I see where Andy Rubin said Google is building a "firewall" between the Android team and Motorola Mobility (link). That's exactly what we called it when Palm licensed out its OS, and actually the firewall worked pretty well. I'm sure Google can and will prevent information leaks between the Android team and the Motorola team. Those teams do not work in the same buildings (many of them are not even in the same state), so that's pretty easy to do.
Most PalmOS licensees didn't have big worries about our firewall. They wanted to know it was in place, and they were careful about sharing information with us, but we were able to work together. The reality is that if your OS is selling well, the licensees will put up with almost anything (look at the early history of Microsoft if you doubt me). And if sales slow down, no amount of firewalling will keep them loyal. Look at the, uh, more recent history of Microsoft in mobile.
The place where Palm had trouble (okay, one of the places) was that it could not figure out what to do when the financial interests of the OS conflicted with the financial interests of the hardware team. It wasn't about the firewall, it was about the corporate business goals. To put it in Google terms, what happens when a change to Android will hurt sales at Motorola Mobility?
Let's make up an example: Suppose that Motorola needs a new feature in the OS to support its next-generation product line. It has already started building the new devices, and has...say, $200 million in parts already ordered to build them. The orders cannot be canceled, and the parts will become obsolete if not used quickly. The Android team has trouble implementing the feature, and realizes that it will have to choose between the feature that Motorola needs and another feature that HTC needs for its next-generation products. It's a zero-sum game; there are only enough engineers to produce one of the features. Who wins? Will Google accept a writedown of $200 million to protect its promise to HTC?
This is not a theoretical question; tradeoffs like that happen all the time when you're developing an OS.
Want to guess how those questions were answered when Palm hardware and Palm OS were in the same company?
I think that's the real reason why Palm and PalmSource had to be separated, and I think that's the real question Android licensees are thinking about. Not is their information safe, but would Larry Page accept a financial bloodbath at Motorola to protect other Android licensees? If Google has addressed that question, I haven't seen the answer. It's a very hard question for any CEO because it pits the interests of Android licensees against Google shareholders.
None of this will drive away Android licensees, but I think it will affect the strength of their interest in also working with Microsoft -- which, when it abuses its licensees, tends to abuse all of them equally.
OS Licensing and Firewalls: That's Not the Point
Information Overload: Several Different Problems Under a Single Name
I want to thank everyone who participated in the information management survey that I posted at the start of the year (link). The survey was long and complex, but more than 400 of you responded to it. I know you've got a busy life, and it was very nice of you to help.
Your responses helped to shape the work we're doing on Zekira, the new app being developed by the startup I'm working on. I have posted a summary of the survey findings here (link). I know you read Mobile Opportunity for tech industry commentary, so I'm going to continue to blog on that subject here (hopefully more frequently). I will post Zekira-related information at the Zekira weblog. If you're interested in information management issues, I hope you'll visit us there.
I think some of the survey results will be interesting to folks here, so let me give you a quick summary of the highlights.
In the tech industry, we talk a lot about information overload, but we haven't defined it very well. What I learned from the survey is that info overload means something slightly different to every person. It's not a thing, it's a range of problems caused by dealing with more information than you can hold in your head.
For some people the problem is too much e-mail. For others it's too many meetings. For still others, the biggest problem is finding a way to access the archive of old files and information they have accumulated over the years.
Some of you -- I guess I should say some of us -- have amassed truly awesome personal archives of information. Literally terabytes of data in some cases. Now if only we could get the information back out of them.
A few statistics on information overload:
--More than 40% of the respondents said they feel overwhelmed by the amount of information in their lives.
--About half of the respondents experience information overload several times a week, and about 15% experience it several times a day.
--20% of the respondents receive more than 25,000 e-mails every year.
--A quarter of the respondents receive more than 100 text messages a day.
--A third of the respondents have saved more than 100 gigabytes of business files in their personal archives.
One of the biggest challenges in creating a product to help with information overload is figuring out where to focus it. Which specific problem(s) do you want to solve? Which people care about those problems? And how do you put a dent in those problems with a startup's resources?
In the next few weeks we'll be talking about how we answered those questions. You can follow our progress at the Zekira weblog. And you can read more about the survey results here.
And again, many sincere thanks for your help.
We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.
Why Web OS Really Failed, and What it Means for the Rest of Us
The New York Times has an interesting article this week explaining why HP's adventure with Palm failed. The latest explanation is that Web OS just wasn't ready for prime time, according to Paul Mercer, who was senior director of software at Palm (link).
