Archive for category Microsoft
WSJ.com vs WSJ iPad App
Posted by tloverro in Apple, Marketing, Microsoft, Mobile, Operating Systems, Technology, Venture Capital on July 23, 2010
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.
Fixing Apple’s Android PR Problem
Posted by tloverro in Apple, Google, Marketing, Microsoft, Mobile, Operating Systems, Storage, Technology on May 29, 2010
Oh the irony. Apple's emerging PR threat comes from a command-obeying robot. (See Apple's famed 1984 ad.)
When you’re number one, everyone is a hater. As Chris Dixon recently tweeted, “Let me get this straight: some guy speculates he could hack the iPad hence major business mag reports it’s insecure??” Indeed, when you’re el numero uno (officially as of 5/27), the media and your competitors are on the hunt for the slightest whiff of anything negative to slam you with, even if it’s it untrue or doesn’t make any sense.
The memes of Apple as “closed” “restrictive” and “arbitrary” are potentially the most damaging to the brand. These gibes have been around for a while but it is Android has truly brought them to the public’s attention. I cite two arguments for these being the most damaging: 1) Apple’s historical brand equity is built upon the concepts of “creative” “freedom” and “individual”—the very antithesis of “restrictive.” (See Apple’s famed Super Bowl ad, “1984”.) 2) Apple’s modern resurgence is based upon Apple’s brand defeating the reality and perception of Apple as “incompatible.” Consumers only bought Apple products en masse once they believed and experienced true cross-platform compatibility, embodied in the iPod, iTunes and Intel Macs (see Kellogg Prof. Julie Hennessy’s case on Apple and the iPod).
So given this particular reality, what is Apple to do? How can Apple defeat the memes of “closed” “restrictive” and “arbitrary”?
1) The New “Open” App Store Takes a Lesson from Amazon
Much of Apple’s brand’s greatest ire stems from Apple’s 100% control over the App Store. However, as Steve Jobs has directly argued, control is necessary to keep the App Store within brand and grant “freedom from programs that steal your private data” “freedom from programs that trash your battery” and “freedom from porn”. So how can Apple reconcile this tension? I believe the solution is by offering a first-party App Store as it is today (analogous to products “sold by Amazon.com”), but also offering a gate out of Disney World to third-party affiliate merchants (think Amazon Merchants) whose veracity can be approved by Cupertino and also continuously rated by customers (think Amazon Merchant star ratings). These Merchants would of course be limited in number and scope, but ultimately the effect would be that the App Store is no longer perceived to be directly under SJ’s thumb. This could be structured in such a way to create distance between Apple’s brand and the Merchant’s experience and goods. It’s all in the execution.
In conjunction, the other half of the equation would be that Apple would need to develop more clear guidelines for the app approval process (as John Gruber has previously argued).
2) Requiring Flash to Reach Goals, not Saintdom
Steve, I fully concur with you on every point you raise in your “Thoughts on Flash,” but the issue from a PR perspective is that it comes off as a crusade against all things Adobe since you pose problems that seem to have no solutions. Instead of indentifying the issues in such a way that they appear intractable, you should have simply set out specific and explicit hurdles that Flash must clear before being allowed on iPhone OS (even if you don’t believe some of them could ever be accomplished). For instance, “Cannot drain battery more than Quicktime and H.264. Must be fully touch compliant as approved by Apple’s HI team—we can help you on this. Must be open source.” I believe this would have been much better received. And yes, I did throw that last one in there—my point is that by publicly issuing a challenge for Adobe to open source you could have won major PR points rather than reinforcing the perception of Apple as closed by “shutting Adobe out” which I believe “Thoughts on Flash” is widely perceived to have done.
3) From MobileMe to OpenMe
If you really want to deflate the (Android) zombies out there who think Apple is “closed” and “restrictive,” open and free MobileMe. As my buddy Sachin has argued, start off by making MobileMe $0. Next, give people a whole bunch of free cloud space (5GB? 10GB? 20GB? 100GB?) and see what they do with it. Let them be creative. Allow music and media streaming. Cache iTunes purchases in the cloud. Open up an API. Go wild. Surprise us all and blow our minds. You know, think different.
