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[Google’s strategy is all about ads, not selling services. Business Analyst Stijn Schuermans examines Google’s three-pronged strategy for making money and the key drivers for the company’s success] Is Google a technology company? Well, sort of. Despite its geeky, engineering-driven reputation, Google is in the first place an advertisement business, as an overwhelming 96% of its revenues come from digital ads. Sure, Google produces some amazing high-tech stuff, spending $3.7 billion in R&D in 2010, but it’s all in the name of crude commerce; of connecting eyeballs to ads. Let’s explore the three pillars of Google’s strategy that enable the company to sell more ads for more money. Google increases its reach by flattening any obstacle that stands between its ads and eyeballs. Then, Google expands its visibility to the user by providing services, creating more opportunities to show ads. Finally, the company squeezes the maximum out of those opportunities by mining user data, which allows them to understand and target users very efficiently. This strategy works pretty well for the company, to say the least. Google ranked 92nd in the 2011 Fortune 500. The company is worth almost 200 billion USD. Last year, it reaped over $29B in revenue. If Google were a country, it would be bigger than Cyprus or Bahrain, based on GDP. Since its business is digital, it collected a net profit in 2010 of $8.5B (a healthy profit margin of 27%), despite providing almost all of its user-oriented services for free. Let’s discuss Google’s three-pronged strategy in more detail. Pillar 1. Flatten The first pillar of Google’s strategy is to crush down anything that stands between consumer eyeballs and Google’s inventory, i.e. the ads that Google’s advertiser customers are providing. That is, any friction for users to be exposed to the ads should be removed. For example, Google provides two operating systems, both immensely complex technologies, at low or zero cost to the world: Android (for smartphones and tablets) and Chrome OS (for netbooks and set-top boxes). Of both operating systems, open source versions are available for anyone to access, develop and build derivatives from. Google provides OS’s like Android for free, because its goal is to commoditize the devices they will run on. They allow OEMs to make high-quality, low cost devices, which can then be delivered at a very affordable price to the mass market. If more people own and use smartphones and tablets, the reasoning goes, this gives Google more opportunities to reach those users and serve them ads. In the same context, Google took a very active stance in the net neutrality debate. There the intention was to ensure optimal access of users to the network. It would not be good for Google’s business if operators would impose restrictions of artificially increase the cost of network access. The theoretical basis for this pillar is the economics of complements. A good analogy is cars and fuel. If the price of fuel goes down, the demand for cars will increase. The services that Google provides are the complements in this case (the fuel) to the core advertisement business. The value of the advertisement inventory increases with the amount of people that Google can reach. Services are subsidized to drive more eyeballs to Google: the price of the service is reduced (in most cases to zero) to indirectly push up the demand for the core product, being ads. Pillar 2. Expand Once lots of people have access to the Internet through connected devices, Google’s second goal is to expand its footprint across the user journey. Put simply, Google wants to be part of as many use cases as possible, since that’s where they can present users with advertisements. Google provides dozens of different services, targeting as many tasks as possible that a user might consider when communicating or looking for information. If a user wants to send email, there’s GMail. For chatting, Google Talk and Google Voice. Want to find directions? Use Google Maps or Google Earth. YouTube allows you to publish your own videos and Picasa to share pictures. In a business setting, Google Apps (like Google Docs) allow you to collaborate with co-workers. If you want to keep up to date with your friends, there’s Google+. The list goes on. In most of these services, Google ads are displayed. Unobtrusively, but always there for people to see. Google doesn’t do all the work of reaching users itself. Google provides infrastructure for others to display ads, deriving about 30% of its advertisement revenue this way. Third parties can display ads on their websites (and share in the profits) using the AdSense platform. A similar system is in place to include ads in mobile apps. Despite some competition, Google is still the main advertisement provider on the Android Market. In fact, most developers on Android use advertisement as a source of income, rather than direct payment. The Android market has the lowest amount of paid apps of any app store. Pillar 3. Mine Finally, after flattening and expanding, Google squeezes the maximum out of the eyeballs it reaches. The company increasing the value of its ads by data-mining the user’s behavior. By understanding what the user is trying to achieve at the moment that an advertisement is displayed, the ad can be micro-targeted to be incredibly relevant to that user. This increases the probability that the user will click on the ad, measured by the combination of fill rate and click-through rate (CTR), and therefore the probability that she will eventually buy the advertised