Mobile Forward

Windows Laptops Need Better Engineering, Not Better Marketing

Vlad Savov, for The Verge:

The chief marketing officers of Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Lenovo, and HP will gather to host a webcast introducing a major new advertising campaign for the PC. It will mark the first time that the five biggest names in the PC industry have come together around a single, unified message to the consumer. […]

The PC industry really needs saving from itself, because its recent history has been one of either price wars that lead everyone to cut corners or, alternatively, the pursuit of high-margin gimmicks with low chance of success.

Apple gets the fundamentals right in a very serious and rigorous way, and then it gets fancy with its marketing spiel. PC vendors have tended to do the opposite, going for outlandish and gimmicky ideas in their designs, but presenting them in boring and clichéd ways. […]

Except for Apple, personal computer vendors use a common OS, common parts, and have a common approach and speed to computer innovation. It’s no wonder they can’t differentiate themselves. And now, it’s to the point that they’re desperate enough to use common advertising. Will one more “commonality” help? Unlikely.

The irony: PC makers have avoided custom R&D to, essentially, save money. Instead, it’s cost them so much that they’re doing this common marketing campaign. And this brings us full-circle to Savov’s title. Great title. Great point.

Imitation Doesn’t Lead to Differentiation

Insightful article by Eva Dou, for the WSJ, titled Rivals Try to Reinvent Xiaomi Business Model. I think the use of the word “reinvent” is almost meant to be ironic; you won’t find any hint of reinvention from the executives that Dou interviewed. Some nuggets:

In a hint of how quickly Lenovo has worked to develop a Xiaomi rival, Mr. Chang said his team was still figuring out what the [Lenovo brand] name ZUK stands for.

and

One morning this summer, hundreds of young engineers at Wingtech in blue cubicles and humming research stations were busy designing and testing smartphones for clients. Large clients such as Xiaomi and Huawei were cloistered into private rooms, to avoid secrets leaking to rivals. But testing equipment was shared, cutting costs for all the brands.

After reading these passages, what do you think the odds are that any one company’s business model or product will be different than the others’? Low. One alternative path forward: caring about consumers and the technology it takes to build better product experiences. Don’t recall if the executives interviewed used any variation of either word? They didn’t. And that leads us to the prediction:

IHS iSuppli China Research head Kevin Wang said […] “A lot of these smartphone players are probably going to die.”

Basically, some Chinese OEMs hope imitation can lead to differentiation. It won’t.

On Apple’s Stewardship of the iPad

Khoi Vinh, writing on his blog, Subtraction.com:

Apple’s stewardship of the platform has had an air of distractedness for too long, in my opinion. In the absence of true innovation, both consumers and developers have come to regard the iPad as inessential, a deadly combination. The fact of the matter is that Apple will need to take a much more aggressive approach to innovating both hardware and software to turn this situation around.

That’s a good summary. I do think iPad Air 3 is going to be a great improvement and that many consumers will upgrade in the next two product releases. The question about “distractedness” raises the question whether the “distractions” — Apple’s other priorities — are going to turn out to be worth it. If Apple successfully shapes (and profits from) the future of wearables (Apple Watch and related products) or the future of transportation (Apple Car) then the answer will be “yes”. Much has to happen, though.

Why HTC Struggles

HTC continues to struggle.

HTC has trouble making a profit. That’s because it doesn’t have any sort of advantage. And it doesn’t have any sort of advantage because it fragmented its resources, for years. It probably did that because it didn’t have an identity. It began as a company that built phones for others’ brands and evolved into an intermediary between component vendors, OS makers, and operators. It never seriously sought to control the fundamental technology, deliver product directly to consumers, or build exceptional manufacturing.

That drive to do something different — critical to identity – never existed at HTC, at least not in its leaders. HTC existed, like many companies, to make money. Ironically, that makes it harder to make money. Because without a drive for technology control, customer interaction, or manufacturing excellence, it’s very hard to undertake something unique – to deliver differentiated products, to serve some customers especially well, or to deliver the same product but at a superior cost. I’d never blame the employees. I’m sure they were eager to fulfill a good mission and follow a good strategy.

Allow me to illustrate HTC’s situation. The slides below show how companies can compete and how critical it is to build a sustainable advantage. I’ve found this view, based on Michael Porter’s work, very valuable. Precise positioning of companies on this view is tricky, so think of it this way: if you’re not at an extreme (left, right, bottom), you can’t make money. Even the companies that aren’t fully “stuck in the middle” have trouble, but I’ll leave that discussion for another day.