Tech Companies Need a Second Great Idea
Posted by tloverro in Apple, Google, Microsoft, Technology, Venture Capital on May 22, 2010
Here’s a theory I’ve been working on: Multi-billion dollar tech startups (excluding healthcare) require one initial innovation to get the fire started underneath them, let’s call this the kindling, and a second major innovation that works hand-in-hand with the first to throw some real wood on the fire to turn them into companies that stick around for a decade or more. It also seems that each decade requires additional fuel on the fire. If a decade goes by without fuel, the fire turns to a smolder and may extinguish.
● Microsoft was just an OS that had some lock-in but not total, until they found Office. Office has been their behind the scenes showstopper that rakes in the cash and keeps Linux and OS X at bay and it wouldn’t have been possible without Windows. Windows got Microsoft from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s and Office (aka Information Worker) from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. Since then Microsoft hasn’t had another major innovation and it’s fire has been throwing off less heat.
- Google was just a much better AltaVista that didn’t have a revenue model and, even worse, had one of its differentiators based on the idea they wouldn’t sell advertisements on their landing page. Google’s second great innovation, AdWords hit the scene in 2000 just a few years after the search engine launched and is responsible for the majority of the company’s revenues and profits. Of course, it would not have been possible without nearly every internet-connected individual on earth having used Google as their search engine of choice. AdSense carried Google from 2000-2010 and it seems that 2010 will be the year of Android-just in the nick of time to keep Google on top for a second decade.
- Apple had their first hit with the personal computer powered by a graphical OS in the 1980s but that idea alone slowly decayed for Apple over time as a competitive advantage. The personal computer carried Apple from the early 1980s until the early 1990s and then the company began its decline. It wasn’t until Steve Jobs returned with his vision of the Mac as a “media hub” which started coming together around 1997 that Apple’s fire was reignited for another ten years. Exactly ten years later Apple had their third epic innovation in iPhone OS which of course would not have been possible without the prior innovations.
- Adobe started off in 1982 with their awesome fonts and PostScript, but it wasn’t until 1989, seven years later, they gave Photoshop to the world, which ultimately put a halo around what became their Creative Suite. Creative Suite, like Microsoft Office, has been the rainmaker for Adobe. Photoshop carried Adobe on an unstoppable growth trajectory from 1989 until the early 2000s but then Adobe’s fortunes suddenly looked less bright and avenues for growth became less evident. In 2005 Adobe purchased Macromedia and their Flash technology. Adobe is clearly hoping to get another five years of dominance from Flash, hence why they are willing to battle Apple to the death to keep it around. Can Adobe innovate again?
The list of reinforcing examples could go on and on. There are surely examples of companies that have defied this logic, but not as many as you’d think. There are so many examples of companies that died because they never had a second innovation they are not even worth listing. We also have contemporary examples of companies caught somewhere in the middle.
- Facebook had their…online facebook (for lack of a better word) and that product was innovative enough to inspire what feels like half the world to go online and trust Facebook with their most sensitive information. But will Facebook have a second innovation, one where they invent a radically new and better way to monetize their information and turn those users into cold, hard cash? Will Facebook have an AdWords moment? That is the key question and I believe they won’t succeed unless they do.
- Twitter gave the world real-time access to the world’s eating habits, but like Facebook, the question is whether or not the young company can have an AdWords moment.
A few takeaways:
- None of these companies knew what their second great innovation (and real money maker) would be when they launched.
- The closer together the innovations come, the faster the growth. Hence Google’s AdWords was more akin to pouring gasoline on the fire than chucking on another bundle of wood. However, AdWords was probably more necessary too as Google had absolutely no way to become profitable beforehand and may have gone out of business before a full decade came to pass.
- This framework can be used to analyze the fates of current companies such as Twitter and Facebook.
HTML I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down
Posted by tloverro in Apple, Microsoft, Mobile, Operating Systems, Technology on April 25, 2010
Dear HTML,
I love you, but you’re bringing me down.
Yours Truly,
-Tom
I don’t want to read NYTimes.com on my Macbook Pro anymore. I would much rather read the NYTimes Editor’s Choice iPad app. The same goes for the WSJ. iPad apps are generally so far superior to their HTML counterparts it’s hard not to notice. iPad versions of newspapers look like the awesome mockups we were promised thirty years ago, while today’s web versions of newspapers still look a lot like what was actually available thirty years ago (see this awesome KRON news clip from 1981).
