The articles are 1300-1500 words, and there’s only one way I’m going to read them all:

This is supposed to *herald* curated computing. Nonsense.

Curated Computing: Fancy cynical analyst term. Here is Forrester Research declaring a new era (‘Post-iPad’, no less).

A consumer can do anything with a Windows PC or Mac… the iPad operates very differently. [It] works more like a jukebox than a desktop — consumers choose (and pay for) applications from a predetermined set list. Each of those applications is, in itself, also curated; the publisher selects content and functionality that’s appropriate to the form factor, just as a museum curator selects artworks from a larger collection…

Rubbish. ‘Curated computing’  has been Apple’s design philosophy for all this decade – that’s only now making its way into industry consciousness.

But it’s a good thing.

If anything, it indicates mobile manufacturers hitting reality. In the short years after the realization that people wanted to ‘do more’ with their phones, manufacturers packed in as many features as they could. A few really took off (cameras, music players, even email), and most others just didn’t (bluetooth, mobile office packages, bar-code readers).

In another way, it’s a sign of the industry beginning to mature. Even as hardware has gotten more capable (faster processors, storage, memory, larger displays, touch-screens) and networks have invested massively to build capacity, there’s a discernible trend to do less better. Manufacturers are (belatedly?) realizing that a mobile device isn’t a smaller personal computer, but something ‘very personal’. And that very personal is very different from personal.

Which is also why everyone in the industry wants ‘vertical integration’ – control over the hardware, operating system, software platform, applications/content, and network. It’s so that having bet on what (limited) tasks a device will perform, a manufacturer has greater control over the quality of what the customer experiences.

Expect, in the next couple of years, for all major smartphone players (in addition to Apple, RIM, Google) to create (curate?)  really great out-of-the-box experiences for the 20% of tasks that matter most – email, web browsing, facebook/twitter updating, maps, and playing music/movies (yes, better than what we’ve seen). Expect  new devices to ship with fewer radios and sensors, and very few basic applications out-of-the-box. All other features and applications will be available via an App Store, to which there will be a prominent link on the home screen.

If this sounds very much like what Apple’s been doing with iPhone all along, of course you’re right. Forrester’s just woken up, declared it a trend and slapped on an alliteration.

Footnote: also, this isn’t as global, industry-churning a movement as Forrester would have you believe: the Japanese, for the most part, like cellphones crammed with bells and whistles (TV, bar-code readers,credit cards, suchlike). And this doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon.

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)

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.”

Let’s say Firefox does buck the trends that open-source applications seem to follow (either having their best features taken by commercially backed competition or ending up as back-end infrastructure), and remains the single largest non-IE browser with an increasing market share. What characteristic of Firefox would most help it achieve that?

What keeps you on Firefox?
I polled Twitter and co-workers about which browser among Firefox and Chrome they prefer, and why [1]. Those that used Chrome did so mostly because they perceived it to be faster than Firefox. A smaller number liked its minimalist interface. Almost all those that used Firefox refused to switch to Chrome because Chrome didn’t support their favorite add-ons [2]. And almost everyone I spoke to was unsure whether they’d switch to Chrome if it supported all of Firefox’s extensions.

Extensions might be what keeps the existing user base loyal. It’ll take Chrome and the others something more than just replicating support for extensions. Developers will need to port their applications to Chrome. You can mimic a feature, but it takes years to develop a developer community. This will also be an important differentiator when it comes to gaining market share (mostly existing or potential IE users) – the ability to literally create your own customized Firefox.

Firefox could also use use deep support for Mozilla Weave as another major differentiator (check out Weave Sync, for example). However, their use cases look like Google could do the same thing with Chrome as long as you were logged in to your Google Account. I guess there’s some (limited) Weave-like functionality already with Google Toolbar.

