframes against IBM in the 1960s, and you don't launch a consumer operating system against Microsoft in the mid-1990s. What you want to do is challenge them in a business they don't understand, or better yet an area where their own strengths make them weak. That's what Google did -- while Microsoft was focused on beating Netscape, AOL and the other first-generation Internet companies, Google quietly established a franchise in search advertising. It's now using this secure base to subsidize free online applications (and a mobile operating system) that compete with Microsoft.
Although Google's direct impact on Microsoft's applications business to date has been miniscule, Google's tactics will eventually present Microsoft with a Catch-22 situation: If it tries to hold the line on prices, its customers will gradually migrate away. If it matches Google on price, it destroys its own revenues.
Microsoft's response has been to try to get a piece of Google's advertising revenue. First it tried to build its own search and advertising business. Now that's failing, so it wants to buy Yahoo's to get critical mass.
The problem is that even with Yahoo, Microsoft will still be far behind Google in search advertising. Google has a huge lead, and is willing and able to spend lavishly to defend it if it has to. I think what Microsoft is doing is equivalent to leading an infantry charge uphill against an infinite number of machine guns.
If Microsoft really wants to spend $45 billion, I think it would be far better served by investing it to attack someplace where Google is weak.
Google's weaknessesA dominant company's strengths are also usually its weaknesses. (For example, IBM was so deeply embedded in corporate big iron that it couldn't understand the PC business. Microsoft was so caught up in monetizing a computer platform that it couldn't picture someone giving away the whole thing.) Google's weakness is its beautifully managed and consistent corporate culture. Google hires only the best and brightest software engineers. It hires them young, so they can be molded, and it brags about screening them all for "Googliness." That consistent culture means it acts far more predictably than many technology companies, and it has very consistent blind spots.
One of Google's blind spots it that it can't tell the difference between usability and utility. Usability is the process of making software easy to learn without a manual or extensive training. Google is extremely good at designing for usability. Its interfaces are clear, uncluttered, and generally self-explanatory. Utility is the ability of a product to solve a major problem for a user. That requires the designer to get inside the head of the target customer, understanding not only his or her rational needs but also the emotional landscape. Google is terrible at designing for utility. It tends to attack problems that engineers care about, rather than normal people; and it often produces elegant technologies that don't engage people emotionally and fail to deliver the full solution they need. (If you want a great example of the difference between usability and utility, compare the old Google Video to YouTube. Google Video was cleaner and easier to use, but it was launched without sufficient content, and was about as emotionally engaging as a slab of concrete.)
One of the best ways to compete with Google, then, is to focus on utility -- to create online products and services that solve real problems for customers, and address both emotional and rational needs. That's what Amazon is doing with Amazon Web Services (although in this case the customers are developers rather than consumers.)
There are many, many more opportunities to create high-utility Internet applications. What you need is a critical mass of bright engineers, a product management culture that understands how to design for utility, and senior management that focuses the company on its best opportunities. Designing for utility takes more resources than just tossing a product out there, so management must restrict the number of projects the company undertakes.
Yahoo has plenty of bright engineers, and I think it understands utility better than Google. Ironically, Yahoo's attempt to make itself into a media company probably helped here, because it forced the company to learn about engaging people emotionally.
What Yahoo has lacked, in my opinion, is the awareness that it's actually a products company, not a media company; and the management discipline to focus on a small number of initiatives.
Will a buyout by Microsoft fix those problems? I don't think so. Microsoft itself isn't great at designing for utility. Mostly, it focuses on copying and adapting things that have been developed by others. One of the most depressing documents I've seen on the Web recently was the alleged plan for Windows Mobile 7 (
link). Assuming that the plan is genuine, it shows that rather than trying to do something new in mobiles, Microsoft is slavishly trying to copy and "improve" on the interface of the iPhone (so, for example, rather than just using finger touches you can also shake the phone to make it do things). This comes after Microsoft spent the last couple of years trying to copy RIM, and before that Palm.
Even the bid for Yahoo is driven by Microsoft's desperate desire to copy and co-opt another company's business model. That's exactly what Yahoo doesn't need. Rather than focused management that can pick out the most disruptive embers in Yahoo's portfolio and fan them into bonfires, Yahoo is likely to get layers of well-meaning ROI analysis, a distracting flood of resources, political integration hassles, cultural conflicts, and a mandate to "concentrate on the core."
The process will probably strangle Yahoo and distract Microsoft. I really hope I'm wrong, but I think there's a very good chance that the merger will be the beginning of the end for both companies.
Written by Prathik on February 4th, 2008 with no comments.
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Nokia bought Trolltech for about $150 million, and there's all sorts of speculation online about what it means. Before I get to that, let me quickly summarize what Trolltech does:
Trolltech is a Norwegian company that makes development tools and Linux software. Its best-known products are Qt (a software layer and development tools for writing applications that run across multiple operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and Linux), Qtopia (a user interface and applications layer for Linux), and Qtopia Phone Edition (a Linux software environment for mobile phones).