Paul's an extremely bright software guy. It's unusual for someone with his seniority to go on the record with criticisms of his former product, and I applaud him for it because it helps us all learn. If Paul says Web OS was unready, I'm sure it was. But respectfully, I don't think that's why Web OS failed. I think the company's business strategy was fundamentally flawed, in ways that would have almost certainly doomed Web OS no matter how it was built.
The point is important because other companies planning similar products might take away the wrong lesson from Palm's demise. (For example, Information Week concludes that it's too hard for any startup to play in the mobile device market [link]; MIT Technology Review says the lesson is that you have to retain key employees [link].) To explain what the right lesson is, I need to give you a little background on the dynamics of creating a new operating system.
New operating systems always suck
Sorry for my language, but sometimes it's best to be blunt. An operating system is an incredibly complex piece of software, just about the most complex software you can write. In the first version of an OS, the list of features you want to add is always much longer than what you can implement, there are always bugs you can't find, and performance is always a problem. What's worse, there is a built-in tension between those three problems -- the more features you add, the more bugs you create. The more time you spend fixing bugs, the less time you have to improve performance. And so on. As a result, every new operating system, without exception, is an embarrassing set of compromises that frustrates its creators and does not deliver on the full promise of its vision.
Remember these beauties?
--The original Macintosh can't create a word processing document longer than 10 pages.
--The original version of Windows can't display overlapping windows.
--The original iPhone doesn't allow third-party native apps, and lacks 3G and MMS support.
The operating systems that succeed are the ones that survive long enough for their big flaws to be fixed. That happens if the OS's supporter has a deep, multi-version commitment to it (Windows) or if the OS does something else so compelling that customers are willing to buy it despite its flaws (graphics on the Mac). Your chances are best if you have both patience and differentiation.
Palm's problem: Lack of a compelling advantage
The Palm Pre and HP TouchPad had neither advantage. Palm was not rich enough and HP was not patient enough to keep investing after the first versions showed a lot of flaws. And more importantly, there was nothing compelling enough about either product to make people buy it despite those flaws.
Think about it, what was the one special thing Web OS devices could do that absolutely compelled you to go out and buy them? And don't say "multitasking;" I'm talking about a genuine, easily explained benefit that would appeal to normal people, not technophiles.
I wrote about this problem back in 2010 when the Palm put itself up for sale (link). To recap: you don't run TV ads featuring a Borg hive queen if you have something compelling to say about your product (link).
Contrast those ads to Apple's current iPhone ads in the US, which are basically a 30-second demo of Siri (link).
The original Palm OS succeeded because it made a great appliance for managing your calendar and address book. That jump-started the market, and all the additional stuff empowered by the OS came later.
iPhone succeeded, in my opinion, because it was the first device to make PC-style browsing work well on a smartphone. That killer feature bought Apple the time and market credibility it needed to enable native apps, fix the phone's problems, and add a raft of additional features that fleshed out the product vision.
Android succeeded (in part) because Apple stupidly left a void in the marketplace that Google could fill. In the wake of Steve Jobs' death, there has been a lot of well-deserved praise online for the brilliant decisions he made. But I think one of Steve's biggest mistakes ever was the decision to wed Apple exclusively to AT&T in the US for multiple years. That forced Verizon to find an iPhone competitor and market it aggressively. Verizon's choices were Windows Mobile (unpopular with customers, and a vendor with a history of shafting its partners), Nokia/Symbian (unpopular in the US, and a vendor with a history of shafting operators), or Google (sexy web brand, believed at the time to be open and non-controlling). People outside the US don't realize this, but in the US Verizon was the main marketing muscle behind the success of Android. It forced the product into the market and kept pushing for a long time, giving Google the time it needed to improve Android and get it past the crucial first release.
The Pre and TouchPad had no patient sugar daddy. And they had no breakthrough feature that would compel people to buy the first versions despite their inevitable flaws. I think Palm's product strategy was broken, and so Web OS was probably doomed no matter how well it was implemented.
The lesson: Who's your daddy, and what's your killer feature?