Finally, that money thing
Now that Firefox has a certain conflict of interest with Google (regardless of how much both might deny it), it might make sense for the Mozilla Corporation to explore alternate revenue streams. As browser capabilities have improved (and bandwidth has gotten cheaper), there’s been a trend to push as much processing to the client side as possible (think Gmail). There’s a ton of potential for further enhancing the browsing experience – and making money off it.

One way of doing that could be an App Store for Extensions – giving the opportunity for developers to truly enhance specific browsing experiences and make money off the effort, with Mozilla Corp. getting a cut. Another could be Firefox Special Editions for companies with pre-configured extensions (like the one for eBay). Mozilla could charge companies for the assembly, promotion and hosting of the special edition download package.

[Update 17 July 2009: Mozilla is now soliciting (voluntary) contributions from users who download extensions/add-ons. What's striking is this: "Mozilla is not getting a cut of any contributions at this point, but I think it would be fair and could become an additional source of income for Mozilla to finance the necessary infrastructure." That's one step closer to launching an App Store.]

I’d like to hear ideas for both issues in this post:
- what will sustain Firefox in the face of increased competition
- what revenue options the Mozilla Corporation should pursue for Firefox

Comment of email rahul@rahulgaitonde.org.

[1] Yeah, that’s a ridiculously small sample and totally not representative of the population. Why don’t you help and let me know in the comments? Chrome or Firefox? And why?
[2] A lone exception said he stuck to Firefox only out of sheer inertia.

“The world is a lot different from a year ago, and we have three brand new browsers and there is a lot more competition and as a result the users are getting a lot more technology…”

“… I think it is uncomfortable, because our rivals have 2-3 times the magnitude of people and resources, and they are relentless.”

The state of the browser market pretty much proves that it’s impossible for an open source project to remain a popular front-end application for too long.

A successful open source project will see one of two trends:

- Commercial entities, each with its own USP will pick, modify and integrate portions of the project into their own products. This is what’s happening with Firefox. (Chrome, according to Google, used ” components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox”). Firefox as an open source project is likely to thrive, but its best features and technology will probably find their way into more popular commercially-backed browsers [1].

- It will see widespread adoption, but on back-end IT infrastructure instead of the desktop. Linux and *BSD are examples of this. I guess this is because after a point, the marginal cost of polishing the UI is more than what developers are willing to bear, and that end users demand more. Regardless, the core functionality of such applications is on par with/often superior to commercial alternatives, so a combination of this + low price point makes them an attractive choice for back-end deployment [2].

[1] Android was a commercially-backed open source project (based on Linux kernel 2.6) from the beginning, so I guess we’ll treat it like Chrome.

[2] This isn’t a value judgement on the quality of open source products, or the viability of the open source development model itself. The past couple of decades do seem to have proved, though, that end-user open source applications are tough to build and sustain in their original form.

No longer. Not only are more mobile phones being sold now than ever before, there are more types of folks making money off it. For smartphones with an ecosystem such as iPhone, there is

- Apple, the iPhone manufacturer

- AT&T (in the U.S.) that provides cell phone connectivity

- tens of thousands of developers who sell their iPhone applications through the App Store (with Apple getting a cut). And this is not just indie developers. Amazon stands to make a huge bundle through book sales via its Kindle Reader app for iPhone [2]

- businesses that create free iPhone applications but make money off ads within their applications [3]

- record labels that offer their music for sales on the iTunes Music Store

- television networks and Hollywood studios that offer their TV shows and movies (respectively) for sale/rent, also on the iTunes Music Store

Of course, this runaway success has inspired every smartphone label to scramble to bake its own pie. Witness the plethora of application stores (Palm, Nokia, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android) [4], and Nokia’s attempts to sell music.

Open or closed?

The more mature a product category gets, the more players there are that stand to make money off it. That’s because the pioneer quickly realizes that for true scale, it must “open up”  the product to entities other than itself. And that’s where it seems we have from history, a clear lesson: IBM opened up the specs of its original PC, and hordes of beige box manufacturers crowded Big Blue out of its own market. Apple itself nearly destroyed all that the Macintosh stood for when it licensed the Mac to other manufacturers.