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Back to the issue of resource focus: It took HTC until 2012 — that’s five years after Apple had announced the iPhone — to focus its R&D on a flagship device, the HTC “One”. But it was a false focus. “One” products were, ironically, many. And HTC kept fragmenting its R&D by continuing to launch mid-tier and low-tier smartphones.

HTC didn’t want to focus on (commit to) differentiated products. And it didn’t want to commit to building a low cost advantage. (It’s not alone in this: count BlackBerry, Nokia, Motorola, Microsoft and others in this camp. In a nutshell, if you don’t control key hardware, software, or manufacturing (at-scale), you find it hard to commit to any direction – they’re all hard.)

The visible slide down (in HTC’s financial performance) started in 2011 when the iPhone reached Sprint, a key HTC customer. By 2013, the end was a foregone conclusion (its financial resources and installed base were critically low), and now we’re seeing its last gasps. The end is likely near. I wish all of its employees the best of luck. I hope they can find a place and a role where they can thrive.

Saturday Assorted Links

I’m digging out after being on a great vacation in Maui, Hawaii with extended family. It’s also good to be back, though. Below are some interesting articles or sentences that caught my eye recently.

1. Xiaomi rumored to launch a Windows 10 tablet in the upcoming months. I believe it’s possible. Largely because of this.

2. With Some Work, Cortana Could Be Windows 10’s Killer Application.

I have some travel coming up, and within seconds—literally—of asking Cortana some questions, I was able to check the weather forecast for my destination, find a handful of restaurants around my hotel, and find out what kind of facilities are offered there. I also quickly found a couple of specific recipes online, search for some images, launched some applications, and added a handful of reminders to my calendar. I even had Cortana remind me to get up and walk around every couple of hours, so I wasn’t glued to my office chair for too long each day.

I’m looking forward to trying it out. The first system-wide assistant on a large-scale OS.

3. Tiny sensor tells you when your favorite places are crowded.

The tiny infrared detector is effectively a smarter, more connected pedestrian traffic sensor: it tells apps how many people are entering or leaving a building at any moment, giving you a good sense of whether that restaurant is packed or blissfully empty.

It’s going to be a sensor-filled world. It’s just a question of when.

4. Why the ‘ruthlessly efficient’ editor-in-chief of The New Yorker never tweets.

“I don’t tweet, mainly because I’ve noticed that some of the other people with jobs like mine have either ended up doing all promotional tweets, which is boring, or writing something half-thought-out that would be better used in a more considered piece of writing,” he told Business Insider.

Words to ponder.

5. You Need More than ‘Natural Talent’ to Make it as a Photographer.

Mr. Turlington: Any dips**t can take pictures […] Art, that’s special. What can you bring to it that nobody else can?

Applies to many things in work and life.

In 1995, a 1MP Pro Digital Camera Cost $20,000

Michael Zhang, for PetaPixel:

Want to see how far digital cameras have come over just the past 20 years? Check out this 4-minute clip that CNET released back in 1995, when digital cameras were only just starting to find their way into the hands of serious photographers.

One of the cameras featured in the video was referred to as the “B-2 Stealth Bomber” of digital cameras at the time. It was a Fujix Nikon camera that cost $20,000 ($31,000 in today’s money), could shoot 1.3 megapixel photos, and used a removable 131MB hard drive that could store 70 photos.

While this was a “pro” camera, the general idea is the same: hardware and software improve dramatically over time. So, then:

What is a $20,000 capability today that might be in your mobile device in 20 years? I would elaborate but, unfortunately, I’m out of ink and space, so I have to leave it there. … … Seriously, though, in terms that will seem extremely general to many, but also interesting to some, I’ll just say: some sort of sensor, processor, transmitter, material, or manufacturing method. Or the intersection of several of those. Would you put software in that category, or is it too dependent on the items there? In some ways, the questions, and your imagination, are the most important things right now.

______

PetaPixel found this story at CNET, via SLR Lounge.

