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My last post generated a fair amount of discussion (comments+email) about Firefox’s future given the increased competition in the browser marketplace.

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.

Mozilla CEO John Lilly on the number of fast, capable browsers in the market:

“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.

For the longest time, the only two entities that made money from a mobile phone were the carrier and the handset manufacturer. Open and shut [1].

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). 

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.

Small and medium businesses can’t afford splashy advertising campaigns on TV and billboards that large corporations can, so their marketing strategies need to be smarter.

The most popular of the smart marketing strategies today is about building customer “stickiness”. Making your customer return to you for repeated service. Staying engaged with him/her. Online, you’d do this by creating, say, a Twitter account with updates about new deals,coupons and discounts [1]. Or staying in touch through a company blog. Or having your customers sign up for a regular newsletter (so old school). Or building an iPhone application (so hot!)

Stickiness is often held up as the best way to market a small business. But the basic assumption of stickiness is that you want your customers to return repeatedly. What if your business just isn’t like that? What if you’re a user-car evaluation service? Or an apartment broker? Regardless of how much they love you or your service, stickiness is no use with them.

Your marketing strategy then needs to focus on referability: getting existing customers refer you to other potential customers. Offline, you could offer your customer, as part of the deal close, a choice of one piece of merchandise: a t-shirt, a key-chain, a cap, a set of stickers, whatever. Online, you could build a Facebook application that your customers could display on their page. For the apartment broker business, the application could have you enter your location, size of apartment, approximate rent and display snaps of sample apartments, with directions to call you. You get the idea. If your customer is satisfied, he/she will be glad to help you with this.

Your business needs to choose between stickiness and referability. And it’s not an either/or choice. Sticky customers are also likely to refer you to their friends. Also, customers that care enough to refer you will come back to you. But the focus of your marketing strategy must be one or the other.

 

[1] Dell is doing this pretty well. It’s not a small business, but the principle remains the same.

Is [old giant] losing out to [hot upstart] over [new trend]?

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

In 2003, John Battelle opined that Google was essentially a “database of intentions“.

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.

GigaOM announces the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8

So far [Microsoft] has been on the losing side of the equation, ceding market share to its upstart rivals, all of whom are touting ease of use, simplicity, security and speed. Microsoft’s browser chief, Mike Nash, thinks the new IE 8.0 has got all that and more.

So true, except that none of it matters to Microsoft. If it cared about  “simplicity, security and speed”, it’d install Firefox + extensions with every copy of Windows.

It’s become pretty clear that the only way you can make money off a browser is by driving traffic from it to a search engine results page with advertisements. That’s how Mozilla makes over 80% of its revenue – driving traffic to Google from its search box and its default home page.

Earning revenue from ads on Microsoft Live Search pages through IE traffic is the only imperative driving IE development. And its getting costlier by the day to keep up with the competition.

The Silicon Alley Insider recently calculated that the New York Times could actually cut down its costs in half by gifting all its subscribers a free Kindle. The immediate conclusion seems to be that the Kindle is the end to the U.S. newspaper industry’s woes. Get everyone a Kindle, you’re back in business.

Or not.

The article’s conclusion is probably right (this is what this post is about; the Kindle could indeed help the U.S. newspaper industry) but its reasoning is entirely incorrect.

Costs (printing, distribution or others) were never the newspaper industry’s biggest problem; it was revenues. Readers have been moving online in droves, resulting in plummeting print sales and print advertising revenues. Also as newspapers have found out, generating revenue from online advertising wasn’t easy. Advertising on the web works fundamentally differently from print. As Nicholas Carr points out:

A print newspaper provides an array of content—local stories, national and international reports, news analyses, editorials and opinion columns, photographs, sports scores, stock tables, TV listings, cartoons, and a variety of classified and display advertising—all bundled together into a single product. People subscribe to the bundle, or buy it at a newsstand, and advertisers pay to catch readers’ eyes as they thumb through the pages. The publisher’s goal is to make the entire package as attractive as possible to a broad set of readers and advertisers. The newspaper as a whole is what matters, and as a product it’s worth more than the sum of its parts.