Is the solution to bring apps to the desktop? I don’t think so. I propose that the solution is to evolve the tools we use to create the web closer to the tools we use to create apps.
The web’s infrastructure needs to remain as open as possible. Yes, HTML5 will help, but no, it won’t go far enough in making the web as easy to make beautiful (for instance, providing the library of the sorts of standard interface elements that iPhone OS SDK does). I want HTML to make it as easy as the iPhone OS SDK to layout content with incredible production value without resorting to Flash (or any other closed or 3rd party plugin) or forcing every web designer to reinvent the wheel.
HTML can learn a lot from the iPad and the iPhone OS SDK. Will it? I don’t know, but if the web/HTML is to remain competitive and as open as it has historically has been, I think it needs to incorporate some of the lessons from folks like Apple in a way consistent with its core beliefs. If it can, the web might even become more open. Otherwise, consumers will seek to consume content where it is most appealing and producers/publishers will go there as well (and probably earn superior CPMs given the better production value and branding opportunities) and that may not be on the web, but in an app and I think that would be ashamed.
Windows Phone 7 Series: The Day Hell Froze Over
Posted by tloverro in Apple, Marketing, Microsoft, Mobile, Operating Systems, Technology on February 15, 2010
Today is an historic day in Redmond: the day Microsoft can finally claim I wrote something positive about their mobile OS. Windows Phone 7 Series is a bold re-imagining of Windows Mobile which I have previously described as nothing less than a “car wreck hitting a train wreck getting hit by jumbo jet.” However, in analyzing Microsoft’s new strategy we see they have implicitly ceded defeat on the original Windows Mobile strategy. This has some very interesting ramifications I have not read about anywhere else, so I thought I would point them out.
If you want a good write up concerning the advancements in WP7S, Ars Technica has a great summary here. But, what interests me most about WP7S was never announced and probably never will be.
Windows Mobile = Windows…but Mobile
So the story goes that Microsoft defeated Apple in the desktop OS market because Apple stuck too rigidly to a command & control system of defining all hardware and software. Bill Gates came in and democratized everything allowing anything to work with anything. (Freedom rules! O’Doyle Rules!) The evil, all black wearing, communist Steve Jobs was handily defeated in the Great Operating System War (aka The First World Operating System War).
As the world evolved and mobile devices came to market, Microsoft pushed on with its democratic, diverse hardware platform strategy and ported it directly to these new waves of mobile devices. This is evident from the various names of these mobile operating system incarnations: Windows CE, Windows PocketPC (Windows…in your pocket!!!) and of course Windows Mobile. These attempts were all aimed at putting Windows on a mobile phone–Start button, task manager, windows file explorer and all–the whole shebang.
Why would mobile phones be any different than computers? Until today, Microsoft publicly believed that this is how the world should work: Microsoft makes the operating system and myriad device manufacturers compete from Texas to Taiwan to make dazzling devices with the most differentiation sporting the most megahertz and most whizbang features to lure consumers. (And we see this in how WinMo devices are marketed: They are marketed like computers: “You should buy this WinMo phone because it has a XXXMHz Snapdragon processor and XXXMB of memory!” Oooo! Ahhhh!)
Only problem? As it turns out, Windows in your pocket is a terrible idea. Why? I realize this may be hard to grasp–it’s exceedingly subtle (at least it was in Redmond for a decade): mobile phones are not desktops nor even laptops; they are mobile phones.
iPhoneOS ≠ OS X Mobile
Attack!!!
Until the iPhone was released, the mobile software world was a horrid shantytown of squalor, JAMDAT and diarrhea. No single mobile OS had a rich enough user experience or had enough market share for development to be worthwhile and hardware differed so much from phone to phone that entire businesses were made out of customizing mobile games into tens of thousands of individual SKUs (I should know; I looked at investing in a few such businesses).
A Turning Point
But now we are coming to the turning point in the war. We are 25 years after the first graphical version of Windows on the desktop. It is becoming apparent even to Billy G. and Stevey B. that quality assurance with an unlimited number of hardware devices and an unlimited number of peripherals, all requiring unlimited numbers of software drivers means, well…infinity plus one combinations of possible devices for Windows to reside on…and that makes producing really tight software quite hard. Windows grew ever larger just to meet the minimum requirements of supporting this infinite universe of hardware and software and soon began to sag and eventually crash under its own weight faster than the Warsaw Radio Mast. We have a name for this tragedy: Windows Vista.