A Former CIA Executive’s Advice on How to Make Hard Decisions

Stephanie Vozza, for Fast Company:

Philip Mudd is accustomed to making tough decisions. As the former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and FBI’s National Security Branch, he has gathered information and made recommendations about some of the world’s biggest threats to national safety. […]

Mudd breaks down his decision-making process into five steps:

1. FIND THE REAL QUESTION
People often focus on the wrong question because they assume questions are self-evident, says Mudd. Focusing on better questions up front yields better answers later.

“Good questions are hard to come up with,” he says. “We typically overinvest our time in analyzing problems by jumping right to the data and the conclusions, while under-investing in thinking about exactly what it is we want to know.”

Good advice.

Small Teams with a Purpose Crush Large Teams with a Process

Great, short article by Dustin at ThinkCollective. Found via @RichRogersHDS on Twitter (the article and the line I used in this post’s title). Besides the great line I used in the title, another sharp insight is:

Stop putting your A players on process teams – a great process will reduce variability and mute the contribution of your A players. Staff your process team with C players – everyone will be happier.

Yes.

Andreessen Horowitz’s Lessons for Asian VCs and Founders

Good words by Michael de Waal-Montgomery, at e27.co, after interviewing Marc Andreessen and other VCs:

Mediocre VCs want to see that your company has traction, top VCs want you to show them you can invent the future. […]

The key to investing is to be aggressive and to fight your instinct to pattern-match (“breakthrough ideas look crazy”). If history has taught us anything, it’s that so much of the future is unpredictable despite our best efforts to analyse current trends and extrapolate future outcomes from them.

The context was VC investment, but the ideas apply more broadly.

Interview with the President of the University that Turned Israel Into a Start-up Nation

Peter High, writing at Forbes, interviews Paretz Lavie, president of the Isreal Institute of Technology, also known as Technon. Lavie explains how the university has become a hotbed of entrepreneurship:

I have been asked this question many, many times and I have come to the conclusion that a world class university that plays such a major role in the economy of its environment or its state must have three ingredients: excellent students, excellent faculty members, and this is obvious, but it must have also a third ingredient and it is not so clear when you think about universities. This is a statement of mission. A mission statement must be part of the DNA of the university. […]

Being entrepreneurial and being innovative is affected by a multitude of factors. First, how the student or the entrepreneur is educated. The ability to take risk or the ability to sustain failure is very important. Remember, among startups only one in ten is successful. Some entrepreneurs are successful only in their seventh or eighth attempt, so you must be resilient to failures. The need to achieve is very important. These are characteristics of sometimes immigrants as you said yourself, or people who need to live in an environment or a neighborhood that constantly challenges them. What you can do in order to direct them or to make them a better entrepreneur is to give them some tools. You can provide them with role models, and this is what we are doing in the Technion […]. […]

You cannot rely on your own knowledge, you must bridge different areas. So most of the research centers in the Technion now are interdisciplinary.

A Strong CTO and a Strong VP Engineering: A Winning Formula

Fred Wilson, writing on his blog AVC.com:

A VP Engineering is ideally a great manager and a great team builder. He or she will be an excellent recruiter, a great communicator, and a great issue resolver. The VP Eng’s job is to make everyone in the engineering organization successful and he or she needs to fix the issues that are getting in the way of success.

A CTO is ideally the strongest technologist in the organization. He or she will be an architect, a thinker, a researcher, a tester and a tinkerer. The CTO is often the technical co-founder if there is one (and you know I think there must be one).

When a company has a strong CTO and a strong VP Engineering that trust, respect, and like each other, you have a winning formula. The CTO makes sure the technical approach is correct and the VP Engineering makes sure the team is correct. They are yin and yang.

Play Catch-Up When You’re Ahead

Apple held its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) last week. One theme in the media coverage was that Apple was playing “catch-up”. That’s very true. Here’s an example article from the Verge. It’s correct; in a number of areas, Apple was catching up. I think there is a bigger point, though:

Playing catch-up is okay, as long as you’ve delivered on the big things.

Here is a rough list of Apple’s major accomplishments since 1997. Compare it to any other company’s.

 

iMac iTunes Apple Stores
MacBook Air App Store China Entry
iPod Siri Mac OS
iPhone iMessage iOS
iPad iCloud watchOS
Apple Watch Apple Maps Apple CPU
Apple TV Apple Music Apple Pay
Leading Industrial and Interface Design

These are what mattered for Apple’s success. Apple went until *2015* before playing catch-up on the features announced at WWDC (iPad windowing, low power mode, music streaming, iCloud drive, transit directions, etc.). With minimal pain.