When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else. In many cases, they bypass the newspaper’s “front page” altogether, using search engines, feed readers, or headline aggregators like Google News, Digg, and Daylife to leap directly to an individual story.

In other words, the true value of the newspaper – the bundle – is lost once online. It becomes a set of standalone articles, each responsible for its own revenue.

Here is where the Kindle can change the game back in favor of print. Since newspapers on the Kindle are subscription-based – just as in print – the bundle can now be restored. Only the medium will have changed, from paper to e-ink. In fact, if Amazon can track the location of a Kindle, it could even display local advertisements, in exactly the same way that local editions of a national newspaper do.

But not so fast. Newspapers (and their partner, Amazon) also need to understand why users moved online in the first place: the convenience of having unlimited news accessible instantly for free. This is what they need to deliver. For the bundle to work, the Kindle must make all its newspapers available for free, instead of charging an arbitrary subscription fee. Revenue from advertisements (on a per-impression basis, since per-click makes no sense in the absence of a web browser) should be split between Amazon (the medium) and the newspapers (the content).

Of course, we still don’t know how many online readers will bite and make the move to the Kindle. But the U.S. newspaper industry sure can’t afford to not try.

Market segmentation by demography, by population, by purchasing power, by usage, by geography – marketers have used all these to plot product targeting.

But segmentation by product features alone?

That is what several well-regarded bloggers were doing when the Sony Vaio P was launched at CES in January.

Was the Sony Vaio P a netbook or a notebook? After all, it was ridiculously small, light and portable. That made it a netbook. But it was expensive, had a high-resolution screen and ran Windows Vista effortlessly. That made it a notebook. No consensus.

Then some among the tech punditry had a brainwave and realised they had been asking the wrong question. So they sparked another round of heated discussion “What makes the netbook a netbook?” Size? Cost? Operating System? 3G connectivity? Optical Drive? Again, no consensus.

The real question that the real buyers in the real world are asking is “Is the Vaio P the machine that *I* want?” They don’t care a battery’s cell if it’s a netbook or a notebook.

If you think you’re a tech pundit, find who those buyers are. Find what makes them collectively tick. Find why they want what they want.

That’s real market segmentation. And real insight.

Microsoft will lay off 5000 staff over the next 18 months. This is partly due to an 8% decline in client revenue attributed to “continued shift to lower priced netbooks”. Netbook sales have been robust. Buyers prefer Windows XP over Vista on netbooks because of performance issues, but Microsoft makes lower margins on XP. This is essentially the problem. Industry analysts are awaiting Windows 7, its Windows release.

But it won’t help.

Microsoft says Windows 7 is netbook-friendly (and it might well be), but that’s irrelevant. The issue is higher margins. If Microsoft prices Windows 7 like Vista, it’s going to raise the total price of netbooks. That is unacceptable. After all, the USP of the netbook is Cheap.

Now, I think the company’s realized the underlying problem: Mobile and Desktop are moving towards each other.

The company is more likely to make higher margins on its Mobile Operating System than on its Desktop Operating System. High-priced smartphones are becoming increasingly popular and also more sophisticated. On the other hand, PCs are getting smaller and lighter – and cheaper.

Most commentators have already identified Mobile and the Cloud as the defining markets for the immediate future and they’re probably right. Microsoft has plays (albeit relatively weak ones) in both these in the form of Windows Mobile and Windows Live.

I think we’re going to see a shift in investment toward these two markets, and away from the PC market. At the minimum, expect a quick rollout of Office Live soon (either free or monetized) and Windows Mobile 6.5.

iPhone is revolutionary not just because of its (multi-touch) touchscreen. There are, after all, other touchscreen phones on the market, and none have achieved iPhone’s popularity. Why?

iPhone is revolutionary not because of its Internet browser. Mobile Safari has limitations that other browsers don’t – most notably the lack of Flash support, no text search, no scrolling to the end, among others. But iPhone users are among the most heavy users of the web. Why?

It turns out that when you put both these features together, you end up with something very different.

