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From an email exchange with a friend asking about the Nexus One (the ‘Google phone’) launch.

Thoughts about the Nexus One’s prospects

Does it have better hardware, a better screen, better battery life, better price, more freedom, better apps, better multitasking, better camera than the iPhone? Yes. Is it the iPhone? No.

People who’ll buy the Nexus One say they want to buy something like the iPhone that isn’t the iPhone, and they’re lying even though they don’t know it. They want the iPhone because it’s the iPhone. And nothing else. When you create in your mind a category called iPhone-like, there’s only one member that’s ever going to be a full, incontrovertible member of that category.

These buyers are going to be disappointed even though they won’t know quite why. They’ll blame it on the phone instead of their own expectations, and demand won’t spike the way it did for the iPhone.

Would I buy it?

I don’t like the iPhone, but I like this current crop of Android devices even less. If, in a (thankfully) fictional dystopian universe I had to choose only between the iPhone and the Nexus, I’d take Apple’s baby (and lament long and hard about the lack of alternatives).

Reason #3: form factor wise no Android device has nailed the iPhone. This is HTC and Motorola and Samsung, not Apple we’re talking about. So there. These firms are known for specs, not sex.

Reason #2: I will not buy a phone with a trackball. Ever. Would you buy a Skoda that featured a manually-operated crank to start the engine? Heck, even Blackberrys have moved on.

Reason #1: Polish. I posit that no one has been able to nail the touchscreen experience other than Apple. Not Palm, Not Android. Not (shudder) RIM and most certainly not Microsoft. Since 2007, for instance, Android phones have been underpowered and have had user experience (UX) issues where the phone hasn’t been able to keep up with text or touch input. Now three years later,

Some animations are very smooth, some are janky as hell. The Nexus One has a faster processor than the iPhone 3GS and has twice the RAM, and yet it still cannot have as fluid a UI as the iPhone OS. This is great proof that your software is key—throwing raw power at things won’t necessarily make them better.

And it doesn’t even have to run Android. Every touchscreen phone apart from iPhone suffers from this.

I think it’s worth demonstrating how Apple nails the experience with an example.

In Mobile Safari, the iPhone browser, if you scroll (swipe) too fast, instead of text you’ll see a chequered pattern – the processor can’t render the text fast enough – but the scrolling experience itself is smooth as ever. Once you stop scrolling, text will eventually appear. On any other mobile browser, the scrolling itself will stutter as the processor tries to render everything.

When you’re using a device all day every day as essentially an extension of your body and mind, stuff like this matters more than features.

I’d pick the iPhone. As, sadly, will folks who upgrade from the Nexus One eventually.

Update (10 Jan 2010): Another example of polish in design:

Other issues that I can’t live with day to day? How do I copy text from non-editable field like an email, webpage, or SMS, or even a 3rd party application? Oh, I can’t. Say what you want about the iPhone not having copy and paste for two years — a joke — it’s the single best implementation on the planet for a smartphone and Google’s approach is almost as bad as RIM’s with the Storm-series.

(From Boy Genius Report, via John Gruber)

Joshua Schachter of Del.icio.us fame on how the different parts of a blogging system could be decoupled and run off specialized web applications: authoring by desktop apps, storage of raw posts and hosting on Amazon S3, templates by Wordpress, feeds by FeedBurner and comments by Disqus/others.

If you run a self-hosted Wordpress/Movable Type blog, you’re already there. Instead of S3, you’re hosting it on your hosting provider’s space (which could well be S3). In fact, this is how rahulgaitonde dot org works.

Now Joshua only alludes to this, but these pieces aren’t coupled loosely enough to move to plug out one component and fit another in. For example, I can’t take the Feedburner RSS component out and replace with another – my RSS feed URL is tied to Feedburner. I can’t move my template transparently between Blogger and Movable Type.

Back in May 2008, I had similar thoughts about separating the email interface from email storage:

There is a market for start-ups that provide only an interface for existing email. For people who are willing to pay for (cheap) storage of their email and for bandwidth. Users will be able to migrate from and to such services without needing to copy huge amounts of email to their new email provider.

I wonder whether in the future we’ll eventually build such a decoupled email system, or find an alternative to email altogether.

Yahoo! just redesigned the Yahoo.com home page, its crown jewel for a decade. The big change is a bar on the left with widgets that display updates from Facebook, Gmail, New York Times and some 60 other sources. The company made a big deal of it, but on the whole it’s failed to impress.

I won’t regurgitate the bucketfuls of painstakingly-written criticism of the redesign itself that I’ve read over the past few days. In any case it’s too early to measure the impact of this change. I think the problem with the lukewarm, even negative reviews was with how Yahoo! announced the change to the world. In other words, this was a communications, not an execution problem.

Why everyone said “Ho-Hum”
The verdict is that this is old hat, and too little to make a difference – and there’s reason to be skeptical. The web has seen at least two major paradigm shifts since the late 1990s (first search and then social media), but Yahoo! has persisted with the original portal paradigm – making money off visitors to its home page by keeping them on its properties. But Yahoo! now ranks 2nd behind Google as the most visited property on the web – and Google makes money by sending people away from its search page!

Yahoo! is under tremendous pressure to 1. innovate and 2. stay relevant in the future. Any move by the company needs to score very well on these two parameters. Redesigning a home page, however dramatically, is not such a move.

Let your users say how great it is
Any pragmatist at Yahoo! would have anticipated that news of a home page redesign would not be seen as game-changing by itself – either by Yahoo’s users or by its advertisers [1].

That’s why it probably made more sense to simply spread awareness of the impending redesign than to generate buzz and create hype. CEO Carol Bartz called it “most significant change in our home page since the company’s inception”. So what? While the redesign effort was probably significant internally (money, time, CEO attention), it’s presumptious to assume users will find it just as significant. Bring out the tom-tom drums after your users have given you the thumbs-up.

As for advertisers, Yahoo! would probably have been far better off sharing metrics with them on a one-on-one basis after the launch. Display new targeting capabilities. Show user adoption rates. Show clickthrough statistics. Things that will bring a grin to advertisers’ faces, especially when they’re under pressure to get the most bang for buck with dramatically reduced budgets. Of course, all this is only if the redesign really works.

In other words, it’s time for Yahoo!, in an infinitely more transparent world, to put its money where its mouth is.

[1] No kidding. Tapan Bhat, Sr. Vice President at Yahoo, crowned himself Supreme Emperor of Unintentional Irony by declaring that the new home page would put Yahoo! at the “center point of people’s lives online.”

When it comes to the Internet in India, the low-hanging fruit has beeen picked, across sectors. Think Travel. Books. Jobs. Dating. Electronics. Money. In his post today, Rajesh Jain lists a few more: Search (dominated by Google), News (Rediff, NDTV, CNN-IBN), Email (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Rediff), Cricket (Cricinfo/ESPN), Video (YouTube/Google).

Online pioneers have lapped up the biggest brands and most popular goods: the largest cities, the biggest hotel chains, the most popular travel destinations, the widest marriageable demography, the most desirable gadgets, the most viral videos, the news everybody reads, the the matches everyone watches.