product. This is what makes the ad valuable to the advertiser. In its early days, Google revolutionized the advertisement industry this way. Before, an ad was broadcast to a very large audience (think billboards or TV ads) in the hope that someone might find it interesting. Any targeting was crude at best, for example an advertiser could choose to print in magazines with very specific audiences. When Google Search came along (still its flagship product), all of a sudden you could target users almost perfectly, as they conveniently typed in what they were looking for. This made the return on an advertisement spend several factors higher. A typed search query is only one way that Google can find out what a user is interested in. Scanning the content of emails is another, pretty controversial one. More recently, Google has tried to launch several social networks like Facebook-competitor Google+, hoping to learn something about the user through his social interactions. In fact, social networks are major competitors to Google for online advertisement dollars. With Google Latitude, the company can understand where you are and select advertisements that are relevant to your location. Many industry sources also confirm that the Android OS is used to collect user information. Conclusion Google doesn’t give away all its consumer services for free out of the goodness of its heart. Its purpose is to make profit. If services are provided for free, they are meant to flatten, expand and mine in order to sell advertisements. Google uses complements everywhere. Where other products might have a single or a just a few complements (think fuel for a car), Google works hard to create as many as possible. Because the core business is to reach people, Google throws its nets as wide as it can. Once it has the user’s attention, it can then use its technology to monetize the opportunity to its maximum extent. – Stijn follow us on Twitter @visionmobile [Want a more detailed analysis of Google’s strategy and how it fits into the ecosystem puzzle? Check out our Software Economics seminars]. #Android #chrome #google #mobilestrategy

[We at VisionMobile have been researching and helping to educate the industry about mobile platforms for the last five years. In this time mobile software has evolved from the world of “open OS” to the world of  complex ecosystems, network effects, app stores which are redefining the rules of telecom industry. Today we share much of this knowledge in our Mobile Platforms: The Clash of Ecosystems report – a critical analysis of major mobile platforms and their battle for dominance – free download here]. In the report the Mobile Platforms: Clash of Ecosystems (free download here) we break down  Android, BlackBerry OS, BREW, iOS, Symbian, Windows Phone and webOS across key elements such as history and origins, owner agenda, ecosystem adoption, market penetration, technology foundations and application development experience. Clash of Ecosystems is part-funded by webinos,  a project aiming to deliver an Open Source Platform and software components for web applications across mobile, PC, home media (TV/set-top boxes) and in-car devices. The report dives into several key trends underpinning the era of mobile platforms and ecosystems – designed to help developers, software companies, entrepreneurs, enterprise CIOs, brands, handset makers and operators to better understand the dynamics of mobile platform competition on intersection of economics and technology. Smartphones go mainstream, but the devil’s in the details. Just two years ago, smartphones were viewed as expensive toys for geeks and Apple fan boys. No longer. Smartphones have entered the mainstream in developed markets, and are taking a growing proportion of device sales in more cost-sensitive markets around the globe. In the third quarter of 2011, smartphone shipments penetration surpassed 29% globally, although this figure varies widely from nearly 65% in the USA and over 50% in Europe to 19% in Asia-Pacific, 17% in Latin America and 18% in Africa/Middle East. The leaders, iOS and Android, are driven by economics of demand. Handset sales are driven not by hardware features (“what the handset can do”) but the user interface and applications available (“what you can do with the handset”). Much like any smartphone platform, iOS and Android are driven by economics of demand, where the demand generated (incl. the number of applications) has a far stronger effect on sales than pure supply chain efficiencies. As of October 2011, iOS and Android are leading the way, with over 500,000 and 300,000 applications, respectively. The rest of the platforms trail far behind with order of magnitude less applications: BlackBerry has 35,000 applications, Windows Mobile 30,000 applications and Symbian 25,000 applications. Successful platforms are a magnet for financial investment. Application platforms like iOS and Android are able to attract huge financial investments on the part of developers, investors and brands. Taking iOS as an example, and estimating that an app costs an average $30,000 to develop, the 500,000 iOS apps represent an average investment of $15B in the iOS ecosystem. This investment directly contributes to Apple’s bottom line, and its estimated $71B iOS-powered device sales. App stores are about controlling ecosystems, not profiting from content. The app store business is the polar opposite of the telco content business. As such, application stores like Apple App Store and Google Android Market should not be mistaken for profit centres. Instead, Apple and Google leverage app stores