In the mobile world, Qtopia Phone Edition has been the company's best-known product, although it hasn't exactly been a commercial success. Motorola uses a version of Qt in its Linux mobile phones, but not all of Qtopia. The Sony Mylo mobile device uses Qtopia, as did the Sharp Zaurus PDAs. But Trolltech had so much trouble getting a mainstream phone licensee for Qtopia that it created its own hardware prototype, the Greenphone. (Out of fairness, I should add that Trolltech has a lot of other tiny licensees you've never heard of; you can see the full list
here.)
The obvious assumption would be that Nokia bought Trolltech for its phone technology, but that's not what Nokia says. The company's
press release says Trolltech will help advance its "cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications, and...Internet services business. With Trolltech, Nokia and third party developers will be able to develop applications that work in the Internet, across Nokia's device portfolio and on PCs."
All About Symbian reinforced that message, reproducing a slide from the Nokia press briefing that showed Qt layered on top of Nokia Series 40, S60, and a variety of desktop PC operating systems (
link). The Guardian quoted a Nokia spokesperson as saying the emphasis of the deal is development tools: "This is about Trolltech's fantastic tools. You can much faster develop programmes which can work on multiple platforms." (
link).
Vnunet quoted an analyst saying that Nokia will use Qtopia to help deploy its Ovi Internet services cross-platform (
link). I don't really see the Internet connection; Qtopia has not been a contender in the net applications world the way that Flash and Silverlight are. But maybe Nokia wants to build it into a contender.
Other analysts suggested other motivations for the purchase. Some of the commentary on Slashdot suggested that Nokia is investing in Linux to counter Google Android (
link). ArsTechnica suggested that Nokia might be planning to replace S60 with Qt (
link), while others suggested that Nokia plans to use Linux instead of Symbian. Richard Windsor of Nomura pointed out in an e-mail analysis that the purchase of Qt rips the guts out of Motorola's Linux plans, although he guesses that's more of a happy side effect for Nokia than the primary motivation.
But an unsigned article on ZDNet UK had the most sweeping interpretation, basically saying that this spells certain death for all proprietary operating systems (
link):
Nokia's bet is that the sheer size of the Qt 4-based market will be a decisive inducement for everyone else, handset makers, operators, and pure applications players alike, and that the explosion in compatibility will amplify the market for everyone much as happened on the desktop when MS-DOS anointed the PC architecture. But unlike then, Qt 4 will break forever the idea that one part of the market can seal itself off as a profitable mini-universe, an idea as archaic in the 21st century as the feudalism it so closely resembles.
As we say here in California, I want some of what he's been smoking.
What does it really mean?We're all assuming that Nokia actually has a coherent master plan here. Although $150m is a lot of money to me personally, it's mouse nuts to Nokia. Maybe Nokia bought Trolltech just as an experiment, or to keep it from falling into some other company's hands. The fact that Nokia's going to continue to develop its Maemo version of Linux, which is not based on the Trolltech technology, suggests a certain amount of incoherence.
If you want to be really Machiavellian, you could speculate that this purchase is the Nokia mobile phone organization's answer to Maemo -- "you tablet guys keep your version of Linux, now we have our own."
But let's assume there really is a plan, and it's aimed at competitors. About six months ago, I wrote about Nokia's ambitions to be a computer company (
link). Now we see them dealing themselves into the operating system competition as well. No matter what you think Nokia's motives are, the fact is that it's now the owner of a respectable cross-platform software layer that runs on PCs and mobile devices. Nokia is now a software layer company, in very direct competition with other layer companies like Microsoft and Adobe and Sun. The deal also makes Nokia a much more important player in the open source community. And it puts Nokia in more direct opposition to the companies with their own operating systems -- Apple and Google and (once again) Microsoft.
That's a huge potential change. I say "potential" because Nokia has a lot more to do if it really wants to compete. The Trolltech team will need more investment (they have been losing money) and Nokia has a lot of work to do in developer evangelism and support to make the challenge real. But the potential is there.
I think that as the implications of the deal become clear, Nokia may have trouble continuing to partner with some of its new competitors. For example, it has spent a lot of time positioning itself as a partner to Adobe Air, but it's hard to see the evolved Qt as anything other than a competitor. Same thing for Google.
As for how this fits with all of Nokia's other products, I'm having a lot of trouble understanding how Qt will cohabit with S60 and Series 40. What exactly are developers supposed to develop for, and which user interface will the phones feature? If Nokia tries to keep all of them going, its phone software is going to look like a petit four, with layers stacked on layers stacked on layers. That makes for a nice pastry, but in a mobile phone it's a recipe for bad performance and short battery life. It's also a certain way to confuse developers.
So a lot depends on Nokia's next steps. Does Qt replace Series 40 and S60? I don't know which group within Nokia made the Trolltech deal, but I wonder if the biggest competitive battle might end up being the one inside the company, between its competing software standards.
Written by Prathik on January 29th, 2008 with no comments.
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If you’re not using Flickr but Google’s Picasa instead, now you have an iPhone version which is very well executed, check out the screenshots:
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Written by Chris on December 13th, 2007 with no comments.
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