What does this show? It’s wiser to postpone (or be behind in) 100 features than the ten technologies that go into one major product (and often, more). Put differently, it’s better to be in “feature debt” than “product debt” or “platform debt”, when you have the competency to deliver one of the latter.

Those ten technologies and that one major product can end up improving the world, and your company, in incredible ways.

How BlackBerry Crippled BlackBerry

In the WSJ, Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff published an overview of their new book, “The Inside Story of How the iPhone Crippled BlackBerry”.

It’s an excruciatingly painful account of BlackBerry executives’ response to the iPhone. Having worked in the mobile industry since 1994 and, most intensely since 2006, these executive reactions are familiar to me.

From my perspective, they reveal several key reasons why BlackBerry, and companies like it, struggled:

1. Lack of In-House Technology Development

  • “How did they do that?” Mr. Lazaridis [Blackberry co-CEO] wondered.
  • “By all rights the product should have failed, but it did not,” said David Yach, [BlackBerry’s] chief technology officer.

When executives at this level are shocked by new technology, or don’t understand it, it means they haven’t been leading their company to scout new technology, and haven’t been doing enough in-house development to push limits.

2. Focus on the Wrong Customer

  • Mr. Balsillie’s first thought was [BlackBerry] was losing AT&T as a customer.

It’s true that an operator is a customer of sorts. But the people using your product are the ultimate customers – i.e., the consumers. While BlackBerry focused on satisfying the operator executive, Apple focused on satisfying the consumer.

3. Narrow Definition of its Market

  • “It wasn’t a threat to [Blackberry’s] core business.”
  • Offering mobile access to broader Internet content, says Mr. Conlee, “was not a space where we parked our business.”

BlackBerry isn’t alone in this. Nearly every mobile company at the time paid lip service to the Internet. But they defined it as the “Mobile Internet” and, critically, none acted to provide a device that consumers could easily use. They thought of their devices, and their market, as narrowly limited to phones, not general computing devices. And when your device isn’t a general computing device, the Internet is an afterthought.

This fundamental framing also limited technology development (#1 above). Most mobile companies, if they developed technologies in-house, limited them to the cellular radio, rather than more general areas: computer interfaces (e.g., touchscreen), computer software platforms, the Internet, or imaging. Nokia was the exception, but it’s too complex to discuss here.

4. Denial, Masked by Mischaracterization of the Disruptor’s Success

  • “I learned that beauty matters […]. [BlackBerry] was caught incredulous that people wanted to buy this thing,” Mr. Yach says.
  • This was no ordinary phone. It was a cult with a devoted and rapidly growing following.
  • “The carriers aren’t letting us put a full browser on our products,” [said co-CEO Mike Lazaridis].

Similarly, from my experience as a mobile analyst during that time, no executive in the industry admitted (for a very long time) that the iPhone was a better device. Seeing leaders in denial, in my experience, weakened their ability to focus their companies on the right things. Which leads to point #5.

By the way, the point about “the carriers aren’t letting us”: The price of entry for a “full browser” was a stellar product. And that was under BlackBerry’s own control.

5. Tactical Responses to Strategic Problems

  • Mr. Lazaridis believed the four pillars of BlackBerry’s success—good battery life, miserly use of carrier’s spectrum, security and the ability to type—still ruled in the new smartphone world and gave his company its competitive advantage.
  • [BlackBerry] would take another stab at a clickable screen with Storm 2.

They brought features to a platform fight. Tellingly, the word “platform” (which means operating system – one of the iPhone’s major strengths) appears one time in the article. [I’m not faulting the authors. I’m saying it’s a reflection of the thinking – and BlackBerry’s thinking — at the time.] And even as features, none of them – except the long standby battery life –matched the iPhone. And, damningly, part of the reason that BlackBerry phones had better battery life was simply that people used them less. They were “phones”…

All this led to the following:

To Mr. Balsillie, [BlackBerry] was in an existential crisis, mired in what he describes as “strategic confusion.” The company’s business had been disrupted on several levels, with no obvious path forward.

Part of the answer — the part that gives you glimpses into the path forward — is #1 above. When you shape your own technology, you can see the future before others do. Is there another part to the answer? Yes — having a great product shaper. And it’s hard to grow, or recruit, a great product shaper if you don’t give them new technology to work with.

Mobile Forward

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