as ecosystem control points. With over 85% of iOS and Android downloads coming from free apps, the 30% revenue share from paid apps subsidizes the operational cost of app intake and distribution, which runs at over $1.2B to date in the case of Apple. The rising star of HTML5. HTML5 has the potential to become a common bridge system across smartphone platform islands and the sea of feature phones. HTML5 is the only common app technology supported by Android, iOS, new versions of BlackBerry OS and Windows Phone platforms. With 225 million Android devices and 146 million iOS devices (UPDATE: this figure only refers to iPhones and does not include other iOS devices) sold to date, HTML5 is supported by over 371 million mobile devices today, albeit with mixed levels of compatibility. Microsoft, Facebook, and mobile operators have very different motivations but are all eyeing HTML5 as a technology that could help dis-intermediate app stores as content distribution silos, reducing the power of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms. However, in its present state HTML5 can neither challenge nor displace the leading mobile platforms. In order to become a viable alternative, HTML5 needs to move beyond being just a development tool, and to converge around a dominant solution for web application discovery, monetisation, distribution and retailing. Mounting developer acquisition costs. Platforms need apps to thrive and developers are the growth engine of the smartphone ecosystems. At the same time, developer attention is scarce; developers are very critical “platform consumers” and need to make far higher investments when adopting a new platform. We estimate that the minimum acquisition cost for a publishing developer is over $2,300 in the case of Apple. As such, Apple, Google, Nokia, Microsoft and RIM have needed to invest billions of dollars in persuading developers to write apps for their platforms. Moreover, developers are motivated by a complex set of incentives, which includes revenue potential, user reach, ability to raise funding, and the pure coolness or utility of a platform. These incentives vary widely across different types of developers and as such call for developer segmentation as a critical cornerstone of any developer strategy.. Software players put mobile operators on the defensive. The app innovation unleashed by smartphones puts pressure on traditional telecom profit centres, not only around value-added services, but also on core messaging and voice services. Apple and Google combined control the user experience of nearly 400 million users through their iOS and Android platforms. Both are strategically reducing the role of mobile operators to that of “connectivity providers”.  Internet giants like Facebook and Amazon are using social-centric and retail-centric strategies to profit from mobile. Startups such as Foursquare and Instagram have pioneered mobile-first services. Communication companies like Skype, WhatsApp and Viber put pressure on core telecom services, notably SMS and voice. Incumbent mobile platforms lose to next-generation challengers. In the last decade we‘ve seen over 20 mobile platforms rise and then die not being able to achieve critical mass. Next-generation platforms (iOS, Android and Windows Phone) have achieved sustainable growth by leveraging on network effects and developer economics. Legacy platforms on the other hand (Symbian, BlackBerry OS, BREW and Windows Mobile) have been designed to handset vendor rather than developer requirements; all have either been discontinued or pushed into narrow market niches. Companies with strong software DNA (common in the US) now dominate the smartphone platform landscape. Patent wars. Apple and Microsoft are trying to leverage their own patent portfolios and paying billions of dollars in patent acquisitions in an attempt to slow down the meteoric growth of Android. Apple’s strategy is to block Android sales starting with Samsung, although with mixed, regional and temporary successes. Microsoft is using an altogether different tactic, namely patent taxes, to coax OEMs like Samsung and HTC away from a higher-cost Android. At the same time, Google is planning to defend Android through the pending acquisition of Motorola Mobile Devices, and its portfolio of over 17,000 patents. We expect a culmination of the patent wars in a multi-vendor consortium designed to standardise cross-licensing agreements across Android, iOS and WP7 handset vendors. Comments welcome as always, – Michael V #ios #webos #mobileplatforms #symbian #Android #windowsphone #Blackberry #iphone

[The era of smartphones is upon us, as penetration increases from 11% in 2008 to over 25% in 2011. But what of the remaining three quarters of the market? Marketing Manager Matos Kapetanakis talks smartphone numbers and takes a look at the elusive long-tail of feature phone shipments] Dawn of the smartphone era Smartphone penetration continues to accelerate, growing from a paltry 11% in 2008 to 20% in 2010 and climbing to 27% in H1 2011. Feature phones continue to make up the bulk of mobile shipments globally, but the revenue potential of each segment is a different matter altogether. As an example, the average selling price for Nokia’s feature phones was 39 Euros versus 144.5 Euros for their converged devices. Another parameter, namely profitability is much in favour of smartphone vendors. HTC has comparable revenues to Nokia’s successful feature phone segment, with two times the profits and profit margin, despite having six times fewer shipments. The gap is even larger in the case of Apple, whose