WP7S ≠ Windows 7 Mobile
Today Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7 Series and simultaneously 1) gave itself a decent shot at reclaiming major market share in the mobile OS and 2) conceded defeat of its core strategy by implicitly admitting that the “Freedom Rules!” lessons of the desktop do not apply to the mobile phone. As Ars Technica states:
“[WP7S relative to WinMo], however, is considerably less customizable, and the hardware requirements are much, much tighter…In fact, pretty much the only optional feature is whether to have a hardware keyboard or not…Software-wise, there will only be one version, with none of the variants that its predecessor had.”
Thus, Microsoft was able to save its mobile OS, but only by adopting tactics from the enemy. While this may have been “OK” to do for the limited world of the Xbox, this is quite a big deal for the mobile OS, which easily represents half or more of the future OS opportunity. Microsoft has ditched the large, open, hairy, wooly, unfettered, laissez-faire capitalism of both Windows and Windows Mobile for the carefully regulated, post-modern compromise that is WP7S.
And I toast Microsoft for it! That’s why WP7S works. That’s why it’s promising! And what next? If Microsoft is able to stick to this strategy, we may see a D-Day face off between Microsoft and Apple.
But will Microsoft ever adopt such a rational and post-modern view of Windows on the desktop, combining both a tightly regulated vision with some room for outside vendors? I certainly hope so.
Addendum on Product Naming
Windows Phone 7 Series…or was that Windows 7: Phone Series? Or Windows Phone Series 7? Really? I mean, really ? That was the best name you could come up with? The whole point of this new OS is that it is NOT “Windows 7 in your pocket.” I understand you want to benefit from the wave of positive press and enthusiasm Windows 7 is receiving, but this is short-sighted. It’s a mouthful and the order of the words is confusing. I am not saying I immediately have a better alternative, but then again I haven’t spent any time thinking about. If I happen to find a seven figure check in the mail from Redmond, I’ll start working on it. My guess is they come up with a better name or at least a more consumer friendly moniker before official launch.
[Ed: Of course, as my friend Lucas points out this is all in principle at least. WP7S is supposed to arrive by "holiday season 2010" which puts it just this side of what many would call vaporware. iPhone 4.0 will likely be 33-50% dead already and iPhone 5.0 will be 50% alive by the time consumers get their first taste of WP7S-an eternity in mobile OS time.]
Windows 7 Anytime Upgrade (WAU) Pricing
Posted by tloverro in Apple, Marketing, Microsoft, Operating Systems, Technology on July 31, 2009
Microsoft just announced the pricing scheme for upgrading from various flavors of Windows 7 to other flavors of Windows 7 through the “Windows Anytime Upgrade (WAU)” program. For Microsoft customers, this comes as a relief as it should make life much easier in scenarios such as the following:
One day you decide to purchase a new, sweet looking Dell Mini 10 netbook with Windows 7 Starter. A few weeks later you are reading personal email via Gmail (Internet Explorer), on Twitter (TweetDeck) and listening to music (iTunes), when all of a sudden you realize you missed an important business meeting with Katy Perry and Tay Zonday on the topic of how to solve world hunger because Outlook never served you with a “Meeting Reminder” because you already had three applications open. This would obviously force you to smash your teeth in requiring a long hospital stay and painful oral surgery. Following your release from the hospital you may say to yourself “Hey, self. It might be nice to upgrade that piece of crap Windows 7 Starter edition to something that’s actually functional. Why the hell didn’t Dell warn me about this in the first place? I might still have some of my natural teeth if they had done that.” After an hour on hold with Dell, a Dell sales representive finally picks up and tells you to hang up and call Microsoft and inquire about the “Windows Anytime Upgrade (WAU)” program.
