This isn't shaping up to be the transcendent week that Microsoft wanted it to be. The Windows 8 announcement isn't a failure by any means, but the coverage is a lot more mixed and confused than I'm sure Microsoft would have liked. That's partly due to some clever marketing by Microsoft's competitors, and partly due to some mistakes made by Microsoft itself.
The situation all came together for me this morning when I did a brief appearance on Bloomberg TV, a cable business channel in the US. The segment was supposed to cover the new iPad Mini and Windows 8, with equal time given to each one. The Bloomberg folks spent time with me yesterday prepping the questions on each subject.
The equal billing of iPad Mini with Windows 8 is itself bad news for Microsoft. Windows 8 represents the reinvention of Microsoft, one of the biggest changes the company has ever made. The iPad Mini is a follow-on product in the iPad line. It's a very nice follow-on, and probably one that will sell very well, but it's not at the same level of importance as Windows 8. However, hardware gets more attention in the tech press than software. It's more tangible, and people react to it emotionally. So the Mini jumped right into the mix.
Apple very cleverly timed the Mini announcement a couple of days before the formal Windows 8 rollout, distracting the press from Microsoft's story. It reminds me a bit of the way the iPhone rumors undercut the Microsoft Zune launch in late 2006.
Leaking Flagship
Even with the competitive game-playing, Microsoft's announcement should have been OK. But then Microsoft failed to ship the Intel-compatible "Pro" version of its new Surface tablet on time. Instead, the only Surface device being reviewed right now is the Windows RT version, which can't run existing Windows software. Since Surface is the Windows 8 flagship, and hardware gets more coverage than software anyway, the concerns about Windows compatibility in Surface RT are dominating a lot of Windows 8 press coverage.
One of the most biting Surface reviews was David Pogue's in the New York Times, who compared Surface to owning "a new Ferrari...that has to be refueled every three miles." (link). PC Magazine called it "a disaster" (link). You can see more reviews summarized here.
There's an answer to the concerns about Surface RT: wait and buy the pro version. But the last thing a vendor wants to do right before the December buying season is tell customers not to buy. You'll hurt sales of not just Surface RT, but all other Windows 8 products as well. So Microsoft can't push that message aggressively. (Hey, Microsoft -- you say you want to be a device company? Lesson No. 1 is that you have to ship your high-end flagship product before Christmas, not right after it.)
The Windows 8 muddle was in full play for the Bloomberg segment, which started with video of Bloomberg's Sara Silverstein and Gizmodo's Sam Biddle trying to use Excel on Surface. Sara tries and fails to copy a formula using the touchscreen. Sam tells her Microsoft claims you can use all of Excel in the touch version. Sara replies sarcastically, "I believe that you would...if you're making a spreadsheet about, you know, lemonade stands" (link).
Then the segment jumps to the iPad Mini, with a discussion of how it stacks up against Amazon's subsidized tablet hardware. That's a great topic, and deserves a lot of thought. In fact, it goes on so long that Bloomberg runs out of time and never comes back to Windows 8 (link). So Apple and Amazon steal most of the oxygen, and the only impression you get about Windows 8 is that it's not ready for serious business use.
Not all the Windows 8 coverage is negative. For example, Walt Mossberg did a nicely balanced piece on All Things D (link), and Wired was pretty positive about Surface (link). But the story of Windows 8 is complicated. In a world of quick sound bites, it's very easy for the press to caricature Windows 8 as "that touch screen thing that doesn't run your stuff properly." Clever marketing by Apple is giving Microsoft less time in the press to explain the nuances of Windows 8, and the failure to ship Surface Pro on time makes Microsoft's job even tougher. Microsoft has enough money to wait out the bad coverage, but I think it's less and less likely that Windows 8 will deliver the massive initial sales that Microsoft promised for it.
The Windows 8 Muddle
"Social" as a Business Tool, and Richard Windsor Unchained
I'd like to call your attention to two new information resources on the web.
"Social" as a business tool. First, my friend and former colleague Nilofer Merchant has written an ebook on the role of "social" tools in business strategy and operations. It's called "11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era," and is published through Harvard Business Review. In the book, Nilofer addresses a flaw in thinking that we saw in many businesses while we were consulting at Rubicon: when you say "social," most established companies think of a new medium for marketing their products, like a new form of advertising. So they assign social responsibility to their marketing team, and treat it as a method to shove one-way messages into the eyes and ears of customers.