The web browser is one of the most mouse-heavy applications on your (desktop/laptop) computer. Maintaining that experience on the mobile phone is tough when you have to manipulate physical keys. Open a web page in a browser on your computer and imagine moving the cursor using only the arrow keys.

Your finger on a touchscreen is the best proxy for a mouse on a mobile phone.

This is, in essence, what makes iPhone so compelling. There are awesome touchscreen phones with average browsers, and great browsers trapped in keypad-based phones. iPhone has managed to bridge that gap. And how.

At an engagement ceremony I attended this October, every one of the guests was a photographer, clicking away at this, that or the other all the time. Not only have you seen this; over the past couple of years you’ve clicked your way through a few ceremonies/parties/gatherings too.

Except that things have changed somewhat: in 2006, your fellow shutterbugs probably used point-and-shoot digital cameras. Chances are they were using their mobile phones at that last ceremony. Chances are that you were too.

No surprise; consider this. The current installed base of mobile phone cameras is 1.9 billion, up from nearly zero 5 years ago. In contrast, the camera industry only ships 100 million (one-tenth of a billion) devices a year.

Whatever happened to the standalone camera industry? And how long, you might also ask, before they fade into oblivion?

I think the answer to the first, discussed in this post, is that the camera industry stopped innovating.

For years, the Megapixel ruled. Consumers bought a new digital camera based solely on “how many MP it had”, fed by copious advertising  by manufacturers promoting this very lust. So, roughly, 3 Megapixels in 2002 went to 5 in 2004 to 7 in 2006 to 8 now (perhaps even 10) – and stopped.

At some point – perhaps a couple of years ago – folks began to realize that the pictures they were clicking with their existing digital camera were good enough. When they wanted an upgrade and looked around, all they saw were more Megapixels. Clearly, no one was listening to them. Camera manufacturers – Sony, Nikon, Kodak, Olympus and others – probably thought they didn’t have to. Even if existing owners didn’t upgrade, there were so many first-time camera buyers out there. You didn’t have to own a larger slide of the pie if the pie itself was expanding.

This is where the camera manufacturers made their big mistake. At that very time, mobile phone manufacturers were busy embedding tiny 1 and 2 megapixels cameras into their devices. Millions of would-be-first-time-digital-camera buyers bought Rs. 9000 phones and suddenly found themselves with a ready digital camera. The photos were grainy and often out-of-focus, but hey – the camera now fit into their pocket, and was always with them to capture moments with friends, on the bus, in the train, on the street, at home, at outings, gatherings, ceremonies, parties, everywhere. Suddenly, the lure of the Megapixel didn’t hold sway at all. What mattered was that this little camera was always there. It also helped that the same block of plastic was, often, a music player, video player and recorder, radio and, occasionally, Internet browser.

Guts.

By this time, the camera manufacturers had had their first “uh-oh” moment, as sales of phone-enabled cameras shot through the roof. They scrambled back to appeal to their base of existing owners, attempting to sell them on something other than MP. So you began to hear noises about everything ranging from image stabilization to multiple face-recognition.

But the mobile phone industry wasn’t idle either. While the first generation of mobile phone cameras were dreadful, the second wasn’t. Mobile phones that cost around Rs. 15000 to Rs. 20000 – the price range of a good point-and-shoot digital camera – were now sporting 5 megapixel cameras (more than what consumers wanted), advanced lens technology (for instance, the Carl-Zeiss lenses in the top-end Nokia Nseries cameras), great flash (the Xenon flash in the Nokia N82) and customizable settings on par with their standalone counterparts. In other words, phone cameras were as good as standalone digital point-and-shoot cameras. The choice for buyers was now between i.) their existing camera plus a few incremental features, and ii.) their existing camera +  music + web + maps + video + kitchen sink. Making that choice was easy.

The female of the species is deadlier than the male. Unquestionably.

Next – what the camera industry can do to stay relevant in the coming years.

On my N82: spent some time with Opera Mini after a while – had been using Nokia’s built-in S60 Browser exclusively over  the past few months.

Here’s a list of peeves and loves about each browser.

