Today, Research in Motion, Motorola and Nokia held a joint press conference acknowledging they too suffer antenna attenuation when consumers grip their phones tightly in certain ways. Following in Apple’s footsteps, they will be offering cases for users of all affected models.

Immediately following the announcement, Nokia’s stock traded down to just $0.01 as investors realized how many goddamm crappy featurephones Nokia pumps out each year. Nokia’s liability is set to be a staggering 1 quadrillion Euros (1.29 quadrillion USD). Jonsen Svensen Svensvensen, Nokia’s CFO, said “The free cases will have a serious and negative impact on our business as the average cost of a case is approximately $4, which is 50% greater than our average gross margin per phone. We’d also like to take this opportunity to announce Symbian 3^3*sqrt(11) — our best and most consumer friendly OS ever.”

Motorola, on the other hand, said they expect the financial impact of the free case offer to be approximately $4,328. Motorola said they plan to send a mass email to their Droid user base offering either a free case with a $30 retail value or tickets to see LaVar Burton live and in person. According to Motorola’s marketing research team, the $4,328 liability accounts for the uptake of up to ten cases and is actually conservative as “there is perfect and undeniable overlap in the Venn diagram for Android and LeVar Burton fanboys.”

News from Waterloo, Canada was similarly optimistic. RIM’s co-CEO, Jim Balsillie said, “While we sell tens of millions of Blackberry smartphones each year, the vast majority of those are placed in the belt clips of investment bankers and consultants who aren’t even allowed to place phone calls on them. Truth be told, we could remove the antenna and no one would f*cking notice. In fact, I think I just saved us four points of gross margin.”

[Ed. But seriously folks, why aren't Blackberry, Motorola and Nokia users rioting in the streets, asking for their free cases? And why are those customers willing to accept the blatant lies from management that their phones are immune from antenna attenuation? I guess it's because nobody really gives a crap. Apple was wrong in belittling the issue at first but eventually fessed up and made some amends. Now it's time for the rest of the industry to at least admit they have a problem too rather than acting like little school children.]

Are you wondering why iPad apps, especially news reading apps like Flipboard, Wired and WSJ, keep getting so much praise and media attention? Well let’s do a head-to-head comparison of The Wall Street Journal iPad Edition and Online Edition (WSJ.com). Why do you think users prefer the WSJ iPad app?

WSJ iPad Edition (click to enlarge)

WSJ.com Landing Page (click to enlarge)

When put in these terms the choice should seem obvious. It actually is. Most websites overwhelm their customers with far too much information and far too many choices. If I simply want to read the morning paper (the primary WSJ use case), the iPad app is better-suited to doing that, even independent of the specialized iPad hardware. Consider how many words, links and pictures there are on the WSJ.com Online Edition. If you studiously read every word and studied every picture, how long would that take you? Of course users don’t read every word, they scan, but you are forcing your users to do far more work to find the information they do care about.

I also believe despite its “lack of features” the iPad Edition is just about as functional as the Online Edition. Most of what most users are looking for most of the time can be found in the iPad app. That’s who you should design for, your majority. Design for the majority of a specific target customer with a minority of features. My rule of thumb is the Pareto Principle: 20% of your features deliver 80% of your product’s utility. Do not design for the corner cases, especially at the outer layer of the onion (ie the first part of your product customers interact with). WSJ.com was designed by committee and designed by feature creep. It was designed by “Hey why don’t we throw in XYZ feature!” I am not opposed to WSJ.com containing all the features they have, but they certainly shouldn’t all be on the landing page. In reality, though, it can be difficult for a company to force discipline and simplify. I’ve seen it before in the real world. Why? Because somewhere in The Wall Street Journal‘s offices a coversation such as this would take place:

Product Marketing: Our data says that many users find our website confusing and overwhelming. They prefer the simplified iPad edition. Let’s start simplifying. Why don’t we move the Personalized Stock Quotes off the landing page?

Web Manager: Oh, no we can’t ditch the Personalized Stock Quotes. They get a good number of clicks. Do you want to lose all those clicks?

The problem with this conversation is that it takes a fixed pie, zero sum approach to product design. This is not how the world works. Removing a feature doesn’t mean you “lose.” This viewpoint doesn’t even begin to account for all the clicks lost / never had due to a confusing and overwhelming website. In fact, a simplified site could enlarge the pie and drive more total clicks to the things you really care about.