NOW, aren’t you glad Microsoft established this program? Isn’t it fucking convenient? You’re damned right it’s convenient. You can upgrade ANYTIME. Not just on Tuesdays or alternating Saturdays like with all those other operating system manufacturers. Is Caldera or Tandy forcing you to upgrade your OS on weekdays from 9am-5pm? With Microsoft you can upgrade from Windows 7 Home Basic Starter Premium Small Business (Northeastern US) 2009 Edition to Windows 7 Prosumer Advanced Home Theater CE Touch Tablet at 4:30am on a SUNDAY! Yes, you read that right. On a SUNDAY! Anytime. Daylight savings time, Christmas Eve, Boxing Day, while you’re in the shower–wait, actually–anytime, except anytime you want to upgrade from say Window 7 Starter directly to Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate. That’s just unreasonable and impossible. You’re an asshole. That’s what you are.
It seems extremely straightforward, but just in case you’ve missed anything or are more visually inclined, I’ve gone ahead and provided a chart for my readers.
And please remember that there’s no official way as of yet to go from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Ultimate or from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Professional outside of buying two upgrade packages. Also unknown is how one might move from Windows 7 Professional to Windows 7 Ultimate.
Let’s look at the pricing plan for OS X upgrades now: $29.
Sometimes I wonder if the Product Marketing and Management folks at Microsoft have any say at all in the things they make. (Is that statement too Marxian for you? Scary, eh?) Perhaps there are just so many people and layers of management that even when they know something such as their pricing is an impending train wreck more than six months from launch, they can’t do anything to correct course. So who does makes deicisions like this inane pricing scheme? Most folks would say “Clearly, a committee.” But I know the real answer. There’s actually one man at Microsoft who made the decision. I hear he calls all the shots in Redmond these days. His name is Clippy.
Parting thought–what about the pricing of this upgrade path?
If I post this graphic on that official Windows 7 Blog, do you think they’ll respond?
NAS is Overblown
Posted by tloverro in Marketing, Microsoft, Operating Systems, Storage, Technology on June 3, 2009
Dear Established Storage World,
I’ve got some serious issues with what you’re assuming consumers and SMBs want from their storage. Get your head out of the “cloud” and listen up. Here’s what people actually want:
1. Don’t f#cking crash and lose my family photos or tax returns.
2. See number one.
Why is it then that when you look at how vendors such as HP, Iomega or LaCie market their storage products, they either 1) promote a bunch of technical specifications that are 100% irrelevant to customers or 2) promote a bunch of esoteric NAS features that are only good for Alpha Geeks? Who the hell cares how much RAM or what MHz processor is in a storage product? Is 1GHz good or bad for storage? Have you ever tried using UPnP / DLNA? It blows!
Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t have any problems with NAS per se. To me NAS is a great way of sharing storage/files across many computers. I use NAS (via SMB/CIFS) at home every day with a Drobo and DroboShare for the three Macs in my apartment. Here’s my problem: most storage vendors conflate NAS with multimedia streaming and “cloud” services, but this approach is bound to fail. NAS is first and foremost a way of sharing files, not streaming them.
FACT: Windows Home Server (WHS) is bound to fail, just as surely as Intel’s Viiv platform for the living room is now a laughable and faded memory. Why? It’s a freaking mule that doesn’t know whether it wants to backup your data or make sweet love to your TV.
Windows Home Server will never match the beauty or elegance of either 1) backing up to a direct-attached USB/FW/eSATA drive or 2) me walking up to my plasma screen TV and plugging my laptop in via HDMI–no need to convert videos between arcane codecs, download tons of buggy software or go through the headache of streaming. Intel’s Viiv failed because it’s really hard to put a general purpose computing device in the living room and have it do anything really well. WHS suffers from this same basic and fatal flaw. It’s really hard to put a general purpose storage device in the living room and have it do anything really well.
Sheer madness! Number of people who actually use this feature? Five? Ten?
At the end of the day WHS and most NAS devices fail my most basic of consumer/SMB litmus tests: I can’t explain what they do in one sentence or less. If you need further proof of their lack of consumer appeal, simply visit HP’s Home Media Server website. The first thing you’ll notice is a page about “Why a Home Server?” Um, if you need to have that page, you should realize you are selling a solution and technology in need of a problem.
"Redmond, we have a problem. No one wants these things."
How about this for a novel approach: we start with the needs of consumers and SMBs first? It’s what I did at Data Robotics (and they will continue to do) and we took the industry by storm. Here’s a cheat sheet for the Established Storage World , please refer to the beginning of this blog entry for what people want from their storage. Hint: it doesn’t have the words “Cloud 2.0.1″ in it.
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