 

Opera Mini Good

• Faster page load times
• Snappier controls
• Smoother scrolling
• Slightly better font rendering (all of above relative to S60 Browser)
• Address TLD auto-complete: (type www.opera. and  a drop-down list appears with opera.com, opera.org , opera.net)
• Speed Dial-like shortcuts for bookmarks

Opera Mini Bad

• No support for multiple tabs
• “Small” font too small, “Medium” too big
• Screen does not occupy entire width when phone tilted (in portrait mode). I don’t think the browser is accelerometer-aware
• Not possible to copy URL

S60 Browser Good

• Does not ask for permission to connect; allows selection of default access point. This is because, unlike Opera Mini, which is a Java app, the S60 browser is a native S60 app.
• Page overview – a shrunk view of the current page which you can quickly scroll around on.
• Attractive Back/Forward implementation. Page previews flip forward and back, like moving your mouse across the OS X dock.

S60 Browser Bad

• Supports multiple tabs but cannot open new one!
• No “top”, “bottom”, “pgup”, “pgdn” keypad shortcuts
• Tedious process to copy URL. Bookmark current page, navigate to Edit bookmarks, copy URL, delete bookmark.

What else

Haven’t had a chance to check out Skyfire yet; the founders have decided, in a sadly common blinkered move, to limit launch to the US. A mobile browser from Mozilla’s been “just around the corner” for a while now (and won’t show up on S60 first). Google’s promised a mobile version of Chrome, but my guess is that Android will get it before S60 does. I don’t see mobile Safari on S60 ever. And it hurts to even speak of mobile IE.

Much has been said about Google’s open-source browser strategy after the Chrome release. The consensus seems to be that Google doesn’t want to win any direct “browser wars” (at least, not in the Netscape v/s IE sense), but to raise the standards for *all* browsers to run ever more sophisticated web-based applications. In other words, create a new “Internet platform“. Helps everyone, including Microsoft.

Noble enough, canny enough, bold enough. Except that no one’s talked about the gamble that’s implicit in the move.

Let me explain.

Suppose Google enhances its web applications using Chrome’s new capabilities – which it will. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader – now run almost as well as desktop applications. But only on Chrome. Now, these applications are more dependent than ever on the browser. In other words, Google is encouraging users to install a thin layer (of Chrome) on top of Windows to run their web apps. Perhaps Firefox will follow Chrome’s lead. That means 20% of the user base will be able to run the next generation of Google web applications.

But there is the remaining 80%. For that 80% of users, Internet Explorer is the receptacle through which they interact with the web. If Microsoft chooses to not play nice, Gmail, Google Docs, Reader will “break” on IE – that is, not render/function properly.

The average Joe’s reaction is to blame the “website”, not the browser. Example: The other day, the Yahoo! India mail website “broke” on Internet Explorer. My sister’s reaction was “Well, looks like Yahoo! mail’s not working properly, let me try Gmail”. Not “let me see if it works on Firefox”. Or my personal experience in cyber cafes in India: If the site doesn’t render correctly, “We’ll try after some time”. Not “Hey cybercafeowner, do you have Firefox on this box?”

In other words, if IE decides not to implement Chrome’s under-the-hood architectural innovations, it will end up discrediting Google’s own web applications, not IE or Microsoft. The average user is happy with his/her webmail (or other such apps). He/she won’t shift to a new browser, he’ll demand that the “email” work “as before”, or he’ll/she’ll switch to a new “email”.

No prizes for guessing that MS is hoping the new “email” is going to be Windows Live Mail.

Last week Nokia announced that its Mail for Exchange application would now be available for any Nokia phone that ran the Series60 3rd Edition platform. Immediately, about 80 million users across forty-three S60v3 phones can now integrate into a Microsoft Exchange environment.

Also, a few months ago, Nokia released the E71 smartphone. Sporting a QWERTY keyboard, a thin form factor, and attractive metal casing, the E71 is Nokia’s first serious enterprise phone. Its predecessor, the E61i, was a capable phone hobbled by a miserable plastic body, poor build quality and bad branding (the E61, E61i, E62 [1]). The E71, in contrast, is simply beautiful.