Now comes the hard part. The cities only a few want to travel to [1], the outliers for whom it isn’t easy finding a match [2] , books in regional languages, people with odd skills, niche but tremendously useful gadgets, highly technical videos. There’s a market for all those. In aggregate, they’re as large and lucrative as those that have already been monetized [3].

Then there’s an even larger market – for individual professional services. The mother of all yellow pages, with a location-based and rating-based component. One that connects me to the nearest puncture shop when my car has a flat on a stretch of highway (and takes Rs. 10 for that connection), directs me to the nearest ATM in any city, to the most reliable service center for my phone.

There is no technological barrier to setting up these businesses anymore (you really don’t need broadband for most of this – just plain Internet access, and in some cases, a cellphone). What makes this hard is convincing small businesses/individuals to sign on. Building trust and credibility. Selling to Jet Airways is much easier than to Pravin Puncturewalla on a random national highway. If you’re willing to tackle that, you have a successful business.

Finally, Rajesh has a compelling vision of the “now-new-near” web, which you should read. I think that “niche” is about as much the future as the others. I also think that “now” and “new” are synonymous for the vast majority of cases, so I propose that tomorrow’s web will be the “now-near-niche” web (built around the evolving Internet Operating System)

[1] RedBus.in is doing a spectacular job with that, by my estimates. Driving to work today I spotted a travel service that did a Hyderabad-Kolhapur (!) bus route. And hey presto, Redbus.in has that route listed.

[2] Secondshaadi barely scratches the surface, but hey, it’s a start.

[3] Yes, yes. It’s the same old tired Long Tail phenomenon. Let’s set aside discussions of how cool the phenomenon itself is and why it works, and explore how you can build businesses in India with it.

Yesterday and today
The Web has been through two major evolutionary stages, and we are seeing some major activity in the third evolutionary stage.

The first was the “early web” – through most of the 90s and until the dot-com bust. People accessed content through directories and portals, and the content itself was static web pages.

The second was what was dubbed (retrospectively) “Web 1.0” [1] Search went mainstream, and we also began to see a lot of dynamic content (think classifieds on craigslist and books on Amazon).

The third stage is what we’ve called “Web 2.0” in its early forms and “social media” as focus has shifted from a loose set of open standards and technologies (RSS, OPML, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, CSS, HTML5, Webkit, Flash, SyncML, OAuth) to the services that have been built with them.

Within this latest stage of evolution, developments in the last three years or so have been about putting together the guts of what Tim O’Reilly called the “Internet Operating System” to truly integrate the Internet into our daily lives. We’re reaching a stage of maturity with these internals (that is, growth/focus/interest is slowing), and are seeing an acceleration in the activity around applications and services built on top of them.

Tomorrow and beyond
But I think there’s still tremendous competition for some platforms that will form the guts of the Internet Operating System. Fred Wilson talks about aspiring to be a platform:

I think, that if you don’t want to be [an Internet] platform, then I don’t know what you should be aspiring to be. I mean, I don’t know that there is anything else that you would want to be.

The search system is pretty much Google and the location system is Google Maps. The iTunes Music Store and YouTube are the digital entertainment system, and Twitter makes an extremely strong case for the messaging system. But there’s still no dominant payment system for the web. There’s still no dominant scheduling/calendaring system yet, no dominant remote storage system and most critically, no identity system. And this is nowhere close to being a complete list.

As a parent, can you subscribe to your child’s school’s football coaching team calendar with the playground location embedded, sign up for it by paying the fees through your mobile phone and have your car’s GPS give you turn-by-turn directions to the ground on practice days following the least-congested route based on real-time crowdsourced information? Not yet.

Until these systems are in place, there is an upper limit on what we can make applications do, how deeply we can integrate these applications into our physical world. The “next Google/Twitter/Facebook” is going to be a company that creates a credible missing platform.

The top-level applications that build upon existing platforms will be either be single-purpose applications (Evernote is one example) or “glue” companies, those that tie platforms together. Don’t expect to see a billion-dollar company out of them in their current form. [2]

[1] The analogy with the World Wars is hard to miss. Until WW2, the First World War was known just as the Great War. Until sometime in 2005, “Web 1.0″ was just the Web.

[2] That’s not to say that they’re not worth investing in. I’m saying that next-generation services can only become mainstream once the plumbing is in place – and to take advantage of new platforms, these top-level applications will need to evolve significantly.

Related stuff around the web you ought to read:

Techcrunch announced PubSubHubbub, a protocol to speed up delivery of RSS and Atom feeds (5 August 2009)

Dare Obasanjo on Google’s possible stab at an identity solution, the WebFinger protocol (15 August 2009)

So you blog, post comments, use Twitter, post photos on Flickr, videos on Youtube, talk with friends on half-a-dozen networking sites, and yes, send and receive tons of email. 

Which is all very fine. Until the day you die.

What happens to your digital possessions after you’re no longer around? It’s a question without a good answer, mostly because it hasn’t been asked often enough. Understandably. The Internet’s only been around some 15 years, and we’ve only begun putting personal info on the Web (Here’s a broad list) for about 5 or 6 years. In other words, very few of us from the Internet Age are dead yet.

But we’ll need answers in the next few years. Archiving and preserving a departed loved one’s online possessions is going to be a huge opportunity not so long from now. I say opportunity because things aren’t as straightforward in the online realm as in the physical, and there’s plenty of scope for smart thinking and innovative solutions.

Imagine you’re a startup that specializes in archiving digital creations. You’ve been commissioned by the departed’s relatives to preserve digital memories. Consider three issues you’d face:

Tracking:

What did your client (well, client’s loved one anyway, let’s just call him/her the client) create on the Internet? You can cover the obvious - email/chat/blog/microblog/photos/videos/social network. Then you get to the hard stuff: all the comments he/she’s posted on websites, forums he/she’s been active on, scraps/wall posts on friends’ social network pages, old email accounts he/she might have had in the past. and so on. 

Right now there is no reliable way of tracking this. How will you go about this?

Ownership:

Who owns data that your client had put up? The answers for some of these are straightforward - does Google own your videos on YouTube? Does Yahoo own your photos from Flickr? Read the fine 
print. But what about the scraps/wall posts your client wrote on his/her friend’s Orkut/Facebook profile? Comments on his/her friend’s blog? One view is that since they’re on the friend’s Orkut profile, they belong to the friend. The counterview is that scraps belong to whoever wrote them. 

Matters are further complicated if the client had stated before death that he/she wanted this sort of data deleted post-death. Will the owner of the blog that your client had commented on allow it?

Another question is about transfer of ownership. If Alice has had an email conversation with Bob that she would not want anyone other than Bob to view, should she have the right to veto the transfer of his email account to his next of kin? Perhaps she revealed her birthday and birth year to Bob. Could she veto the archival of his calendar?

Context:

This is closely related to ownership. Often, data by itself is useless without the context it was originally created it. A comment your client left on a blog post has very little value without its original blog post. A scrap/wall post or a “reply” tweet even less so. A pretty picture your client clicked and uploaded on Flickr is greatly diminished in value, significance and memory without the comments it sparked. A social network profile without the accompanying network is hardly social. But archiving the context along with your client’s content will raise the above ownership issues.

These are problems we haven’t faced with physical possessions because these problems never applied to them. How we sort them out is a both a tricky business and a business opportunity.

