Raising the Bar, Learning from Failure, and Other Lessons from Steve

After a crazy couple of weeks in the consumer electronics/smartphone/computer/telecom mega-industry (it’s really all one now), another bombshell arrived yesterday with the news that Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO and is taking on role of chairman of the board. In reality, it probably means he will be in an advising capacity not unlike what he’s probably been doing for the last year while on medical leave. But still, a shock to the system.

The fact that he’s been able to carry on having any significant executive role at Apple is testament to how passionate and dedicated he is to the company. For quite a long time now he’s had another full-time job (and I’m not talking Pixar or being on the board of Disney): fighting cancer. Best wishes to you in that challenge, Steve.

There’s a lot of speculation on how Apple will do now that Jobs is no longer at the helm. I for one think it will do just fine for quite a while - it’s got a very solid culture that will endure, huge momentum in the market, no debt, probably the strongest brand in the world, and the upper hand in almost every market it’s in.

Setting the Bar Crazy High

All of us in the design and innovation biz have a lot to thank Steve Jobs for. He opened up the play space for us by setting the bar so ridiculously high. This did several things:

• It set a standard for quality, invention, and consistency that inspired others (including us at frog), and allowed much greater latitude for pushing the boundaries of form, materials and interactions. A staple of client requests in the last decade has been “I want the iPod of [my category]” (which became “I want the iPhone of…” and then “iPad of…”). Meaning of course that they didn’t want a literal iPod, but they wanted the same kind of game-changing product, business opportunity, and user experience which these devices came to represent. Most companies, however, underestimate how difficult that is to do from a cultural, technical, organizational, and business perspective (especially if you want to do this repeatedly, not just a one-off).
• It changed people’s expectations for design, products and experiences even in categories far beyond the ones Apple plays in. A good example is the current trend of consumerization of IT, where expectations about ease of use, flexibility, and joy of use from consumer applications are now being forced onto staid IT systems. Why does the online expense-filing application my company pays a lot of money for have to suck so bad, when the free site I use for sharing photos handles so much more complexity so much more easily?

Failure Can Make You Stronger

In 1965, the Apollo 1 spacecraft caught fire while still on the launchpad, killing all three astronauts. It was a televised, very public failure for NASA as it desperately tried to overtake the Russians for the race to the moon. While it was tragic, it also prompted a critical reassessment of the program that ultimately made it better. Retired astronaut John Young said, “I can assure you if we had not had that fire and rebuilt the command module … we could not have done the Apollo program successfully. So we owe a lot to Gus, and Rog and Ed. They made it possible for the rest of us to do the almost-impossible.”

Jobs has been quite open about the fact that after he was fired from Apple, he went through a difficult period. But ultimately this made him a better leader, and he returned to the company after eleven years quite a different person than he had left it. I think it’s fair to say that Apple is a better and more successful company now than if he’d been at the helm for the entire time.

In his humble, inspiring speech to the graduating class at Stanford, he put it this way:

So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. […]

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. […]

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

Spend a lunch break watching the whole thing if you haven’t, it’s worth your while:

The Next Smartphone Frontier: Prepaid

We live in a unique cell phone bubble in North America: We are the only region in the world where the majority of people get their cell phone service with a subscription. Here, prepaid phones are a fringe minority, relegated to lower-income populations, very infrequent users, and loaner phones. But in the rest of the world, prepaid phones vastly outnumber subscriptions, in some cases by 5-10x.

A recent article by Asymco makes this very clear. Here’s the overall breakdown globally (“post-paid” = subscription since you pay after each month’s service):

Courtesy Asymco.com

The breakdown by region:

Courtesy Asymco.com

However, smartphones have so far been largely limited to subscription plans. As Asymco notes (using the iPhone as an example):

The first chart shows the global split between pre-/post-paid subscribers as of 2010. Roughly 1.5 billion are post-paid and 3.7 billion are pre-paid. That means that nearly 70% of the world is not being addressed by the iPhone as it currently stands. Put another way, a shift in positioning might result in a 250% increase in addressable market…. You can visualize the iPhone having spent the last four years penetrating into the blue areas of the chart through the expansion of carrier agreements. With half the US & Canada area being finally filled in this year, most of the blue is now more-or-less within reach.

Furthermore, according Nielsen, the subscription market has shifted dramatically to smartphones in the US, with 38% of Americans owning them, and 55% of purchases in the last 3 months being smartphones. If this trends takes hold in other markets beyond their relatively small subscription customers, then smartphones will really take off in a whole new way with prepaid users.

Courtesy NielsenWire

One Step Ahead

Now consider this: in the next version of iOS, an iPhone (or iPad) won’t need to every be tethered to a PC. If expectations hold up, this means that an iPhone user won’t need to own a PC at all. Guess what? This matches up perfectly with the prepaid market in the rest of the world, where PC-ownership is far, far lower on average than it is in the US. The iPhone therefore can become the defacto communications/computing device for a vast population. Apple has already made a small move in this direction by making the iPhone 4 available unlocked, but in the US this is largely pointless since 3G bandwidth is only available on AT&T’s network (the iPhone’s 3G radio is incompatible with T-Mobile’s network, the only other choice). But it’s clear Apple has its eye squarely on this next huge frontier of growth, one that could easily dwarf the impressive volumes it’s achieved so far.

Why Google Had to Take Control of Android with Nexus One

Google’s introduction of Nexus One, a phone to truly call its own, is a completely necessary move for the company. Only by taking ownership of the whole user experience will Google really be able to prove the value of its Android platform.