“Opening up” a successful product and creating an open ecosystem divides the pie into so many slices that the pioneer is left picking up only crumbs. Apple’s iPhone ecosystem has been “opened up” to all those players above through the iPhone OS developer API, the iTunes Music Store and the iPhone App Store, but the ecosystem itself remains tightly closed.

[1] OK, so there were (are) electronic component manufacturers on the source side and advertising agencies on the sell side. But let’s limit ourselves to those that gained directly from the mobile phone. 

[2] Also with iPhone OS 3.0, developers can now charge for features within the application (unlocking extra weapons and purchasing weaponry within games being the most commonly cited examples), so you could have a free basic application with paid features if you like. Before OS 3.0, the best that developers could do was offer separate “free” basic and “paid” full-featured apps.

[3] Take Twitterific, for instance. The free version of the application inserts ads into your tweetstream.

[4] With comical attempts to make them sound different (Palm Software Store, Nokia Ovi Store, Blackberry App World, Windows Mobile Marketplace, Android Market). 

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)

Did Microsoft miss out on the big search opportunity that Google pounced on? Is Google losing the real-time communication game to Twitter?

Microsoft’s original mission was “a computer on every desk and in every home” [1]. Even with their almost total dominance of the PC industry, that mission remains far from accomplished.

Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. That’s a mouthful. But it’s also nowhere near completion.

Both companies – one over 3 decades old, the other over a decade old – have still only plucked the low-hanging fruit. Urban homes and corporations have computers, but there are still billions of potential Microsoft consumers – who might be well served with a mobile “computer”, for instance. For Google, even with its mind-boggling data center infrastructure and web-crawling, the task is just begun. Books. Space. History. Energy and resource consumption. And more. And that’s just the “organize” bit. Converting all that data to information so that it is “accessible and useful” is another thing altogether.

Companies like these are larger than the “next big thing”. Their own “thing” is so incredibly significant, so humbling. That’s why it’s unfortunate when such an organization changes its very mission to something that can mean absolutely anything (and therefore also nothing): Microsoft’s mission is now “to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential” [2].

Google isn’t about to kill Microsoft. Not if Microsoft directs all its resources towards what it set out to do. Likewise for Google; Twitter isn’t out to organize everything known to man. So ignore those predictions of doom.

[1] According to Wikipedia the exact words were “to get a workstation running our software onto every desk and eventually in every home”

[2] Although I didn’t find any evidence to suggest Microsoft changed its mission in response to any other company or threat

The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. … a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends… this artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture.

That phrase made it into his book “The Search” and quickly became a popular way to demonstrate how enormously important and powerful Google might eventually become.

This last Saturday, the New York Times ran a piece on a possible new monetization idea that Twitter was considering: to “offer shopping advice and easy purchasing”. People already solicit their Twitter followers’ opinions, and it is also already possible to identify real-time trends related to a particular product, company or event. Put those together, and you get an extremely powerful (and, the founder hope, lucrative) tool.

Viewing this piece of news in the context of “database of intentions” you can see how the web has evolved since Battelle propounded that idea:

One, Twittter is now a database of actions, of people announcing by-the-second what they have tried, used, bought, rejected, liked and disliked. I see an attractive opportunity for an analytics firm to help companies make sense of what people are saying about them, what events caused this conversation, and the results of a company’s actions/response on the conversation and subsequent sales/signups.

Two, it is still a database of intentions, but at dizzying, real-time speeds. From the New York Times article:

“Commerce-based search businesses monetize extremely well, and if someone says, ‘What treadmill should I buy?’ you as the treadmill company want to be there,”

While it’s certain that companies can use these intentions to snap up customers before competitors, it’s unclear as yet how companies will be able to scale and respond if and when Twitter achieves Google’s adoptions levels. There is definitely an opportunity for another business here.