Yesterday, Apple pulled an application named Podcaster from the iPhone App Store. With Podcaster, iPhone/iPod Touch users could “update podcasts directly on the device over wifi.” Apple rejected the application because

Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes.

This is about as anti-competitive as it gets – applications that threaten iTunes’s monopoly over loading content to/from iPhone/iPod Touch will not be allowed on to Apple’s iPhone App Store. John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame has more to say about Apple’s exclusionary policies.

So some apps are banned. So what?

This is a big deal because App Stores are becoming an important way (and for iPhone/iPod Touch, the only way) to add functionality to a mobile device – whether it’s from Apple or Nokia or Android. Installing applications on your mobile phone is tricky at best and throw-your-hands-up-it’s-impossible at worst, which is why such App Stores (which make the job much simpler) will gain a lot of traction in the months to come. This places enormous power in the hands of App Store owner – either the handset or mobile OS manufacturer.

Simultaneously, as mobile devices become ubiquitous, more capable and more functional (because of these apps), an application ecosystem will begin to form – there are already over 3000 applications for iPhone/iPod Touch on Apple’s App Store, with small startups entirely dependent on the money they make from sales through the Store. Indeed, Kleiner Perkins has set up an iFund to invest in startups that make apps for iPhone, and there’s a RIM-backed Blackberry Fund too. How much longer before we start seeing the same interest in Nokia/Android application startups?

But this rosy picture could be in jeopardy if such rejections – either arbitrary or anti-competitive – become more commonplace. It’ll scare application developers, and drive away investors. And a multi-billion dollar (because of the sheer numbers of mobile devices) global opportunity could be lost, lost even to the party behind the App Store itself.

What are mobile app startups and users likely to do?

There are two things, both of which are likely to happen:

1.) Web apps that try to offer the same functionality will pick up speed. No App Store will be able to restrict what web-based applications users choose to use. Tomorrow, the Twitter client Twitterrific might be in the soup (because it has a built-in browser and mimics the functionality of Apple’s own Mobile Safari browser – you never know),  but the web-based Hahlo twitter client for iPhone/iPod Touch will face no such problems because Apple has nothing to do with it (and vice versa).

Ordinarily, I’m a strong proponent of native applications for mobile devices (at this stage of the industry). But circumstances are going to push app developers harder to write Good Web Apps.

2.) More jailbroken iPhones. Ironically, this warranty-voiding way of installing third-party applications is also the most open, offering several more native applications with fewer Apple-enforced restrictions. Developers will work harder to make it easier for customers to jailbreak their iPhones and iPods Touch.

Both these trends will represent a move away from the App Store.

Conclusion

As the technology industry becomes more open than ever (open software and hardware standards, community-based platforms for communication, convergence of desktop and mobile), this move towards closed application ecosystems is an anachronism.

More restrictions will mean more effotrs to circumvent (or just abandon) the App Store – whether from Apple or Nokia or Google’s Android. From the App Store owner’s ponit of view, this will be killing the golden goose – and the loss of possibly billions of dollars in revenue.

Recent smartphones from Samsung, HTC and LG indicate that Nokia’s finally got competition in the high-end space. However, it’s going to take more than engineering skills to succeed in India’s tough mobile market. Consistent phone branding, clear messaging and a solid distribution network are as important, and that’s where Nokia’s streets ahead. Can the competition catch up?

It isn’t about features

There was a time when the only competition Nokia’s smartphones had was from the odd, super-expensive PDA-phone that was more the former than the latter. Over the last year though, the competition has dramatically upped the ante in terms of what it packs into a handset.

A case in point is the near-simultaneous release of Nokia’s new flagship phone, the N96, and Samsung’s Innov8. The Innov8 outclasses the N96 on nearly every count, making it a widely-awaited contest. And that’s not the only notable example: the Samsung Blackjack II is a very capable Windows Mobile QWERTY phone, matching Nokia’s E61i. The Samsung Instinct was hailed the iPhone killer, offering a full-face touchscreen with touch feedback – touchscreens are something Nokia doesn’t even have in the market yet. LG’s not far behind in the race either. The LG Viewty, released around the same time as the N95 sported a 5MP camera with “image stabilization”, and a touchscreen.

Yet, in spite of these releases, both Samsung and LG lag far, far behind Nokia in the Indian smartphone market. Admob’s June 2008 Mobile Metrics review states that 97% of ad requests from smartphones were from Nokia handsets. It’s more or less clear that Nokia’s built a solid reputation in India as *the* smartphone brand. And at the heart of that is its N and E series branding strategy.

Nokia’s smartphone strategy: Product, Brand, Distribution

Nokia’s strategy of creating two lines of positioning for entertainment (Nseries, with advanced imaging, video, internet and gaming capabilities) and business (Eseries, with focus on connectivity, productivity and email) certainly seems to have paid off over the last 3 years.

Nokia’s used these brands to create multiple, successive communications campaigns around the terms “Nseries” and “Eseries”, which marked a break from the number-oriented labeling custom. Consider Nokia’s own phones; could you infer anything at all about the 3650 from its name? The 7610? The 9200? Contrast that with, say, the N81 – I can tell at a minimum (because its an Nseries) that it’s a phone with reasonably good looks, stereo music, large storage capacity and a 2MP+ camera. Here’s a decent article about Nokia’s efforts to build the Nseries brand. Ditto for the Eseries.

Finally, think about the massive investment Nokia’s made in its dedicated priority and concept stores. While it already has an extensive distribution network for its low-end line (see the section “The Distribution Edge” in this article on Knowledge@Wharton – free reg. req’d), these stores are a great way of showcasing your top-line phones to people for whom the purchase is a high-involvement decision.

Samsung’s strategy (or the lack of it)

While this is a discussion about Samsung, it holds equally – if not more – true for other handset manufacturers.

In contrast, Samsung’s strategy seems to be all over the place. No, let me correct that – I don’t think they have a strategy. They know at a minimum that their phones need to do music, video, photos, the Internet, and that touchscreens are good to have. That’s about it.

From a product perspective, there doesn’t seem to be any great deal of thought on timing launches (relative to market conditions or relative to previous releases). Further up the development cycle, what features go into which product (or, more importantly, what features to leave out). Or even further up the cycle, what OS to use on their phone (they use several).

On the marketing side, from a branding perspective, each phone seems to be a brand unto itself. What can explain names like Innov8, Instinct, Glyde, Blackjack, F-480, SGH-i780, U900 Soul? (All are recent releases packed with features). There’s no consistent product look (you can, in one look “tell” that a phone is an Eseries device, can’t you), color or name.

If your phones don’t use a consistent Operating System (the way Nokia uses Symbian+S60), it’s impossible to develop an active developer community. If you don’t have a consistent brand identity, it’s difficult to develop ambassadors for your phones. If you keep developing a different website for each of your phones, its impossible to build communities online.

What markets is Samsung chasing? What positioning is it considering for its phones to gain share in these markets? More abstractly, what do Samsung’s phones “stand for”? What is the message they’re trying to get out? Even SonyEricsson has a rudimentary strategy that says “We make entertainment-centric phones. Some of them make great music devices – the Walkman series, other are great for photography – the Cybershot series”. HTC has a less clear strategy around its Touch line of phones, but at least they’ve got a consistent name and OS in place.