I am telling many of the startups I advise to conceptually “design for the iPad, not for the web.” It’s too easy to create an overly chromed-out website from the get-go. The iPad is a great design tool in that it forces trade-offs. (Unbeknownst to most people, trade-offs are actually the critical factor that drives the greatest innovation and the best products. It is the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard that makes it great, even though that makes it harder to type on.) Apple understands trade-offs. Products that try to be everything to everyone usually fail. They fail because they don’t have a target customer in mind and thus have to keep adding on extra features to accommodate every possible user and use case. In the end you, you wind up with Windows Vista.

So why are iPad apps such as Flipboard and WSJ getting so much attention? It’s because they are easy to use. They make reading the news what it should be, fun, as opposed to work, which is what WSJ.com feels like. They look nothing like most of the crap we put up with in HTML. Some of this can be attributed to the natural product value advantages of the iOS SDK over HTML (as I’ve previously written about) and some of this can be attributed to the great design decisions and trade-offs the iPad is fostering.

Please subscribe via RSS! (Ironic enough for you?)

Given some of the reactions out there on the blog-o-sphere, I thought I would clarify a few points regarding my post on RSS.

1) When I say “RIP RSS” or anything like it, I am being totally 100% tongue-in-cheek. I would not sanely call a technology that is deployed on nearly every website on earth (proudly including this one!!!) dead without employing large doses of humor and irony.

2) My larger point is that given how widely deployed RSS is on the publisher front, I believe it still has very low awareness on the consumer front, especially among non-technical folks. The folks I am referring to check email, have Facebook accounts, use Google and, by the way, are the majority of internet users. However, unlike you and me, they’ve never read Slashdot, don’t know what PHP is and didn’t have to hack their WINSOCK.DLL to get Mosiac or Netscape working with AOL back in the day. Go out and see for yourself. Ask a bunch of folks who are not technical and have jobs that are not in tech, ages 30-60, what RSS is and whether or not they regularly use it. Do the same for email. Compare and contrast. Is that a high bar? Yes, but I believe RSS has that sort of potential which is why its low awareness frustrates me.

3) I am an avid RSS user. I need RSS to keep on top of things (mostly Achewood, Kottke.org, HackerNews and DF). I have no less than SIX paid and free RSS clients and utilities on my computer, iPhone and iPad. But the fact that I need to email my blog updates to my family and friends is a sign that something has failed. However, I might have misspoken. Perhaps it’s not RSS’ fault. Maybe the problem is that the world has never seen an easy to use, consumer friendly and viral RSS reader and link sharing client. As my commenter KidMercury pointed out, RSS is great at being a backend technology, so maybe the issue is that no one has taken RSS to the next level as a consumer-facing technology.

4) It’s all about potential. The use case for RSS is so simple, ubiquitous and awesome that nearly every one I know needs it from ubergeek Unix admin to luddite. So how should we judge whether or not RSS is being as successful as it should be? I think it should be almost as ubiquitous as email or at least close to it (30%-50%?). with daily usage.

5) You also need to understand where this blog is coming from. I should probably rename this blog “In Defense of Normals.” All of my posts try to look at things from a decidedly non-geeky POV despite being a geek myself. One commenter asked if I also consider Linux a failed technology. Using the same criteria I used for my post on RSS, the answer is “No, Linux is not a failed technology insofar as it wasn’t meant to be a consumer tech, but Linux & Unix on the Desktop (ie in Wal-Mart) have been disasters precisely because they were meant for consumers.” But consider OS X which is kinda like a skin for Unix. Now, that has been a success.

You might think of it this way: RSS has been a huge win on the backend (kinda like Linux & Unix on servers and workstations, etc.) but has failed to capture the public’s attention and imagination (kinda like Linux  & Unix on the Desktop) as much as I think it should / has the potential to. What I really want is something brave and new. I want an RSS client that, like OS X, takes an awesome underlying technology and makes it consumer friendly.

REVISED Edition (I wrote the first edition in a bad mood)

RSS is a failure as a consumer-facing technology. That’s right, despite the fact that you can’t live without Google Reader, RSS is an utter, horrible Kin-tastic failure. You should be embarrassed to use it. Your usage of RSS makes you look as outdated as a dude rocking a Rio Diamond 600 for his MP3 player. (Hopefully you can tell at this point that I am being tongue-in-cheek.)

I put RSS in the same ranks as the JooJoo, Palm Foleo and Clippy. No, strike that. RSS is a worse failure than Clippy. Clippy was ambitious. Clippy was designed to possess human-like intelligence. Now’s that a goddamn challenge! RSS was designed to tell users when a website has been updated. If that’s not a fucking simple task, I frankly don’t know what is.