But some companies, especially startups, are learning to integrate the full range of what we call "social" tools deeply into all of their business processes and decision-making. It requires a fundamental rethinking of everything you expect a business to do. To give you one very minor example from the startup I'm involved in, when you have a small team and Skype, do you really need to pay for office space and the time involved in commuting every day? Do you even need all your team members to live in the same country?
It sounds simple to folks who live online, but you'd be amazed by how hard it is for an established company, even a tech company, to rethink its business processes.
Nilofer's book is, as she says, a "quick read" designed to help you rethink business from a social perspective. You can learn more here.
Richard Windsor Unchained. In this age of tweets and shared videos, I'm delighted to see a new old-fashioned blog on the mobile industry. Richard Windsor has been for a long time one of my favorite financial analysts covering mobile. His short bullet-point e-mails analyzing earnings reports were always pungent and on-point, and since he's based in London he's outside the Silicon Valley groupthink. Richard recently left Nomura and is now free to share his opinions online, in a new blog here.
An excerpt from his recent comments on RIM:
"• RIMM also managed to grow the subscriber base by 2m to 80m but the mix and quality of these subscribers is falling fast despite this quarter’s blip.
• Out go the high spending corporate executives spending $100+ per month and in come the teenage texters in Indonesia spending more like $5 a month."
Yup.
The Unanswered Question About Apple Maps
I agree with almost everyone else that Tim Cook was right to quickly apologize for the problems with Apple Maps. If you're in the US, you can contrast his handling of the situation to the National Football League's handling of its referee lockout. The lesson: Deny a problem and the public will feed on you like wolves on a crippled buffalo. Acknowledge the problem and people will give you a second chance. The apology is especially effective if it comes from a person (not a corporate statement) and sounds sincere. Most of us want to be nice to one another, and a personal apology taps into that reflex.
So fine, I'm sure Apple will fix the app eventually, and in six months this whole thing will probably be a distant memory.
What I'm wondering about is a much more serious problem that may not be solved in six months, and that (unlike the Maps app itself) threatens Apple's long-term prosperity. The question:
How in the world did Apple make a mistake like this in the first place?
I'm not talking about shipping an unsatisfying app; that happens to any company. I'm talking about making an obviously underwhelming and unfinished app a centerpiece in a critically important new product announcement. If you have an app that isn't perfect yet, position it that way. Tell people that it's just getting started and needs more work. Instead, Apple execs gushed about Maps on stage. Scott Forstall made it the first feature in his iOS 6 demo, and spent more than two and a half minutes talking about it (link). This sort of mismatch between message and delivery is a sign that Apple's product management and review process failed utterly somewhere along the line.
It's a little bit like NASA launching the space shuttle Challenger when people in the organization knew it might blow up. The issue is not that there were flaws, it's that they went ahead with the launch despite the flaws.
Of course nobody has been killed by Apple Maps, so it's a very different sort of problem. But both are related to organizational culture and business practices. Like NASA's culture of safety, Apple is supposed to have a culture of great product functionality. It's the center of what makes the company special. That process failed spectacularly in the case of Apple Maps, and speaking as somebody who spent years reporting into the product management organization at Apple, there is absolutely no excuse for what happened.
Apple's marketing machine is so powerful that any major failure in a marquee feature gets magnified enormously. Even Google can probably get away with a big feature failure or two; you expect Android to be a bit loose around the edges, and lord knows Google backtracks on initiatives all the time. But Apple claims that it will amaze and delight us with its new products, and so people naturally expect greatness. It's what justifies the intense coverage of Apple's announcements.
There are several possible explanations for what went wrong, all of them bad. Maybe:
--The product managers on Apple Maps knew it had problems but didn't think users would care. Or
--The managers of Apple Maps knew there were problems, and reported the problems, but were ignored by middle management. Or
--The middle managers reported the problems, but senior management ignored them. Or
--Maybe Apple has become so insular and self-satisfied that no one there realized the difference between a good looking maps app and a usable one.
It comes down to this: are you incompetent, bureaucratic, or out of touch?
Screw-ups like this happened occasionally at Apple under Steve Jobs. Someone once described to me the experience of being in a group that was pulled into a meeting with Steve where he said, "you let me down, and you let the company down." My friend said it was one of the worst feelings ever, and it also resulted in job changes for the people responsible. That may be something Tim Cook will need to do. But he also needs to ask some deeper questions. Is this just a failure of a particular manager or team, or is there a cultural or process problem that needs to be fixed? That's a very tough question to answer. You don't want to mess up the culture and practices that Steve left behind, but at the same time you can't permit this sort of mistake to become a routine event.