From an advertising perspective, the only shred of consistency I’ve seen over the past months is the “Next is What?” Samsung campaign. However, I don’t see the campaign tied to a product that anyone will remember. Nokia, on the other hand, has run periodic campaigns for each generation of devices it releases – in print, on TV, online.

From a distribution perspective, I don’t see why Samsung doesn’t leverage its extensive distribution network for its home appliances and entertainment devices – it’s a channel where it has one heck of a headstart on Nokia. I see digital cameras and Indian-manufactured laptops sold in those sorts of electronics stores. Phones seem to make just as much sense.

Conclusion

While the Indian mobile market is (still) seeing explosive growth, the high-end of the market is maturing. The implication is that features are no longer the USP for a smartphone; brand is. And how well you communicate that brand to your audience. Nokia has done a stellar job since 2005 by investing in its Nseries and Eseries strategy – in product design, marketing and branding, advertising and distribution. The competition seems to already have the engineering capability to match Nokia. But it needs to get its act together if it needs to take on Nokia in the marketplace.

(This post began as a reply to a comment question on my previous blog post about iPhone 3G. It’s also a complete re-write of an earlier post.)

My experience with the Internet on my Nokia N82 has been more than satisfying, but that might well be a result of my usage pattern. Your mileage may vary. And yes, my ideal internet-access device would be iPhone, but I’ve already written about why iPhone is a no-no for me.

Email

During my commute, I process email I received the previous evening and overnight. Since the ride is frequently too bumpy to type fast, I avoid replying until I’m in my office (though I send the occasional one-sentence reply through the app). I use the Gmail App to label, star, archive and delete email.

Bulk processing email like this is faster on the Gmail App than it is on the desktop! The Gmail App has handy shortcuts (press 7 twice to delete, 8 twice to mark as spam and delete, 9 twice to archive, “*” to mark as star. It also pre-fetches email so you don’t wait for minutes on end for pages to load.

Feeds and updates

The Google Reader interface for iPhone works just as fine on the S60 browser. With prefetching, ability to star, share, share with notes, and mark entire feeds and folders as read, I can process feeds as fast on my phone as I can from my laptop. I also catch up on Twitter with the S60 browser. m.twitter.com is fast, and doesn’t feel like you’re compromising on the experience because you’re using a mobile-adapted interface.

Microblogging

The same S60 browser and m.twitter.com let me send tweets while on the go. I’d love to post via SMS, but the facility seems to be “unavailable temporarily” since May at least.

News

I use Google News India and the New York Times mobile page for Indian and World news respectively. Both sites have awesome mobile interfaces, and render very well on the S60 browser.

Incidentally, you can view pages either in landscape or portrait mode by just tilting the phone using the built-in accelerometer on the N82. I scan tweets in portrait mode and my feeds and news in landscape mode.

Social Networking

A few months ago, Google release a mobile-adapted interface for Orkut. Like all of Google’s mobile services, Orkut mobile is simple and well-designed, with support for viewing profiles, photos, scrapbooks, birthday reminders and activity updates – all of what you’d use on the web. I don’t see much support for communities or applications, and I’d prefer it stay that way. I don’t like Orkut’s implementation of either.

Instant Messaging

I’m not a big fan of instant messaging, and certainly not one of those who’s online but “Busy” all day long. If I do have to ping someone on Google Talk, though, Fring is the app I use. The competition (apart from Ebuddy) tends to be either horribly designed or terribly engineered. Or both. Fring lacks notification on the phone’s front screen (For Nokia, I can imagine using Active Standby to display “New IM from so-and-so”. Google’s managed it with their Search Box).

It’s also a VoIP client. Rohan writes in: “My phone is WiFi-enabled and I have a Skype unlimited connection. I’ve configured Skype within Fring, so when I connect my mobile through WiFi to the local LAN, I can make almost free voice calls (VoIP calls) to 32 countries using Skype on Fring.”

The Series 60 Browser

All of my mobile web access is now through the default vanilla yet stunningly capable S60 browser. It has support for multiple windows – invaluable for opening links to websites from Twitter, support for SSL (when I check Gmail from the browser), one-click zoom in/zoom out, and the mini-map feature – viewing the entire page, reduced, on your screen, and scrolling through it instead. Invaluable for scrolling through long pages.

What’s your mobile applications list? And how does it fit into your daily lifestyle?

iPhone 3G, finally, will be available in India on August 22nd through Airtel. While I’m excited about the world’s most revolutionary phone meeting the world’s fastest growing market, I’m not buying one for myself. Instead, last month I purchased a Nokia N82 Black, having decided that iPhone 3G was not for me. Why would I pass up the chance to own perhaps the sexiest piece of electronic hardware in the country?

In a nutshell, iPhone is peculiar. It is generations ahead of its peers when it comes to user experience, but has inexplicably glaring flaws. Some of these are deal-killers for my usage pattern. Nokia’s Nseries phones, specifically the N82, fit my mobile lifestyle like a glove. Well, almost. But this post isn’t about the N82. Here’s what struck iPhone off my list:

Applications cannot run in the background

This is the number one flaw that clinched it for me. This article on Mashable about the release of Google Talk for iPhone first alerted me to it:

Therefore, you can’t have Google Talk sit idly in the back and have a conversation every now and then – which is the default pattern of usage for most users, I believe. This limitation is due to Apple’s silly “apps can’t run in the background” rule, the official explanation of which goes along the lines of “we can’t let people do that, it would consume too much battery.”

In fact, Google’s blog post about this said

“…in order to receive instant messages with Google Talk on your iPhone, the application needs to be open in your Safari browser. When you navigate away to another browser window or application, your status will be changed to “unavailable” and your Google Talk session will be restarted when you return.”

This is shocking. For instance, during my commute, I use the S60 browser, Google Maps, the Gmail App and the music player simultaneously. I also cycle between these applications pretty frequently. Having to shut down an active application and start another one is simply unacceptable.

Poor battery life; no replaceable battery

Paul Stamatiou, who knows a thing or two about iPhone, has this to say about the battery:

No copy-paste out-of-the-box

While there is an application on the iPhone App Store that enables copy and paste, I am once again apalled at the lack of native support for this. My Nokia 6670 could copy and paste text back in 2005, and now it’s ubiquitous. No one would even call it a feature any longer. Copying phone numbers, addresses, names, conversations snippets, text from web pages, into other apps are things I do almost daily. I do not want to rely on a third-party app to give me this functionality.

Poor camera

Users forgave the sub-par camera on the original iPhone, but to continue to ship with the exact same camera a year later is unforgivable. iPhone’s 2 megapixel camera does not have either a flash or autofocus. Most of Samsung’s and Nokia’s high-end phones ship with 3MP cameras with LED flash. Nokia’s flagship phone, the N96, ships with a 5MP camera with Xenon flash (the same one as on the N82). Samsung’s Innov8 sports a monstrous 8MP camera (which, arguably, is overkill).

In addition, iPhone cannot record video. At all. In contrast, the N82 can record video at a smooth 30fps.