RSS has failed us. How do I know? Normal people have never heard of RSS. FAIL. I don’t need to actually execute a $1,000,000 marketing research survey to tell you the results. RSS users are hairy-ass, geeky tech dudes. RSS hasn’t crossed the canyon because it’s afraid it’ll get sunburnt if it steps outside of a temperature controlled server room.

Really Simple Syndication–if it’s so simple why do I need to email my family to tell them when I wrote a new post on one of my blogs. If it’s sooooooo simple that six year old cats can use it why did I spend a Saturday morning wasting my time installing an email subscription feature on this blog? (BTW, MailChimp seems to be the best solution I have found so far and it still is 1000x too complex to install on a blog for that purpose.)

The time, my friends, has emerged for something to replace RSS. Something that works. Something that will climb that Mount Everest of engineering marvels: letting me know when a website has been updated. And that chosen technology will be so utterly radical both women and men will use it.The ideal solution should making sharing news and following a website both easy and natural. Users shouldn’t have to deal with an RSS unread count that regularly exceed 1,000+ (useless) or be bothered with understanding the differences between HTTP and RSS (complicated). All a user should have to say is “Yes, please!” If it’s not that simple, it will fail.

I stand uncorrected: branding and advertising matter in mobile. TechCrunch speaking to a luddite:

I asked him, “why the iPhone?” His answer? The commercial.

Per my earlier post, it appears that babies do trump useless HDMI ports after all. Android and Droid are royally screwing up their marketing.

Did you guys hear? OMFG! The new Droid X has an HDMI output! H-D-M-I OUT-PUT!!!!!!! Magic cakes!!!!!!! Isn’t that a useful feature!

Oh, hey there Grandma! I know you’ve been jonesing for HDMI output on your phone because you totally know what that means and spent the $80 a normal retailer charges for an HDMI cable. And what’s that? You even bought the hard to find mini-HDMI adapter? Radical! Oh and I bet it’s easy, like falling off a log, to set up. Ohh nooeess!!! It’s notttttt?!

This is what using HDMI on an Android phone is actually like according to the tech savy, professional gadget blogging CNET:

After spending some time encoding various file formats and sizes, we found that MP4 movie files performed the most consistently. Also, files rendered closer to the Evo’s native 800×480 resolution worked best as larger videos stuttered and would not play properly on-screen.

Well, don’t worry about that Grandma! It’s a good thing we bought you all that file conversion software and that new Alienware gaming rig to convert your huge video collection to MP4 in your codec of choice. But wait! What’s that Grandma? You were actually hoping to show photos of your kids over HDMI? Well F*CK, apparently Android phones CAN’T do that. They can only use the HDMI output for the bundled video player and/or YouTube, so no luck. But don’t worry Grandma! You can still brag to all your friends that your phone rocks because it’s like totally open!!! Yay!!! And don’t be scared of that creepy robot eye either Grandma!

BUT OH WAIT. What’s this? The iPhone 4 has BABY-DMI Output! Oh SNAP! That phone just made a goddam baby! It’s miracle! Hallelujah!

And that dude is downloading the baby on his iPhone! Double snap!

No, I was wrong. That phone didn’t make that baby. That baby made that phone call. You can call MUTHAF*CK!N BABIES OVER VIDEOCHAT on the iPhone 4. And it’s so easy babies can make video calls.

Now’s that what I call a useful feature Grandma. So which would you rather have Grandma, the Droid X or the iPhone 4? Your call.

[Ed. Apologies for the uncharacteristically foul language in this post. The script demanded it.]

So a guy walks into a a fashionable barbershop for a haircut. The barber is a cute young lass. She asks her client who is a wearing a suit and tie if he’s on his lunch break. The young man replies, “No, I was interviewing for a job.” The barberess follows up, “What sort of job are you interviewing for?” The young man says, “I am interviewing with AppliedTechno Corp for a programming position translating backend database protocols such as…these protocols…” STOP.

That is the truth. That’s all quite truthful as delivered [Ed. Please excuse the stereotyping] by someone with an engineering mindset. Lots of detail that doesn’t take into account the mindset of the receiver of the information. Factually correct, but not necessarily suitable for the audience, suitable for a clone of himself. He might feel as if leaving out some of this info was incorrect or it just might not occur to him to do so.