Two companies are working on new mobile platforms scheduled to ship in 2012: Nokia's next-generation Windows phones, and RIM's BlackBerry 10. In both cases, the press has been focusing on their development schedules. The schedules are very important, of course. But the real questions to ask are:
1. Do they have the financial backing to complete versions 2 and 3, which will be needed to fix the inevitable flaws in version 1? and
2. Will the products do anything unique and compelling that will cause at least some customers to prefer them even if they have other drawbacks?
I think Nokia can probably say yes to question 1; RIM is in doubt. And as far as I can tell, neither vendor has even started to address question 2. If they don't, in a year or two we'll probably be doing more post-mortems.
A New Survey on Information Management
I'd like to interrupt the usual programming here to ask you a favor.
The startup I'm working on will ship its first product in 2012. As part of our development, we'd like to get some data on how people are affected by information overload. We hope our product will help with that problem, but we need to understand better how people feel about the problem and what they're doing about it today. So we're doing a survey.
I think that you, the folks who read Mobile Opportunity, are a very good cross-section of technology users, so I'd like to ask you to take the survey. I know you have much better things to do with your time than fill out a survey, but we could really use your help. It'll take about ten minutes, and it's almost all multiple choice. I'll share the results here, so you can learn more about your fellow readers and how you compare to them.
To go to the survey, click here. Note: The survey is now closed. You can read about the results here.
Once our company gets closer to launching, I will start up a separate weblog to talk about the product. I'll also keep on writing Mobile Opportunity, with its current focus.
Thanks in advance for your help. I really appreciate it. And I'll have a new post for you next week. It's a pretty long one that I've been working on for a while.
Lessons From the Failure of Flash: Greed Kills
Adobe's decision to stop development of mobile Flash has deservedly gotten a lot of attention online. It's a sad story for Adobe and Flash developers: a dominating standard on the PC web failed to get traction in mobile, and will now be abandoned gradually in favor of HTML 5. But the story's not limited to mobile -- without a mobile growth path, I think Flash itself is destined to become a dwindling legacy standard everywhere (link). I think the whole Flash business edifice is coming down.
How did Flash go from leader to loser? There are a lot of explanations being floated online. Erica Ogg at GigaOm has a good list (link):
--Mobile flash didn't work very well
--It was opposed by powerful people like Steve Jobs
--It was out-competed by HTML 5
(And by the way, how in the world do you get out-competed by something as slow-moving as HTML 5?)
I agree with Erica, but it's more a list of symptoms than root causes. It's like saying an airplane crashed because the wings fell off. Yes, that's true, but why did the wings fall off? If you look for root causes of the Flash failure, I think they go back many years to a fundamental misreading of the mobile market, and to short-term revenue goals that were more important than long-term strategy at both Macromedia and Adobe.
In other words, Flash didn't just die. It was managed into oblivion.
The story of Flash is a great cautionary tale for companies that want to create and control software platforms, so it's worth looking at more closely.
A quick, oversimplified history of Flash
In the software world, there is an inherent conflict between setting a broad standard and making money. If you have good software technology and you're willing to give it away, you can get people to adopt it very broadly, but you will go broke in the process. On the other hand, if you charge money for your technology, you can stay in business, but it's very hard to get it broadly adopted as a standard because people don't want to lock themselves into paying you.
Clever software companies have long realized that you can work around this conflict by giving away one technology to make it a standard, and then charging for something else related to it. For example, many open source software companies give away their core product, but charge for hosting and support and other services. Android is another example -- it's a free operating system for mobile phone manufacturers, but if you use it in your phone Google also tries to coerce you into bundling its services, which extract revenue from your customers.
In the case of Flash, the player software was given away for free on the web, and Macromedia (the owner of Flash at the time) made its money by selling Flash content development tools. The free Flash player eventually took on two roles on the web: it was the preferred way to create artistically-sophisticated web content, including an active subculture of online gaming, and it became one of the most popular ways to play video. Flash reached a point of critical mass where most people felt they just had to have the player installed in their browser. It became a de facto standard on the web.
Enter Japan Inc., carrying cash. The rise of mobile devices changed the situation for Flash. Long before today's smartphones, with their sophisticated web browsers, Japan was the center of mobile phone innovation, and the dominant player there was NTT DoCoMo, with its proprietary iMode phone platform. The folks at DoCoMo wanted to create more compelling multimedia experiences for their iMode phones, and so in early 2003 they licensed Macromedia's Flash Lite, the mobile version of Flash, for inclusion in iMode phones (link).