No modem capabilities

iPhone cannot be used as a modem for your computer out-of-the-box. The iPhone App Store (the only place from where you can legally install third-party applications) hosted Netshare, an application to do just that – “tether” your iPhone to your computer. Only briefly, though. It was pulled down in two hours. The only way to use iPhone as a modem is to “jailbreak” it (install a firmware hack) and install alternative applications. On the other hand, I’ve been able to use my Nokia phones as a modem since 2005.

Operator Bundling

There is still no clarity on whether existing Airtel users will be allowed to migrate their current tariff plans to iPhone 3G. The current plans in the U.S. charge an awful lot of money for data. 

Conclusion

In summary, although iPhone 3G offers a compelling user interface, large screen and gobs of storage, it has a few fatal flaws in its design, intentional or not. On the other hand, the Nokia N82, while not perfect, fits into my mobile usage lifestyle perfectly. Consequently, I have decided in favor of the N82.

What will you choose on August 22nd?

Update:

More recent developments add to my reasons to not purchase iPhone 3G:

Steve Jobs admitted to the Wall Street Journal that Apple has the ability to remotely disable software it deems malicious on an iPhone 3G. I am not comfortable with Apple (or any other company) retaining control of what I can do with my iPhone after I have purchased it.

The performance of the 3G chip on iPhone 3G seems to be below customers’ expectations. So low, in fact, that there have been strong rumours circulating about a device recall. This is not encouraging news for someone who’s been awaiting 3G rollout in India for over a year now.

The price of iPhone 3G in India is about Rs. 31000 for the 8GB model and Rs. 37000 for the 16GB one, which is inordinately high. I would be willing to pay about Rs. 16000 for the 8GB model and Rs. 18000 for the 16GB model, without an operator contract subsidy). I wonder how many potential customers Apple will lose by pricing iPhone 3G that high.

Tarek writes about what he can do with his Nokia S60 phone that he can’t with his iPhone.

Xobni is an Outlook plugin that has proven remarkably useful in managing managing bloated inboxes. It’s generated its fair share of buzz lately, and most users seem to love it. Apart from a clutch of very well-implemented features, what it is about Xobni that make it such a inherently popular tool?

Visibility: Xobni is a sidebar for Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007. With tens of millions of people using Outlook at work and, indeed, spending all day in it, Xobni is constantly in its users’ view. Contrast that with applications like Facebook, which live in a tab in your browser and will be out of view most of the time. (Serendipitiously, widescreen monitors are more popular than ever before, so a sidebar works well).

Ready-to-go: Unlike Facebook, xobni doesn’t need a first-time user to enter profile information, build a network over time by inviting friends, or accumulating wall posts or scraps. Xobni uses as fodder the tons and tons of information that’s already accumulated over the years in your inbox. That means once it’s done indexing, Xobni gets you up and running right away – discovering your network instead of you building it.

Intent-based: Xobni understands how you ‘do’ email. Users don’t view email as a chronological list of tasks at all – they either want to look at email as boxes of tasks (or projects or events), or as a collection of people whom they talk with. Xobni does the latter, and very well. So it’s a cinch looking up attachments from a contact, or the time of day you typically communicate with someone, or schedule time with someone.

Cool: Xobni’s done a terrific job of being viewed as something cool to transform drab old Outlook into. That’s why so many early adopters have turned passionate evangelists.

Do you use Outlook at work? Have you given Xobni a spin? What else (apart from specific features) do you think makes Xobni popular?

(This post is a follow-up to “Why did Mowser fail?“)

An iPhone in every hand will not ignite a mobile web revolution. That much is certain.

Both Michael Arrington and Russell Beattie make this mistake. Perhaps that comes from living in a echo chamber for too long – both likely have iPhones, are heavy web users on their devices, have friends who have iPhones, and therefore think all would be well if only everyone had one like them. Arrington is shockingly naïve when he says “…it will be much better to push prices down so that today’s iPhone is available for next to nothing in the third world.” Of course, I bet he hasn’t lived for too long in the “third world”.

Blaming puny hardware and tiny screens as the primary causes for poor mobile web adoption is thinking along very narrow lines indeed. As I outlined in the previous post, we could build much better applications today, using hardware and screen sizes available today – we aren’t building software that’s good enough because we haven’t yet understood how people use the web on their phones.

But that’s not all. Russell points out that “…in the US 85% of iPhone owners browsed the web vs. 58% of smartphone users, and only 13% of the overall mobile market” and uses that to conclude that as iPhone reaches more users, all problems will vanish (“better devices and full browsers”, as he says).

That’s not necessarily true and it more likely isn’t. iPhone targets a specific segment of the mobile user market – users who were likely to be heavy users of the Internet on their phones – people who would use their phone to browse the Internet. (Not that these users purchased a phone just for the Internet experience). It will continue to capture that market as it’s introduced in more countries.  Therefore it’s unlikely that those numbers Russell quoted would jump up substantially if everyone had an iPhone.

What does iPhone mean for the future of the mobile phone? I predict that while it’ll be a strong influence on broad design principles, it’s unlikely that every phone of the future will be like iPhone. For instance, Apple has shown how to design software that truly takes advantage of a touchscreen. More phones will have touchscreens in the future than they would have if it weren’t for iPhone, but maybe not with pinch-drag features. More phones will have full-screen applications. More phones will have smarter menus and make more data available across applications. And so on.

But the verdict is clear. It is designing better software, not praying for better hardware, that will truly get the mobile web rolling.

According to Mowser’s founder Russell Beattie, the “Mobile Web” is dead. As is his startup Mowser.  I think he’s partially wrong. Russell hasn’t quite figured out how the Internet on mobile devices is likely to work.

Mowser is (was?) an intermediary between a mobile browser and the web. It processed a “regular” web page to display better on a mobile browser (which is the way Opera Mini functions). It made money by inserting its own ads into these rendered pages. Apparently things didn’t work out. There weren’t enough users (and porn made up 80% of traffic), and hardly anyone clicked on the ads.

Which isn’t surprising. Because that isn’t at all how users interact with the web on their mobile devices.

Above all, Intent drives all usage on the mobile phone. Users don’t “browse” or “surf” the Internet on their mobile phones. Rather, they access particular services with a definite intent.  That means that as things stand now, a successful mobile web application would best be a native phone application that pulls data from the Internet but does the rendering locally. For example, a mobile-based Facebook would work best as a native Series 60 application (for Nokia phones) – or a cross-platform Java app.  When a user’s travelling and wants to Facebook a bit, he/she could launch the Facebook application, and it’ll connect to the Internet in the background, pull your mini-feed and other paraphernalia  and display that data on your screen. That way, the application doesn’t need to pull display code (HTML et al) making it faster and the user enjoys a much better experience (including all the AJAX-y effects you want).