This exemplifies the difference between “telling the truth” which is something scientists and engineers often feel compelled and obligated to do and “marketing.” Individuals with an engineering mindset often think of there as being some epic battle between the truth and marketing: good vs. evil, straight men vs. spin doctors. This isn’s the case at all, at least with good engineers and marketers. I believe engineers and marketers would be better off and more productive if this misunderstanding were cleared up and technologists, scientists and engineers trusted marketers more and saw them less as “evil spindoctors trying to shove crap on an unwitting public” paraphrasing my Kellogg Prof. Julie Hennessy. (On the flip side, marketers also need to learn that engineers are not all socially awkward introverts who look like Bill Gates circa 1978.)

Marketing is not lying anymore than engineering is creating superhuman robots hellbent on taking over the earth. Marketing is telling a story in such a way that your audience can digest and appreciate it. Marketing is the man replying, “I am interviewing for an engineering position at a local startup.” This is truthful. It’s delivered in a concise way that the audience likely understands and appreciates. It’s also much more likely to incite follow up questions from the audience. The woman may have asked “What type of engineer?” or “Which startups?” or “What did you do before?” We call this a dialogue or engaging your audience.

As soon as you can get the brain of your audience to interact with your message, they are much more likely to be interested and remember it (and resultantly use, buy, etc.). She may have had a great conversation with the engineer and then established a relationship for future visits. Instead, she smiled and nodded awkwardly after his geeky sililoquy. They stopped speaking to each other after that.

PS- Who get’s their haircut after an interview. And, yes, this really just happened before me: State Street Barbers in River North, Chicago.

Droid is betting on features with a rational appeal. Apple is going for the heart, laddering up to an emotional appeal.

Image from iPhone 4 FaceTime web video

Droid billboard

Image from iPhone 4 FaceTime web video

Recently, I had a conversation with a startup  around the concept of making it easier for customers to adopt their product. The question is how you reduce the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) for customers around not just buying but integrating your product or service. I’ll demonstrate this by way of example.

EXAMPLE: I am sitting on a Southwest flight last night from LaGuardia to Midway. I am engrossed reading a Wired article on my iPad when a loud noise startles the crap out of me. But oh, it’s just the wing flaps extending in preparation for landing. But are they normally that loud? Everyone besides me is looking anxiously around as well. Maybe it’s just because I am sitting over the wing? For a few seconds, a wave of fear, uncertainty and doubt crosses my mind.

Keep in mind. I am an experienced flier. At one point, a United pilot on the JFK-SFO run would call me by my first name. Yet, my experience on my flight was soured by a few seconds of panic. Even though flaps successfully deploying is a good thing and Southwest didn’t do a damed thing wrong, Southwest’s brand was subconsciously tarnished in my mind and all the folks around me who were looking nervous.

When designing products we often spend an incredible amount of time on the tangible and visible. In the airplane example, I am sure product designers spent lifetimes of effort making sure the seats are comfortable yet safe and space efficient, redesigning the engines in multi-million dollar wind tunnels to make them 5% faster or more fuel efficient. Why do all this again? Oh yeah, to serve your customers better and thus make more money. Sometimes to improve your product you need to get inside the head of your customer and understand the underlying psychology.

To make the product better, start with the customer, find the psychological insight and then go back and tweak the product.

In this example, my customer insight is that people are afraid of flying. In a post-September 11th world where there are crazies trying to blow planes up with their freaking shoes, this fear is even more pronounced in the public psyche. This seems like a fairly intuitive insight and it is, yet I don’t see a single US airline addressing it. The difference between good and great products (and companies) is operationalizing these insights.

Many flights already have personal television displays on every seat with a channel that shows your flight status on a route map. In the short-term, how about another channel that tells you in simple and reassuring terms what is going on and prepares you for it?

“We are 25 miles from the airport and have begun our descent to Midway. In approximately 60 seconds you will hear the plane’s wing flaps start to deploy as the pilot slows the plane down to a safe landing speed…Next, you will hear the plane’s landing gear deploy beneath you…Midway Air Traffic Control has instructed us to circle the airport for 20 minutes. The plane will be banking to the left as we circle. Our approximate planned flight path for the holding pattern is: [map].”

This is just one example of how to address this customer fear. I am sure there are better ones out there. But the point is that if you were to make every person who ever shot a nervous glance around an airplane 25, 50 or 100% more comfortable, you’d probably boost revenue more than many direct “product” improvements which would likely be more costly. Customers would find flying more relaxing, less taxing and would have better memories stored in association with the brand of airline on which they flew. This increases customer loyalty and turbocharges profitability.