When I was at Apple back in the 1990s, before Steve returned, we had a joke we told on ourselves:
Q: What's the difference between an Apple salesman and a used-car salesman?
A: The used car salesman knows when he's lying.
Apple needs to be sure it doesn't slip back into that old habit.
Judging Apple: It's Really (Still) About Steve
It's been interesting to watch the passionate reactions flow back and forth about Apple's iPhone 5 announcement. Most of them fall into two camps:
-Apple is failing. The announcement was a boring disappointment, Apple is falling behind on features, and its execution is deteriorating. Just look at the mapping app in iOS 6.
Or
-The Apple haters don't get it. Look at the huge sales, Apple has always focused on functionality over feature list, and you have no idea how impressive it is that they packed that much circuitry into something so thin and elegant (link). Oh, and that map thing is a tactical retreat to get a better long-term future.
Both sides have some valid points, but I think what's driving the peculiar energy in the debate is a question that almost no one's putting on the table, and that no one can answer yet: Can Apple without Steve Jobs still put lightning in a bottle? Can it come up with that new category-busting product, like the iPhone and iPad, that overturns whole industries and makes us all nod our heads and say, "yes, of course, that's how the future should be"?
I think the Apple defenders generally believe that Apple can do it, and judge the current announcements as the normal incremental steps Apple takes between product revolutions. The Apple critics don't take it for granted, and are studying each announcement for signs of bottled lightning. When they don't get it, they feel uneasy, and that colors their comments.
The reality is that we don't know what the new Apple is capable of. It's unfair (and unrealistic) to expect magic in every announcement. The market can't absorb that much change, and no single company can produce it. But until Apple rolls out a new category-changing product, we can't know if it is truly the same power it was before Steve died.
Apple today is huge, rich company run by a bunch of middle-aged white guys who drive very expensive cars (link). Like any company run by a homogenous team with low turnover, it makes them potentially vulnerable to getting out of touch with the real world. That was also pretty much true before Steve died, but most people trusted that he had the mystical power of product design that enabled him to discern new product categories and make brilliant decisions about feature trade-offs. We don't know if his acolytes can do that. Is there a process for brilliance, or did that pass away with the founder?
When Apple made mistakes in the past, people trusted that it was an aberration that Steve would soon fix. Now when there's a mistake, I think there's fear in many minds that this isn't an aberration, it's the new normal for Apple; that the company is turning into a big successful outfit that often does good incremental work but also makes big glaring errors because of inertia or internal politics, and is too self-absorbed to see them before they go splat in public -- like the abortive decision to withdraw from Epeat green certification (link), like the rescinded staffing changes in the Apple stores (link), and like the mapping situation.
Apple's success makes it a target for huge, powerful competitors: Samsung, Google, Microsoft, and others. Its ultimate defense has always been its ability to change the rules, to alter the competitive landscape in ways that put the other guys at a lasting disadvantage. If Apple has lost its ability to change the world, the fear is that it'll become the business equivalent of the battleship Bismarck: a stationary target as more and more business firepower is concentrated against it.
We don't yet know what the new Apple can really do, and it'll take another two years or so to find out for sure. Until then, we should expect the passionate debate between the faithful and the skeptics to be renewed every time Apple announces anything. Just keep in mind that the debate won't really be about the products. It'll really be about Steve.
The Seductive Foolishness of a Facebook Phone
The rumors about Facebook making a smartphone have died down -- for the moment. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month that it wouldn't make sense for Facebook to create its own smartphone. I'd like to believe that finally put an end to the rumor forever, but you know it's going to be back. Even when Zuckerberg issued his denial some people claimed he was lying (link).
People react emotionally to hardware. The idea of the leading online community making a phone is sexy, and seems intuitively obvious in an age when software giants like Google and Microsoft are making their own hardware. Of course Facebook is making a phone. Isn't everybody?
It reminds me of elementary school:
Mom: Honey, why did you jump your bike off the roof?
Child: (in traction) Everyone else was doing it.
Mom: If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you do that too?
Child: Yes, Mom, as a matter of fact I would. Jeez, haven't you heard of peer pressure?