The reason a native, single-purpose application will work is because 90% or so of the time, a user wants to interact with only a handful of web applications, but wants a kickass small-screen experience with them. I can imagine shortcuts on my Nokia web-capable phone that say “Gmail” “Facebook”, “Orkut”, “Yahoo Messenger”, “Google Reader”, and “The New York Times”. Which mean “Mail”, “Chat”, “Network”, “News”, “Feeds” (and “Maps”). How many more applications will a user need most of the time? After all, your average user has one email account, one social network, one chat app – you get the drift. (Think how much better the Gmail mobile application works than the web-based m.gmail.com)

Russell is right when he says that applications without a PC equivalent will not work. Take News, for instance. It’s cumbersome to navigate the New York Times on a mobile screen. (Even with iPhone’s pinch-tap-drag-flick wizardry. Admit it. It’s OK.) So I can imagine an NYT mobile application that displays headlines by category and a 5 or 10-line summary for each item (like a partial RSS feed). You can star an item on your phone. When you get to your PC, you click an “Open on Computer” button on your phone application, and Firefox pops up on your computer, opening your starred news items in tabs so you can read them in full. Does that sound better than reading an entire newspaper online on your phone? I can also imagine mobile “portals”, like the Yahoo one Russell pointed out:

Finally, monetization. Of course users won’t click on “interstitial” ads on their Phones. As above, intent is key. And relevance becomes even more important when both bandwidth and screen real estate are at such a premium. The only way someone could monetize ads on a mobile phone is if the ads were relevant to the user’s physical environment. (In a mall? Get ads about offers at stores in that mall. But in the middle of a tiny web page? Not on your life.)

In a follow-up post, I’ll talk about why both Russell and Michael Arrington are mistaken when they latch on to iPhone as the device for the future.

So my Thinkpad’s hard disk (a standard Hitachi 2.5″ 4200 RPM 80GB HDD) died Saturday evening. It began making ghastly noises all of a sudden, signaling imminent mechanical failure. I shut down the computer immediately, and on restarting, a BSOD informed me my boot volume was un-mountable.

I haven’t tried to recover any data yet, but that disk contains my entire music collection, and pretty much everything from my IIMK days. Tremendous loss. However, lessons have been learnt.

I’m going to use this post to chronicle how I’m getting my laptop functional again, the applications I use – both on the desktop and online, and strategies I’m using to move as much data online as possible.

Recovery

I had an external 120GB HDD (the same Hitachi make), which I plugged into the Thinkpad. And installed my copy of Windows Vista on it. After that, I downloaded and installed several Windows Vista device drivers for the Thinkpad R50. It took me about 4 hours from crash to a working (but data-less) machine.

Local Applications

What I installed immediately afterward. All of these are freely download-able applications, most of which I’ve been using for several years now.

• Firefox 3 Beta 5
• PowerPro 4.8 – shell control software
• iTunes 7.6.2
• OpenOffice 2.4
• VLC Player- all-in-one media player
• Nokia PC Suite 6.86 – interfacing with my N73
• Filezilla FTP client
• Paint.NET – midway between MSPaint and Adobe Photoshop
• Foxit Reader – lightweight alternative to Adobe Acrobat Reader
• WinRAR – archiver par excellence

The installers for all of these are now on my SanDisk 2GB USB pen drive (along with all the Thinkpad Vista drivers). I’m going to update these every six months. It’ll take me far less time to get back on my feet in the event of another crash.

The Online Life

Although I was a pretty heavy user of Web-based applications, it’s going to become a way of life now. I’m now going to move as much data as possible online (except for large files like MP3s and videos), given that I usually have access to a high-speed connection – at home, work and on my phone.

PIM – Email, Scheduling, Contacts and Notes

All my email from 2004 onwards is in my Gmail account. I forward email from my RahulGaitonde.org and IIM Kozhikode mailboxes into Gmail. I also used Gmail’s ability to import email via POP3 to pull old email from these accounts too. I had also configured Thunderbird for Gmail via IMAP, but will be using Gmail’sweb interface exclusively now. To send email from other accounts, I use Gmail’s ability to use a custom “from” address.

As an aside, does anyone know of a good Series 60 email client – with IMAP support – that I can use on my N73?

I’ve used Google Calendar extensively, right from its launch. I have three calendars – one for Work, another for Birthdays and Anniversaries and the default calendar for miscellaneous, casual events. I used to sync these calendars with Thunderbird using GCALDaemon, which I highly recommend.

Contacts is where I’ve got a problem. Outlook (and then Thunderbird) used to be my repository for contacts. Over the years, I had built up an extensive database of email addresses, phone numbers, blog URLs and work addresses, and used to sync this database with my N73. Thankfully, that syncing means my contacts are safe.

However, I’m not sure what my future setup will be. Most probably Gmail’s contacts will be my repository. But I don’t know how I’m going to sync that with my smartphone. I’d love to hear suggestions. (I hear GooSync’s paid service can do this)

Google Notebook is my trusty scrapbook. Although I don’t think much of the interface and its questionable integration with Google Bookmarks, it works well enough. I’d use it even more if it had an Offline mode (say, through Google Gears). That’d bring it close to MS Office OneNote (which is an excellent piece of work).

Finally, I use Google Bookmarks through the Google Toolbar, but ever since I’d started using the Firefox 3 Beta, my list of local bookmarks had grown – because you can now tag them and search them using the Address bar. Those recent bookmarks were lost in the crash – ironically, just days after I blogged about the need to integrate Google Bookmarks with Firefox’s local store!

Staying updated

Google Reader is the answer. Apart from friends’ blogs, I follow:

• Tech News and Opinion: GigaOM, Techcrunch, NY Times Bits, BBC’s dot.life, Startup Duniya, WATBlog, Google Blogoscoped.
• Tech Lifestyle: Lifehacker, Lenovo’s Design Matters
• News: RSS Feed for my Google News

There are several other technology bloggers whose blogs I subscribe to. For news and other non-tech material, once a fortnight, I’ll check up on the Economist and BusinessWeek.

To stay in touch with what I find interesting, visit my Google Reader Shared Items page, or subscribe to it via RSS.

Photos

Thankfully, I’ve been fairly regular uploading pictures into my Flickr Pro account. I have about 500 photos on Flickr now, tagged and categorized. In the future, Flickr will become my primary photo repository.

Blogging

RahulGaitonde.org is hosted on Wordpress 2.5 using TheWebBrains‘ hosting service. I’ve been with TWB since 2004, and they haven’t let me down.

I use Filezilla to manage files on the remote server. Here are the Wordpress plugins I use:

• Akismet for spam filtering
• FeedBurner’s FeedSmith to redirect my Wordpress RSS feed to a custom Feedburner one
• Twitter Tools for integration with my Twitter account
• Random Redirect for readers with some time on their hands
• Wordpress Database Backup
• I also have a list of my Google Reader Shared Items on my sidebar. The code for this is easily available through your Google Reader page.

Web traffic monitoring for RahulGaitonde.org is done through Google Analytics. Again, something I’ve used since it was available.

Office

I’ve always used Google Docs and Spreadsheets whenever possible, right since the Writely days. Most of term papers, plans, databases have been composed, created and stored on Google Docs – so they’ve survived the crash.

Whenever I don’t have access to the Internet, it’s always OpenOffice (although Office 2007 is a splendid piece of work, and at least three years ahead of OO.org). From now on, any document I create with OO.org will be imported into Google Docs as soon as I’m connected.

Issues

That’s the rosy bit. But what about my music collection and videos? I can either back them up on external storage (which I don’t trust right now), or on DVD (cumbersome adding files and preserving albums), or on remote bulk storage like Amazon’s S3 (bandwidth too costly in India). So large files are a problem.