How do you take these lessons and apply them to your startup or company? Perhaps the reason more customers aren’t buying or using your product is not because of the lack of features X, Y and Z (even though they explicitly ask for them!) but because they fear setting it up, figuring out when to use it in their daily life, because your claims seem too good to be true based on their prior experience with crappier products or because they fear they won’t get enough post-sales support. There are a million possibilities for customer FUD. All it takes is some careful research and an open mind to find these barriers to purchase/usage and transform them into competitive advantage.

Two recent reviews of the HTC EVO discuss the product’s battery life. Brad Feld, one of the brightest VCs in the country, writes:

I can only find one thing to complain about – the battery life.  It’s still running Android 2.1 so I expect there will be plenty of battery tune up in Android 2.2, but out of the box the battery only lasts about six hours…Ok – that’s literally the only thing I don’t like.

Michael Arrington, a man who needs no introduction to my readers, writes:

Well, I’m an Android Fanboy, and I’m telling you not to buy this device. The battery life is abysmal…but this device routinely runs out of power while sitting on standby overnight next to my bed. You aren’t just charging this once a day. Or twice a day. You need to be thinking about your next power fix just about any time you are using it.

I think these two reviews miss something fundamental. Perhaps having worked for a hardware startup has helped me see this. Building hardware that runs software is all about trade-offs. With smartphones there are three primary trade-offs: cost, size and battery life.

While cost is a real trade-off, the upper limit to the BOM on these devices is well known to each manufacturer so this variable doesn’t change much from device to device or between generations. Size is a trade-off too, but like cost, it’s fairly constrained: the new device can’t be any thicker than the previous generation. That means the primary trade-off across all smartphones comes in battery life. Let me state this another way: producing a great phone that gets six hours of battery life, is like me saying “I love my pet tiger, but he eats babies.” That’s just not an acceptable trade-off. Eating babies makes tigers fundamentally bad pets. Unusable battery life makes a smartphone a fundamentally bad smartphone.

Why is Apple so controlling? Why do they have phones that are all nearly identical? Why do they have particular restrictions on background apps? It all comes down to battery life. Battery life is not just another feature on some specifications checklist. It is the driving philosophy behind every design decision made on the iPhone. I think Android fanboys totally miss this point. Now, you might not realize this as an end user because the iPhone’s battery life is “OK.” That’s because Apple is making an explicit decision to trade some battery life and purposefully make it “good enough” for benefits such as a super dense and bright display, background threads, push notifications, video recording, gyroscopes and a laundry list of other features. If they could make a phone with a 10-day battery and all those other features at current size and cost, they would, but that’s not possible. They do this because they know it’s those other features that sell new phones, but battery life is the fundamental currency that runs the smartphone economy.* Apple is able to maintain this balance without dipping into unacceptable territory for the majority of users.

Let’s be clear that squeezing an extra hour or two of battery life out of a phone is no small task. You must make multiple trade-offs for every hour.

Since Apple is developing iOS for a very limited number of devices running extremely similar hardware, they can tweak every bit of code to optimize for battery life. Since Android is designed to run on heterogeneous hardware, these sorts of bit-level and device-specific optimizations are impossible. As smartphone hardware continues to become more complex, this dynamic suggests that iOS’s battery life advantage over Android on average will grow over time.** What you saw at the WWDC Keynote was Apple following a Reagan-esque Cold War Arms Race approach to defeating Android. Every new iPhone hardware feature is analogous to Apple trying to outspend Google in battery life. Google will feel compelled to start mandating front and rear facing cameras, gyroscopes, etc. to stay competitive, but all this will take an even greater toll on Android battery life. Android handset manufacturers will be forced to either make their batteries larger and thus their phones thicker or raise their cost and hope the carrier subsidies will go up too…or the HTC EVO 2 will get a stellar four hours of battery life.

*I’d wager that Apple is probably striking the right balance with battery life. How do we know this? If the iPhone 4 had been announced and it was the same, except 25% thicker than the iPhone 3GS, but had an extra 25% or even 50% battery life on top of what it will have, the reactions would have been universally negative. You know this is true. Don’t lie to yourself bro.

**I say on average because there will be variance within the Android ecosystem. Some Android phones will be better designed than others, but on average I predict, holding battery sizes between iOS and Android equal, Android will become less and less efficient per watt-hour of battery than iOS. Of course, one way for this prediction to fail, is for Apple to squeeze in more battery draining features than Android because Apple has more battery life to spare.

PS- Have I mentioned in the past ten minutes how much the HDMI out on the HTC EVO pisses me off as a product manager? Features without benefits are meant to appeal to a very specific target. That target is somewhere in the basement searching for their red Swingline stapler at this very moment.