A combination of the application and the phone, then, is supposed to demonstrate that Nokia is now serious about the Enterprise. That it is the first choice when a company’s IT department chooses a smartphone to mobilize its workforce.

Not so fast. Research in Motion’s Blackberry series of phones rule the roost in that space. And it doesn’t look like Nokia’s in a position yet to unseat RIM.

Nokia’s Enterprise Problem

 

 

Nokia’s problem are two-fold. One, any enterprise phone has to have a physical QWERTY keyboard, since it’ll mostly be used for email on the go. Nokia only has one device in this form factor. Its history with such phones, as we saw, doesn’t inspire confidence. And it doesn’t have a product roadmap around its QWERTY phones. No organization’s IT department is going to fit its executives with a phone like that. Not when the alternative is Blackberry [2].

Nokia has also never tried to seriously sell to the Enterprise. Sources tell me that in India, the phone is mostly being sold via the retail channel; corporate deals have been non-existent. It doesn’t surprise me. Most of Nokia’s previous Eseries phones had been pretty, Wifi-equipped toys with all sorts of form factors (candybar, clamshell, slider), and tiny 9-button dialpads [3]. Not the sort of product line a sales guy would be proud demonstrating to a firm’s CIO.

Blackberry’s massive brand is also going to be tough to compete with. As things stand today, given a choice, an executive would almost always choose a Blackberry over an E71. Features don’t even matter; just that he/she wants to be seen carrying a Blackberry. RIM has achieved what even Apple hasn’t been able to – ubiquity as well as desirability.

How can Nokia compete in the Enterprise?

1. Concentrate on winning accounts at companies that haven’t set up a mobile device infrastructure for their workforce, instead of converting existing WinMobile/Blackberry accounts. Few IT departments want to support more than one device family. But a surprising number of large firms haven’t gone mobile yet, and there’s where Nokia can leverage one crucial advantage: Price.

2. Reduce price through reduced margins. Nokia commands massive margins on its Eseries phones currently, I’ve learnt. It could win any bidding war by cutting those margins. Blackberry will make it a neck-and-neck affair on features, but Nokia could win on price.

3. Over the next 18 months, build a product portfolio around mobile devices with QWERTY keypads, with a 3-tier low-end, medium and flagship strategy. Nokia’s own Nseries 7x, 8x and 9x models are a good example of this. And retire the 9-button keypad Eseries models [4]. They aren’t going to win Nokia any accounts.

Conclusion

Nokia’s crafted a brilliant entertainment devices strategy around its Nseries branded phones. Not so with its enterprise strategy. While the Eseries brand is strong, Nokia has problems both with its Eseries phones as well as the marketing around them.

Either the company can pull along anaemically, selling “business” phones through its retail channels, or it can take on Blackberry by winning more corporate accounts. That’s going to require changes in its product, pricing and marketing strategy. Tall ask, tall results.

 

Footnotes:

[1] There were 3 models, nearly indistinguishable externally. The E61 did not sport a camera but had WiFi and 3G. The E62 had neither a camera nor WiFi/3G. The E61i had both. And all 3 were ugly. (back)

[2] Of course there’s Windows Mobile, which runs QWERTY phones by Samsung, Motorola and Palm. Nokia’s E71, in my opinion, trumps Samsung’s Blackjack II and Motorola’s Q9c. Palm practically invented the smartphone market but is now in a dead slump. Then there’s iPhone. Unless it gets a physical keyboard, Apple isn’t winning any deals. Open and shut. I’ve used both the iPod Touch and the Blackberry Curve, and there’s no contest when it comes to doing email. Neither of these are game-changers in the Enterprise smartphone market. (back)

[3] Ironically, with the release of the Blackberry Pearl Flip 8220, RIM has decided to go the other way and test the clamshell market. (back)

[4] There have been repeated calls among the Nokia enthusiast community to bring some Eseries-only features to Nseries devices, notably the ability to display additional information and notifications on the home screen, ability to define “modes” – a collection of active standby shortcuts and themes, the enhanced calendar, a fully functional version of Quickoffice, among others. The E51 and E66 with enhanced cameras (they’re cheap to put into a phone) and standard 3.5mm audio jacks could function admirably as Nseries devices with the above features.