What about file formats such as PDF and ZIP? Miscellaneous settings and configuration files? Right now the plan is to back them up manually, periodically, on RahulGaitonde.org. But that’s far from ideal; there are too many such files.

Finally, the volume of remote data is already so much (4+ GB in Gmail alone) that downloading all that data locally (should the need ever arise) is impractical. What if I need to move from Flickr to, say, Picasa Web Albums? Or what if I need a few dozen photos to take with me on a USB pen drive? It’s extremely cumbersome to download assorted photos, even in batch mode. It’s the same for documents, spreadsheets, notes, email.

It’s clear that making the move online is adopting a fundamentally different lifestyle – which implies moving back offline is a major task. It’s one that I’ve been driven towards by my recent massive loss of data. The move has been made easier because I was already half-way there. In the weeks to come, I’m going to cross the other half and go completely online.

Questions? Suggestions? Comments? Do let me know.

Apple released Safari 3.1 today, and has claimed that it is “the world’s fastest browser”.

“Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers…”

Having used  it since it was first released last year on Windows, I think this is more than just twisted statistics. Forget those measurements (down to decimal points, for god’s sake), but Safari definitely feels faster than either Firefox or Opera. Safari’s UI needs a post to itself, but it puts both IE and Firefox to shame.

Apple could put more muscle behind promoting Safari on Windows (for reasons I outlined last June), but I don’t see it giving either Firefox or IE a serious run for their money. My prediction is that Safari’ll be locked in an inconsequential battle for third place with Opera (also a fast, snappy alternative).

IE will always be number 1 because it’s pre-installed with Windows (and is un-installable). The vast majority of the installed base won’t switch to anything else (both home and business users). IE’s good enough. ‘Nuff said.

Firefox is the poster boy of the power-user crowd because it’s so customizable. But there’s an upper cap to the market share it can gain (see IE above).

Safari’s USP is speed and simplicity. Speed isn’t enough for the IE crowd to switch. And Safari’s simplicity (which implies non-extensibility) is a deal-killer for the Firefox crowd. Opera faces the exact same problems.

Between these massive masses of users, both of whom have diametrically opposite views on what a browser should be, are the miniscule 4-5% who use either of Safari or Opera, regardless of how good/fast/simple/snappy they are. Pity.

Footnote: Hark back to my June 2007 article about why Apple wants Safari on Windows – it’s got to do with the iPhone. Opera, with its large mobile push, probably has the same strategy too.

In my previous post, I looked at how a social network “picks up” an application and “spreads” it to reach the audience that would be interested in using it. And I said that was because social networks make it easy to propagate information, but primarily because people with similar interests have numerous ways of “hooking up” – either via communities or interacting on these in-network applications.

That last point makes social networks a lot of like the communities of old – BBNs, chat rooms, IRC, forums. But since they’re the *new* craze, well, they’ve got to be different somehow. How?

One, profiles. Even as a new member of a group, find out a lot about the people you’re interacting with by looking at their profile pages – where they’re from, who they know, what they do, how they look like, what they like, what they’re up to lately, and a dozen other things. Because of this, interactions on social networks become richer sooner.

Two, you can, with a single profile page, be a member of multiple communities/groups/hangout spots. You don’t have to replicate your profile. With Facebook’s “mini-feed” (a summary of what your friends have been up to recently on FB), you can discover people who share several interests/lifestyle attributes with you. Also, because you *can’t* make different profiles for different communities, you’re the ‘real you’ throughout. Interactions are therefore more genuine, more real, and perhaps more trustworthy.

Three, marketers can build up impressively detailed profiles of users individually (via their communities and behavior), and communities themselves (via profiles of their users in aggregate). That enables far better, more granular targeting of ads than would be possible on forums, benefiting both users and advertisers.

Four, applications! Interactions between members are no longer limited to text-based discussions about action that happens elsewhere. Forum-like conversation and the actual application exist side-by-side.

Five (and this is mostly because of FB), communities are no longer silos but are deeply influenced by (and in turn influence) the rest of the Internet. For instance, the Digg.com application shows your friends your five most recently Dugg stories. Think of the added (and focused) traffic to Facebook from Digg and then from Facebook to Digg.

Social networks need to open their walled gardens to the rest of the Internet, instead of attempting to monetize only interactions within. As we’ve seen above, those very interactions will become richer as data flows into the network from outside (of course, at the cost of profile data flowing outwards in the short term). I think a network’s success will now depend on how much it is willing to open itself up.

Facebook’s Beacon brought some spice to the tech community, which had been longing for some juicy stuff to blog/discuss/pontificate about since the iPhone’s launch several months ago.

Beacon is (was?) part of Facebook’s new online ad system which shared a user’s actions on other (partner) websites with all his/her Facebook friends. (If you rent a movie on Blockbuster, your friends will be notified via Facebook’s mini-feed). Scary, eh?

So in addition to the flak that Facebook was already getting because of the havoc its “Applications” have wrought, it was criticized soundly for making Beacon the insidious nightmare that it was. I kind of lost track of that story after a few weeks (the tech blogosphere, like most of modern society, has an incredibly short attention span), but there were reports that Facebook had rectified most of what was wrong.

At around the same time, Google unveiled what it thought was a whole new chapter in social networking – now, your shared items in Google Reader would automatically show up in the Google Reader feed list of whoever was on your Google Talk list (and you could see their shared stuff). Privacy advocates made a tremendous amount of noise yet again.

However, Dave Winer at Scripting.com had a word for those who screamed blue murder when Beacon surfaced:

[t]here are thorny issues here, but we want these companies to give up control of our information, and we don’t want them to be overly scared of public opinion as they do it…[but] most important, I want them to give me control of my data.

Indeed. Almost all web-based applications we use today are personalized to some degree. So inured are we to this personalization; we don’t even notice it anymore. Until something like this pops up. Why do we love some applications and hate some? When does a feature cross the privacy line?

Here’s a look at some popular Internet applications/services:

Application/Service	User info collected?	Personalization requested?	Personally identifiable info shared by default?
Amazon’s recommendations	Y	N	N
iGoogle	Y	Y	N
Google’s personalized search	Y	N	N
Orkut/Flickr	Y	Y	Y
Google Reader’s shared items	Y	N	Y
Google News	Y	Y	N
Facebook Beacon	Y	N	Y
iTunes Music Store	Y	N	N
YouTube	Y	Y	Y
Digg/Del.icio.us	Y	Y	Y
Gmail	Y	Y	N

As we see, the only two applications that have run into privacy troubles (Google Reader’s shared items and Facebook’s Beacon) are the ones where personalization was not requested, but information was shared anyway. Then there are the annoyances like Google’s personalized search, that displays India-tailored results for me because it knows my location (and there are several times – more often than not – when I don’t want this). There are other beauties of design like Amazon’s recommendations – that give me personal, useful information without needing to know anything at all about me.

Making sense of it all:Internet application services seem to divide themselves into three degrees of personalization:

1.) Personalization based on viewed contentAmazon’s recommendations (“people who bought this also bought…”), eBay, Digg, del.icio.us. Here, user information in either aggregate or anonymous form is enough to offer a customized experience.