profits are nearly 20 times those of Nokia’s feature phone segment, despite having less than a third of Nokia’s shipments. Smartphone platforms: Google vs. Apple First, let’s take a look at the two leading players, Android and iOS. The vacuum left behind by Symbian’s timely demise has been filled primarily by Android and, to a lesser extend, Apple’s iOS. In H1 2011, Android gobbled up nearly 45% of the smartphone pie, leaving approximately 20% for Apple’s iOS and 12% for RIM’s BlackBerry OS. Apple has enjoyed a healthy increase of iPhone shipments in 2011, already reaching past the 50M full-year figure for 2010 in the first three quarters of 2011. Despite the initial disappointment of not being a brand-new iPhone, the iPhone 4S managed to get 4 million sales in just one weekend – that’s more than Windows Phone manages in an entire quarter. However, in an increasingly price sensitive smartphone market, there is a limit to how many iPhones can be sold. Despite being the number one smartphone platform, Android is not guaranteed a smooth sailing. Apple’s lawsuit barrage on Samsung, the biggest Android vendor in terms of sales, has exposed the platform’s Achilles’ heel, namely patents. The large arena of this high-stake drama will not be set in Germany or Australia, but the large smartphone markets, like the U.S. Google’s acquisition of Motorola (don’t miss our full analysis) has indeed armed Google with fresh patent ammunition, but might alienate the big Android vendors. Smartphone platforms: The best of the rest But what of the other platforms? Windows Phone continues to fail to impress users, with sales being disappointing, as Ballmer himself recently admitted. Nearly eight months after the much-vaunted Microsoft-Nokia deal, Windows Phone is faced with lukewarm results, being outsold even by Samsung’s bada platform. In H1 2011, Windows Phone barely reached 4M shipments, while bada shipments climbed to nearly 8M. WP7’s growth, after it replaces the zombified Symbian as Nokia’s main smartphone platform, is still uncertain, but the longer it takes for Nokia WP devices to hit the shelves, the more market share will Nokia lose. In H1, even if Nokia were to magically replace all Symbian handsets with Windows Phone handsets, Microsoft’s platform would still be far behind Android, with just half of Android’s shipments. Windows Phone, however, should not be summarily disregarded, as Microsoft has managed to create a substantial ecosystem around the platform, which is the main ingredient to the success of Apple and Google. Windows Marketplace reached the 30 thousand apps milestone in just 10 months, while the platform has received positive reviews by developers. The platform is widely acknowledged as having the best developer tools in terms of features, based on our Developer Economics 2011 report (www.DeveloperEconomics.com). Even though Stephen Elop described the smartphone market as a three-horse race, there is another important player to be considered, namely RIM. During the past year, RIM has suffered a number of blows, from declining market share and repeated drops in their share price to a total service blackout that lasted four days. RIM is starting to lag behind its competitors and their leaking market share is up for grabs. Despite a vibrant developer community, problems such as fragmentation issues and an aging platform have cost RIM the creation of a healthy ecosystem. A telling sign is how BlackBerry App World is lagging behind not only Apple and Google’s app stores in terms of available apps and downloads, but also Nokia’s Ovi Store. Now, the BlackBerry blackout fiasco has cost RIM the confidence of 70M subscribers. RIM is on the verge of relinquishing their last remaining competitive advantage, namely reliability. Even though RIM is trying to turn the situation around, with the introduction of the BBX platform, plus the carrot of Android apps compatibility in the second version of Playbook, it’s the RIM brand that has taken a beating, more than the BlackBerry brand. It remains to be seen whether users will flock to the notoriously unsafe Android platform or will opt to follow the safer, iPhone route. The iPhone route seems more suitable to RIM’s enterprise segment, as the segment’s disposable income is enough to carry the weight of expensive iPhones. Smartphone vendor arena In H1 2011, Apple and Samsung toppled Nokia as the undisputed king of smartphones. The top-5 smartphone vendor rankings also include RIM and HTC. It’s no surprise that 3 out of the top 5 players are purely smartphone vendors; but the old guard is catching up. Although lagging behind, LG is finally on board the smartphone express, while Sony Ericsson has disowned their feature phone heritage and plan to become a smartphone-only vendor in 2012. As smartphone prices are dropping, ZTE and Huawei are also firmly in the game, extending well past their native home market. It’s interesting to note that in a market of 208 million smartphones in H1 2011, there are very few dark horses. The top 10 players accounted for nearly all smartphone shipments in the first half of 2011, leaving just 3% of shipments in the ‘other’ category. The elusive long-tail of mobile shipments While Nokia has lost the pole position in the smartphone market, it continues to firmly hold the feature phone market in its grasp. Nokia accounted for over 27% of total feature phone shipments in H1 2011, followed by Samsung with 20% and LG with 7%. However, the feature phone market is extremely fragmented, with the top 7 players accounting for just 64% of shipments. The remaining x% belongs to the