Mark Zuckerberg is young for a CEO, but I hope he's not that young. I think making a smartphone is one of the most spectacularly stupid things Facebook could do. Even if the product succeeded (which is very iffy), the distraction and business problems it would create could do severe damage to the whole company. There are other, much easier ways for Facebook to make itself a power in mobile and to extend its dominance in new areas. I think Zuckerberg and his troops should be concentrating on those enormous opportunities rather than messing around with hardware.
Knowing my luck with predictions, this means Facebook will probably create a phone and make it a huge commercial success. In that case, you're welcome to come back here in a couple of years and tease me. But in the meantime, here's why I think the "Facephone" would be a terrible idea, and what the company should focus on instead.
Making a smartphone: The Red Queen's Race
Most people outside the phone industry don't understand how hard it is to make a competitive smartphone. Mobile hardware is moving at amazing speed, with companies like Samsung packing in new and updated features as quickly as they can. Many customers are very sensitive to these features. If you fall even a little bit behind -- say, with a camera that has too low a resolution, or a slow processor -- many people won't buy your phone, unless you discount it to the point where you aren't making any money.
You might be thinking to yourself, "okay, so just make sure you're using the leading components." That sounds easy, but Samsung in particular specializes in sourcing those new components immediately (or making them itself) and building them into new hardware quickly, all at an aggressive price. Unless you move extremely fast, you'll find yourself releasing new features at the same time as Samsung is moving on to the next generation.
So you need a hardware organization with close ties to the component suppliers, and with enough money to make advance orders for components that haven't shipped yet. And you need to hire several complete engineering teams, so a couple of them can be working on future products in parallel while one team brings the latest flagship to market.
All of this is a huge investment. It's also high risk, because sometimes you'll guess wrong on a component and have to eat its cost. And at best, if you're wildly successful, all you can do is keep pace with Samsung. It won't give you differentiation.
And oh by the way, rising competition from Huawei and ZTE in China is probably going to accelerate the process even further.
Then there's software. A similar situation applies in software, even more so. Apple and Google are competing to see who can cram more new software features into a smartphone. For example, Apple adds voice recognition, and Google immediately counters. If you're not prepared to quickly match all of those features, your phone will end up in the discount bin, the same as if you were behind in hardware.
So to enter the smartphone business today, you need a large software engineering organization creating a huge suite of applications, and updating them frequently. Plus you'll need to do a large amount of hidden software customization to integrate with the specific features and applications of each major mobile operator.
You can save some of this investment by licensing a third-party operating system. The choices are Android and...well, Android. Which is made by your most bitter rival, Google, a company that has shown itself to be willing to manipulate Android to hurt competitors. So maybe you do like Amazon and build on top of an open source version of Android, one that Google doesn't control. But in that case you're using software that's a generation out of date, you have to write many of your own applications, and there's still that software integration work with the operators. You save some time and investment, but not nearly as much as you'd like.
So now you've created a huge hardware and software engineering organization. You next need to pay for all the parts and manufacturing. You must create marketing deals with the operators and tech stores (which means hiring a dedicated salesforce). You need to hire a support staff that responds directly to phone calls and e-mails (something that you, like other Internet companies, don't do). You have to arrange for repairs and returns. You need to license a huge range of patents, so Apple won't sue you. And probably some other details I forgot about.
None of this is impossible for Facebook, but it takes a huge amount of time and investment. It's not the sort of thing that you can do with a skunkworks team of a few dozen engineers from Apple. Google, faced with this same situation, decided to buy Motorola. If you really think Facebook is serious about the smartphone business, then the rumor you need to start is which smartphone company it's going to buy.
I'll kick off the rumors by nominating HTC.
But the real killer problem is that even after you do all of the above, all you've done is make a smartphone that matches the competition. You still need to figure out what makes your phone so compellingly different that people would buy it instead of an iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, or the latest Google Nexus thing.
Differentiation cures all
Reading all of the above, you might respond, "hey, all of the same conditions applied before Apple entered the smartphone business, but it managed to succeed without making many of the investments you talked about." And you'd be right. The iPhone's success shocked the major smartphone players because they assumed the iPhone's relatively poor hardware specs (no 3G!) and missing software features (no MMS!) would make it an afterthought. Apple succeeded because the first iPhone's differentiation -- real PC-style web browsing -- was so compelling that for many users it outweighed all the other drawbacks of the phone. RIM did something similar with mobile e-mail years before, so there is a precedent for shaking up the phone industry with breakthrough devices and relatively low up-front investment. Maybe Facebook can be the next company to redefine the smartphone.