Alternatively (and controversially), it could create another brand for small businesses, (Eseries Lite? Ugh.) that need the business capabilities of Eseries, but for whom the E71 and its ilk are too expensive. (back)

At the outset, I’d like to clarify I’m no iPhone or Apple zealot. My interest in mobile touchscreen interfaces has been piqued by my recent purchase of an iPod Touch.

I was playing around with a colleague’s HTC Touch Cruise the other day. The Touch runs Windows Mobile 6.1, and, in summary, is a full-featured smartphone with decent multimedia capabilities. That’s not what this post about though.

It’s about two clear observations I made – that we’re stuck in the late 90s when it comes to mobile touch-based input devices, and that UI designers still use the desktop paradigm when designing for mobile touch screens. While Windows Mobile is what triggered this post, with PalmOS, and UIQ too.

Poke, poke

Turns out that it’s a huge pain navigating the WinMobile interface on the 2.8″ touchscreen with your fingers. The buttons are tiny, the menu options are awkward, and it’s next to impossible to grab and drag a scrollbar. I gave up.  It’s clear – the best way to navigate a Windows Mobile is using the accompanying stylus. 

But a stylus is a hopelessly outdated tool. Along with the physical QWERTY keyboard for desktops/laptops, the stylus is a tool for mobiles that stubbornly refuses to die. Perhaps it’s easier – and commercially attractive – for touchscreen phone manufacturers to add applications and features than to rework a familiar, though suboptimal interface.

iPhone/iPod Touch have changed that. iPhone may not pack the sheer number of applications the HTC Touch Cruise does, but its interface is revolutionary. It lost the stylus. In fact, with multitouch – flicking, pinching, dragging with multiple fingertips – your hand is more effective than a stylus. You may not agree with iPhone the device (I don’t) – but you have to admit iPhone’s set the benchmark for all touchscreen interfaces.

Honey, I shrunk the desktop

Windows Mobile 6.1 has a task bar, a system tray, a Start button and a drop-down Start Menu. With nested menus. On that tiny 240×320 pixel screen.  

After spending a while with the device, I realized that Windows Mobile is essentially a shrunk-down version of the desktop Windows interface. The widgets are smaller, but the paradigm is the same. The result is a cluttered interface and a frustrating navigation experience.

Someone’s psyched the WinMobile team into believing that their biggest strength is that their mobile interface looks just like their desktop interface. That may have been true when mobile applications were very simple, but it doesn’t hold true any longer. It’s hurting usability and innovation.

There have been several calls for this, and I’m going to say it here again – the WinMobile team will do themselves and their legions of developers and enterprise customers a world of good if they rethink their interface. 
 

Note: I think Samsung and LG also have very good touchscreen interfaces. But this is merely an observation from Google Image Search results. Haven’t tried them out first-hand, so no comparisons.

Arrington on Techcrunch talks about the possibility of Amazon licensing its Kindle ebook reader hardware specs and trademark to third-party manufacturers:

…a licensing program that gave hardware manufacturers the ability to build Kindle clones, along with an incentive to sell them at near-zero margins. Amazon would give those manufacturers access to the core Kindle hardware specs (there’s no real magic there anyway) and the right to call it a Kindle device so long as they also put the core Kindle software on the device. That software links the device to Amazon’s store, meaning downloads revenue flows through Amazon.

Amazon would then share a percentage of net margin generated from downloads with the hardware manufacturers.

Techcrunch has put into words what I’ve felt since the day the Kindle was announced. After all, Amazon isn’t in the hardware business at all; it’s in the product and content retail business. I can imagine that in the initial days of the Kindle launch, Amazon needed its own device to build a strong association between Amazon’s brand and the mobile ebook model. Now that that purpose is served, manufacturing and selling the Kindle hardware is an overhead that Amazon could avoid.

Just like Associates?