2.) Personalization based on purely personal informationMost of Google’s services offer this degree of personalization – iGoogle, personalized search results, Google News, Gmail. In all of these cases, the service provider (or application vendor, depending on how you look at it) has access to a ton of information about the user (think Gmail), but relies on that information bank alone for the experience.

3.) Personalization based on personal and group-level informationHere’s where both controversies have arisen, and, unfortunately, here’s where most of tomorrow’s applications will likely be slotted. Orkut, Flickr, YouTube and other community-based applications.

Concluding:An application can move from one degree of personalization to another. I can visualize Amazon, for instance, forming a community where individual book purchased can be used as recommendations (PQR in your friend network bought…). Or Google News, for that matter.Whether or not you land in a privacy soup will depend on where you choose to draw the line.

Some time later: What role does owning a lot of web real estate play in this game of personalization?

Why the mobile phone industry today looks a lot like the PC industry 25 years ago:

• Several players selling standalone “boxes” (or bricks). Atari, Commodore, Tandy, Apple back then. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Apple now
• Incompatible software platforms
• Incompatible hardware and peripherals
• Nascent application development industry
• Device seen as replacing several existing devices

Big differences:

• Sheer number of mobile phones, sheer variety in features and, consequently, price points
• Growth markets are in the East
• Carriers could make or break innovation

Game-changers – then and now:

• The IBM PC and its open platform. No current-day equivalent
• Standard operating system and, consequently, standard development environment. Current-day equivalent: Google’s Android, possibly

Bob Cringely contends that the battle for search is over, with Google emerging the clear winner. With Google Universal Search, Google has put so much distance between itself and numbers two and three, that the incremental return on additional investment into search by either Yahoo! or Microsoft will be negative. Both firms will be better off putting their money in other lines of business.Why has GUS ended the search wars? Apart from standard Web Search, Google’s also ruled vertical search – maps, books, images, and video. (The only exception was news, where Y! did a better job.) So if Y! and MS were to follow suit with their own integrated searches, the top video (or book) results would be on Google’s properties. In fact, the better they made their searches, the more traffic they’d drive to YouTube or books.google.com! Not only does Google do the best job with vertical search, today it also owns the properties where this vertical content resides!

So where does that leave Microsoft? Simple. Microsoft should get out of search. And out of online advertising altogether.

Surprised? Read on.

Microsoft is a company that, after having led consumer computing for a generation, is now finding itself playing follow-the-leader. Over the last few years, its strategy has been plainly, reactive. Its Live initiative (Windows Live Search, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, Office Live) was a poor attempt to match Google’s online portfolio, pitting application service against application service. But it didn’t work out. Today, the Live initiative is an acknowledged damp squib.

Why? Because the New Web is not central to Microsoft’s business model. It never has been. In the mid-to-late nineties, when it “woke up to the Internet”, it reacted. And made Internet Explorer integral to Windows 98, added TCP/IP support and made it easy to connect to the Internet (it also bought Hotmail, launched the MSN portal and tried to play ISP). These didn’t seem to me, either then or now, to be part of a concerted strategy to leverage the opportunity the Internet presented. Cut to today. With Ray Ozzie’s “leaked” memo in 2005, the company once again found itself waking up to the New Web. Once again we find a set of ad hoc tactics that don’t collectively define a web strategy. It seemed crazy that a person with the sagacity and vision of Ozzie would talk drivel like “online advertising is the next big revenue opportunity, and therefore we must move everything – Windows, Office, Mail – online, and make money out of ads”. It is almost as if with each generation, the Web is being retrofitted into Microsoft’s business strategy.

In contrast, Google is a company that has been built from the ground up to leverage the “Internet opportunity”. The firm realised that first public, then private data would find its way to the web. It first created tools so that it would have access to all of this data (either by crawling or by hosting this content). Simultaneously, it created applications that people could use to access the information they needed from this data. And it monetized this access.

Microsoft is a desktop applications company. From 1975 to 2007, repeat, it has been a desktop applications company. Further, though it may have had a profound effect on consumer computing, its revenue has come from enterprise customers. Finally, its largest selling products are not its search service, or its MSN portal, or Hotmail, or Messenger. Its largest selling products are its Windows Operating System and Office Application Suite. The mandarins at Microsoft have to consider these facts before running around like confused chicken.

The Enterprise does not “get” the Internet. It gets the network, or, more precisely, the intranet, but it does not get the Internet. There’s just too much data that needs to be kept within the walls of the organization. Two paragraphs ago, I said that Google’s essence is to have access to data, either by crawling or hosting. No large firm is willing, either now or in the forseeable future, to let that happen. This Enterprise market has been growing for two decades now, will continue growing. This is where Microsoft faces virtually no competition from the likes of Google.

How can Microsoft enter a new phase as an enterprise software company? How can it create better applications using the Network? That’s another Tomorrow Today in itself, coming up soon after this series is done.

And Yahoo! ? The Google of the late nineties is foundering. Brad Garlinghouse’s “Peanut Butter” memo seems to have done little more than cause a rearrangement on the company’s board, but I don’t see a strategy shift in the least.

Yahoo should also get out of the search and Pay-per-click advertising space.

What is Yahoo! as a company? As Terry Semel himself stated several months ago, Yahoo! is primarily a media company that is technology-heavy. An online media company, to be precise. Now think of the online advertising world in terms of the Long Tail. Yahoo’s customers were in the “head” of the Long Tail graph – a few thousand advertisers, but each one worth big bucks. Google instead targets the “long tail” with its AdWords model. In fact, AdWords is not effective for large advertisers, but then it was never intended to be.

Yahoo! needs to realise that there is much more to the online marketing world than simply advertising, especially when compared to the sophisticated offline marketing campaigns that professional marketing and PR firms run. Yahoo! would do well to induct that kind of talent onto its rolls. I’m thinking an acquisition of a respected marketing/advertising agency. Being able to use more media like video, audio, images and maps willl increase the richness of future campaigns, With regard to video, having traffic driven to Google’s properties (YouTube) won’t seem so bad once the videos on that website have been created by Yahoo! (PR videos, video ads, videos with embedded ads, the works!)

Online PR, viral and buzz marketing, social network marketing and affiliate marketing are areas that are currently a fishmarket of small fragmented firms, none of whom have the scale or the expertise to cater to truly large clients. They’d be cannon fodder should Yahoo! choose to muscle into these spaces.

Finally, mobile is one area where I believe Yahoo! already has a lead over Google. Its widget-oriented OneSearch service proves that the mandarins at Yahoo! have the right idea. The company recognises that the mobile web is different. Although more intent-based than the PC Web, mobile web is subscription-driven instead of search-driven. OneSearch is a large step down that road. Mobile online communities could be a massive revenue-earner. Google has Orkut and Dodgeball in its armory but isn’t doing a thing with them. Will Yahoo! grab this opportunity instead?

In summary, both Yahoo! and Microsoft have forgotten their company DNA in their zeal to show Wall Street that they’re wise to every Google trick. They don’t have to be. In fact, as we’ve seen in this rather detailed Tomorrow Today, they’re three very different companies operating in three different spaces, playing to their different strengths. The sooner Redmond and Sunnyvale realise this, the sooner they’ll be able to drag these companies out of the morass they’re sliding into.

Tomorrow we’ll wind up by examining what GUS means for Google itself, and where the company could go from here.

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