The deal was a breakthrough for Macromedia. Instead of giving away the flash client, the way it had on the PC, Macromedia could charge for the client, have it forced into the hands of every user, and continue to also make money selling development tools. The company had found a way to have its cake and eat it too! In late 2004, the iMode deal was extended worldwide (link), and I'm sure Macromedia had visions of global domination.
Unfortunately for Flash, Japan is a unique phone market, and DoCoMo is a unique operator. The DoCoMo deal could not be duplicated on most phone platforms other than iMode. Macromedia, and later Adobe, was now trapped by its own success. To make Flash Lite a standard in mobile, it would have needed to give away the player, undercutting its lucrative DoCoMo deal. When you have a whole business unit focused on making money from licensing the player, giving it away would mean missing revenue projections and laying off a lot of people. Macromedia chose the revenue, and Flash Lite never became a mobile standard.
Without fully realizing it, Macromedia had undermined the business model for Flash itself. The more popular mobile became, the weaker Flash would be.
Enter the modern smartphone. Jump forward to 2007, when the iPhone and other modern smartphones made full mobile web browsing practical. Adobe, by now the owner of Flash, was completely unprepared to respond. Even if it started giving away Flash Lite, the player had been designed for limited-function feature phones and could not duplicate the full PC Flash experience. Meanwhile, the full Flash player had been designed for PCs; it was too fat to run well on a smartphone. So the full web had moved to a place where Adobe could not follow. The ubiquity of the Flash standard was broken by Adobe itself.
To make things worse, Adobe was by then in the midst of a strategy to upgrade Flash into a full programming layer for mobile devices, a project called Apollo (later renamed AIR). The promise of AIR was to make all operating systems irrelevant by separating them from their applications. At the time, I thought Adobe's strategy was very clever (link), but the implementation turned out to be woefully slow.
So here's what Adobe did to itself: By mismanaging the move to full mobile browsing, it demonstrated that customers were willing to live with a mobile browser that could not display Flash. Then, by declaring its intent to take over the mobile platform world, Adobe alarmed the other platform companies, especially Apple. This gave them both the opportunity and the incentive to crush mobile Flash.
Which is exactly what they did.
The lesson: Don't be greedy
There are a couple of lessons from this experience. The first is that when you've established a free standard, charging money for it puts your whole business at risk. Contrast the Flash experience to PDF, another standard Adobe established. Unlike Flash, Adobe progressively gave up more and more control over the PDF standard, to the point where competitors can easily create their own PDF writers, and in fact Microsoft bundles one with Windows Office. Despite the web community's broad hostility for PDF, it continues to be a de facto standard in computing. There is no possible way for Adobe to make money directly from the PDF reader, but its Acrobat PDF management and generation business continues to bring in revenue.
The second lesson is that you have to align your business structure with your strategy. I think Macromedia made a fundamental error by putting mobile Flash into its own business unit. Adobe continued the error by creating a separate mobile BU when it bought Macromedia (link). That structure meant the mobile Flash team was forced to make money from the player. If the player and flash development tools had been in the same BU, management might have at least had a chance to trade off player revenue to grow the tools business.
What can Adobe do now?
The Adobe folks say the discontinuation of mobile flash is just an exercise in focus (link). They point out that developers can still create apps using Flash and compile them for mobile devices, and that Flash is still alive on the desktop. Viewed from the narrow perspective of the situation that Adobe faces in late 2011, the changes to Flash probably are prudent. But judged against Adobe's promise to create an "an industry-defining technology platform" when it bought Macromedia in 2005 (link), it's hard to call the current situation anything other than a failure.
I think it's clear that Flash as a platform is dying; the end of the mobile Flash player has disillusioned many of its most passionate supporters. You can hear them cussing here and here. Flash compatibility will continue to live on in AIR and other web content development tools, of course, but now that Adobe doesn't control the player, I think it will have trouble giving its tools any particular advantage.
What Adobe should do is start contributing aggressively to HTML 5, to upgrade it into the full web platform that AIR was originally supposed to be. That's a role no one in the industry has taken ownership of, web developers are crying out for it, and Adobe implies that's what it will do. But I've heard these broad statements from Adobe before, and usually the implementation has fallen far short of the promises. At this point, I doubt Adobe has the vision and agility to pull it off. Most likely it will retreat to what it has always been at the core: a maker of software tools for artistically-inclined creative people. It's a nice stable niche, but it's nothing like the dominant leadership role that Adobe once aspired to.
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