There are two problems with this for Facebook:
1. You're not Apple. Although Apple was not a phone company, it was a world-class consumer hardware manufacturer with a fanatical focus on user experience and quality. RIM had many years of pager experience before it made the first BlackBerry. Neither company made a tweaked phone; they brought a different set of system design practices to the phone industry. The iPhone alone didn't defeat Nokia and Motorola, they were beaten decisively by Apple's business processes. Facebook lacks that sort of process differentiation, especially relative to Google.
2. What possible differentiation in a Facebook phone would be so compelling that it would make the iPhone and Android obsolete? Almost by definition, an innovation that great is something that I can't imagine today. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg can, and if so I salute his vision and welcome our new Facebook overlords.
Which future do you want to live in?
The other issue Facebook needs to consider is what industry structure is best suited to its future.
There's a future scenario in which the usage of the web becomes more and more dominated by smartphones, and in which smartphone users are limited to a selection of apps and websites manipulated by the smartphone manufacturers. In other words, the web becomes a series of walled gardens rather than than the open environment it is today. If you believe that scenario is destined to happen, and if you believe the only way to have a role in smartphones is to make your own hardware, then of course Facebook has to make a smartphone. It's dead otherwise.
But I don't think that's how the future works. It's not a fixed destiny, it's a set of possibilities. Our own actions shape the future and call it into being. The more powerful and persuasive an organization or individual is, the more it can do to shape the future. And Facebook is a very powerful, persuasive company.
I think the best future for Facebook is one in which the web, including the mobile web, stays open to software-only innovation. In this world, customers choose which websites and web apps they want to use, without being forced into a particular choice by a hardware manufacturer. This would enable Facebook to run on all smartphones, keeping the company focused on expanding its network and adding new features and services to it. In other words, Facebook could keep doing what it does best, rather than pouring money into a new set of skills and gambling that it can out-compete Samsung and Apple on their home turf.
If Facebook creates its own smartphone, I think it makes that open future less likely. A Facebook phone would encourage other software companies to make proprietary phones, further closing off software openness. And it would make the other phone companies much less likely to cooperate with Facebook. Today, smartphone companies will fall all over themselves to work with Facebook. Even Apple is actively integrating Facebook with the iPhone. How long will that last once Facebook starts selling a phone? Instead of Facebook everywhere in mobile, we could end up with Facebook noplace except on the Facebook phone.
Beware the Ides of Flash
Right now, Facebook is so popular that Google can't prevent it from working with Android. The more that Apple integrates with Facebook, the more pressure Android licensees will feel to match that integration, even if Google discourages it. But if Facebook were kicked off iPhone, Google would have a much freer hand to disadvantage and exclude Facebook from Android.
This is my biggest concern about the Facebook phone idea. The company could easily produce a phone that is just good enough to scare away its other phone partners, without being good enough to dominate the smartphone market. The Facebook phone could call into being the exact industry structure that Facebook wants to avoid. That's why I see it as hideously high risk, a bet-the-company move that should be taken only when there's no other chance to survive.
And Facebook has other choices.
What Facebook should do
In ecology, the most successful species are not the ones that adapt best to the environment, they're the ones that reshape the environment to match their needs. That's what I think Facebook should be doing. Instead of competing with smartphone manufacturers, it should run a series of integration experiments with them. Facebook's early efforts in that direction were not very successful (link), but that's why I'd put more resources into them -- there's a learning curve.
Facebook's goal should be to get the handset companies competing with each other to build Facebook more and more deeply into the phone. How about creating a set of Facebook integration requirements, and a "Facebook Ready" logo for complying phones?
In addition to integrating the core Facebook functions, Facebook needs to bring along the Facebook economy. The challenge for Facebook is not just to transfer its content to mobile, it's to make available the full ecosystem of third party apps and services that make Facebook so powerful on the desktop. I know some of the smartphone manufacturers don't want anything that looks like a third party platform on their phones, but Facebook is one of the few web companies popular enough to force it. Provide the full ecosystem to some phone manufacturers, and the others will be forced to follow suit.
This would give Facebook not just an application on smartphones, but a mobile platform that it can grow rapidly and in new directions, as it did on the desktop. Instead of competing at the commoditized hardware layer, Facebook can compete at the platform and UI layer where most of the profitability is. It's the right place for Facebook to fight, but it's all put at risk if Facebook makes its own phone.