This isn’t very different from the masterstroke that Amazon played years ago with its Associates affiliate program. Before Affiliate Marketing became the wild jungle that it is today, Amazon launched a series of innovative tools – aStore, Omakase Links, Product Previews – to let publishers (people who owned websites/blogs/suchlike) add links to Amazon’s content onto their web pages. These publishers then earned a cut of the sale generated by clicks from the links on their web pages.

Kindle is Associates all over again, except instead of web-based tools, we’re talking hardware specs.

For instance, Amazon’s aStore let developers build their own focused online “stores” (which displayed Amazon’s books). (A religion-focused website would be able to draw viewers and sell that category of books better than Amazon.com itself.) In the same vein, a student version of Kindle with access to e-textbooks and additional bookmarking features would be better marketed and sold by a third party which is focused on only that market.

With such an Affiliate/Franchise/Licensing model, manufacturers would fall over themselves for a chance to access Amazon’s massive ebook and newspapers database – and a cut of the subsequent revenues.

The Mobile Opportunity

Once third party manufacturers have licensed the Kindle specs, they are no longer restricted to building anything that looks like the Kindle today. I can readily think of well-designed iPhone/iPod Touch ebook applications like the New York Times app. This fits in with American universities doling out iPods Touch and iPhones to their incoming freshmen.  A market for Nokia’s S60 devices would be many times larger.

What do you think? Would you purchase a Kindle application for your mobile device?

Aside: Of course, manufacturers would then be free to choose the carrier of their choice for wireless content delivery. That sure isn’t going to make Sprint-Nextel happy.

Being able to choose to be contacted by either voice, IM or SMS is an extremely attractive proposition. Using all three from the same device, though, is the holy grail of unified communication. With VoIP, smartphones and IM, we might be getting pretty close to that.

Right now, your instant messaging contact list, and your phone/SMS contact list are disparate and independent. Your contact’s IM status tells you nothing about where he/she is, or if he/she can take a call. Is it possible to

• Integrate both contact lists into one?
• Set one real-time status that all your contacts can check?

The answer will, very soon, be yes.

Same Network

A mobile phone is already capable of making calls, receiving SMSes and running an instant messaging client. But since phone calls and SMS are sent over one network type (Voice) and Mobile IM over another (GPRS/EDGE/3G), there’s no unification between these services.

However, when WiFi coverage is widely available, or when you can make and receive calls over your packet-data oriented 3G network, the line begins to blur, and then altogether disappear. Applications like Fring, which integrate your phone contacts list and Gtalk list, already make that possible. If you can make VoIP calls, you can talk to your contact by voice or text.

The Possibilities

At that point of time, your status message indicates you real-life communication status. One could, for instance, check if a contact is open to receiving SMS only, or having a short IM conversation, or receiving calls, or none at all. This goes beyond the “Available”, “Busy”, “In a meeting” statuses.

If you’re on a phone call, your IM status could indicate that automatically, so people getting in touch with you could leave you an SMS/IM message without having to first call you and check if you’re busy on a call. You could indicate if you’re driving, sleeping or having dinner and have it show up on your friends’ mobile chat list.

If you’re in a meeting, simply setting your IM status to “Busy” could automatically cancel all calls made to you and pop up an IM chat box on your caller’s phone so he/she can send you an IM instead.

Stretching this, implementing a multi-way voice conference wouldn’t be any different from a multi-way chat. Additionally, with text-to-speech and speech-to-text, some participants could write and read text, others could speak and hear voice – in the same conversation (say one’s in a movie hall, the other is driving – they’d never be able to speak with today’s state of tech).

Adding location to the mix throws up some interesting possibilities. If you can display your location as part of your IM status, your friends nearby could sign up for notifications and call you to meet up – all from the same device. Or if you’re waiting to call someone until he/she reaches office? Set an alert for when your contact’s location changes to his office locality.

Conclusion

Not only are we “integrating voice and data” – that’s been on the cards for long – but we’re also integrating people and devices, using features of one to enhance our experience with the other.

How long do you think it’ll be before we get here? Will telecom companies try to block this, given that they won’t be able to charge per-call any longer?

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?

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