Nexus means a series of things connected together, an appropriate name for a phone where Google is taking more control of both the hardware and software, and therefore much more of the user experience.

We are at interesting inflection point with smartphones, a point where we have two competing development models playing out and a future in which probably only one will survive: Highly integrated, or highly modular.

With a few exceptions (BlackBerrys and to a lesser extent Treos), until recently most smartphones have been modular affairs: hardware from one company, OS and software from another company, wireless network from yet another. This has led to disjointed user experiences that have limited the appeal of the phones to more mass market audiences. The success of the iPhone with mass consumers showed that it was vital to integrate all these elements together seamlessly (and that integration goes beyond the phone itself to content on the PC and in the cloud).

In the early stages of a category such as smartphones, the usage experience is often rough and incomplete. Early adopters will look past this, but until a more refined experience arrives that delivers the right recipe of capabilities, ease of use, and price, then the majority of people will stay away. I refer to this as an experience gap - a mismatch between what people want to do with a product, and what the products on the market can actually deliver.

Once the recipe has been established, and clarity reached about what people want, it then becomes easier to divide up pieces of the experience to different vendors, as they now all have a common goal in mind. Following Clayton Christensen’s logic, once this happens then modular approaches will ultimately win out - they will be more technologically sophisticated, cost less, and offer more capabilities. The PC is the archetypal example of this process. Smartphones are coming up on this inflection point, though the timing of when it will tip into full-blown modular-hood is unclear. Smartphones could be like mp3 players, where the similarly integrated ecosystem of iPod/iTunes has resisted being broken into components by competitors.

Google’s leaders are excellent students of tech history, and they no doubt understand this trend. When Android premiered it was, as Christensen would say, “prematurely modular”, in that it was a system that had a very high degree of modularity and very little structure, but it was too early for other vendors building on the Android platform to know how to put together an effective recipe for user experience.

Charlie Wolf at Needham Company roundly criticizes Google for its overly loose approach to Android:

The great appeal and promise of Android is that it’s an open source operating system in the tradition of the Linux operating system. The appeal of open source lies in the freedom of software developers, smartphone manufacturers and wireless carriers to modify the source code of the operating system.  And, as initial versions of Android phones demonstrate, the smartphone vendors have every incentive to do so in order to differentiate their phones from others running on the Android platform. For example, Motorola sells it customized user interface as “MotoBlur” while HTC markets its user interface as “Sense.”

Unfortunately, the freedom of smartphone manufacturers to modify the Android code has created significant hurdles for application software developers. Unlike the iPhone where a software application can be written once and run seamlessly on all versions of the iPhone [Not exactly true - AR], most software applications written for Android have to be customized for each smartphone. This limits the addressable market of an application to that of an individual smartphone rather than the Android platform itself. 

(Download the PDF of Wolf’s report here)

The lackluster success of the early Android phones has surely made Google realize that they need to take a much stronger role in order to bring all the pieces of the experience together. The catch-as-catch can approach they’ve had to far just isn’t going to cut it. Fragmentation is a death knell for a product like this at this stage of maturity. Google needs to lead the charge with an integrated platform until the experience gap is fully closed. Then it can afford to loosen the reins and let the handset manufacturers, carriers, and third party developers go do their own things independently, safe in the knowledge that they will all come together to create something interesting and valuable for customers.

Goodbye iPhone, Hello (Again) BlackBerry

I am now a reverse switcher - I switched from a BlackBerry to an iPhone about six months ago, and now am switching back again. Why? Basically it comes down to the fact that the iPhone is really good at the stuff I do 10% of the time, but pretty poor at the stuff I do 90% of the time. This is not to bash the iPhone. It has been a transformative device in the wireless industry, and forced everyone else to up their game. It has shuffled the power structure between device makers, service providers, developers, and the broader ecosystem. But such a sophisticated device is a very personal choice and people have very different priorities for something they use and carry around with them almost every waking hour. My phone is provided by and for work, and I primarily use it for work purposes, and for that I find a BlackBerry much, much more efficient. Now after having a BlackBerry Bold for a week, I realize how much I was fighting with the iPhone the whole time trying to get it to do what I wanted, at the speed I wanted.

Click to read more ...

Back to the Future with iPhone Typing

Reading a review of Documents To Go, a Microsoft Office-compatible document creater/reader app for the iPhone (as well as many other PDAs/smartphones) made me think of the old “laptops” that first appeared in the early 80’s. When typing on the iPhone in landscape mode you only get a few lines of text remaining visible, and Documents To Go exacerbates this further with additional menu bars that take up more vertical real estate (though they can be invisible-ized when not needed).

Here’s a screenshot from the MacWorld review. As you can see, there are only 3 lines of text visible (perhaps 5 with the menu bar off):

Here’s what the old Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 looked like, perhaps the world’s first true laptop computer from 1983:

Two and a half decades later and we’re back where we started…

If you’re just typing a quick message then such a letterboxed view is perhaps acceptable, but for working properly on a multi-page Word doc it’s just horrible. I would sometimes use my old Palm Tungsten T3 (which had one of the larger Palm screens) along with a fold-up keyboard, and it actually wasn’t too bad. But that’s my minimum for a tolerable experience when writing anything even moderately lengthy.

I have to admit that I find myself less and less enamored of the forced compromise that the iPhone creates between keyboard and content by placing both on the same screen. I don’t find any of the permutations satisfactory for what I need. Obviously I’m in a minority however, as most people love their iPhones according to one recent very small-scale survey.