generic ‘other’ category. But what is this dark, elusive gap in the market? The answer lies in the plethora of primarily Asian phone manufacturers out there (see a slightly out-of-date list here), taking off-the-shelf MediaTek hardware designs to create Shanzai handsets for the Chinese market or brand name handsets for India. The long tail of feature phone manufacturers largely caters to local markets, in partnerships with local telcos. India and China are the obvious examples of low-volume feature phone manufacturers, with each country playing host to over 15 such companies. With tens of companies shipping low-end devices to local markets, it’s small wonder that the biggest bulk of feature phone shipments comes from the long-tail of handset OEMs. The end of feature phones While smartphone penetration continues to increase, just over 1 in 4 mobile phones are smartphones. The tipping point will come when handset OEMs manage to release low-cost smartphones into the market, in high volumes. Google is already attempting to sell cheap smartphones in the range of $100 unsubsidized, pre-tax. The rate of acceleration will increase even further if there is any truth to the rumors of cheaper iPhones, as consumers are still hesitant of the prices that Apple demands for its products. Furthermore, most major handset OEMs are keen to lower the volume of feature phone offers in favor of smartphones, as the latter have a much higher profit margin and the market is slowly getting accustomed to the use of touch screens. Questions or comments? Drop us a line on Twitter. Download the full 100 Million Club watchlist. – Matos #ios #zte #100millionclub #google #nokia #smartphone #featurephone #Apple #lg #motorola #symbian #Android #samsung

[Just a short 1.5 years from MeeGo’s birth, Intel dumps it to shift focus to a new platform, Tizen, in partnership with Samsung. Guest author Dave Neary discusses the underpinnings of Tizen and why both MeeGo and Tizen are software bubbles]. Eight months after Nokia embarrassed Intel by withdrawing support for the MeeGo project, Intel has followed suit. On 27th September, Intel and Samsung announced the birth of a new mobile platform called Tizen. After only 19 months, MeeGo has been left parentless, and appears to be on life support. Tizen is, in fact, a successor of the Samsung Linux Platform, a reference platform of the LiMo operator consortium, with some components taken from the MeeGo stack. Given that LiMo and MeeGo have both failed to set the mobile computing world alight, and Android has a four year head start, can we expect better things from their offspring? What has changed with this announcement? Is this Intel’s last chance to have a stake in a credible smartphone platform? And what  should Samsung, Intel and the Linux Foundation do to give their new platform a fighting chance at success? The Birth of Tizen Last year, when reviewing the progress which MeeGo had made in its first few months, we reserved judgement on the project, on the grounds that it was “too early to be able to tell how the final product will compare to iOS or Android”, but we noted that there had been some growing pains between Nokia and Intel. Those growing pains stretched to breaking point earlier this year, when Nokia finally gave up on MeeGo and turned to Windows Phone to revitalise its smartphone products. Intel was left looking for a heavyweight consumer device partner to come in and lend credibility to their claim that MeeGo was no longer a one-man show. Rumours that LG would be joining the project failed to materialise. Finally, Intel ran out of patience, and partnered with Samsung on a new platform, Tizen, to be based on SLP (Samsung Linux Platform), a platform which Samsung have previously provided to the LiMo Foundation to be used as a reference plaform for its members. While the move has obviously been in the planning for months, Samsung were perhaps encouraged to partner with Intel on the back of the news that Google has acquired Motorola Mobility in August – a view supported by their recent settlement of an Android-related patent dispute with Microsoft. In addition, as LiMo members, most notably Vodafone also ran out of patience, SLP was left as a platform without a home. MeeGo on Life Support How does MeeGo fit into the big picture now? High profile participants like GENIVI, China Mobile, Asus and Acer have committed to shipping MeeGo devices. Will they be based on the unreleased MeeGo 1.3, or the previous 1.2 release? Or will these companies move en mass to Tizen? Given the lack of reaction from partners like GENIVI, we suspect that the Tizen announcement caught these vendors unawares. Jerermiah Foster, a community manager working for one GENIVI member, informed me that his company would reuse MeeGo 1.2 in the short term, and while Tizen looked interesting, there were no current plans to move development to the platform. He also confirmed that he found out about Tizen through the project announcement, and not before. In spite of vendors withdrawing their support, part of the community is banding together to salvage their work. After Nokia pulled out of MeeGo, community developers working on the MeeGo Handset UX banded together to continue work (with several Nokia engineers) in the MeeGo Handset Community Edition, aiming to provide MeeGo support for the Nokia N900, N950 and N9 devices. In spite of the Intel announcement of Tizen, these developers have vowed to continue the development of MeeGo on ARM, and released the MeeGo Handset Community Edition 1.3 at the end of September. The current plan proposed by these developers is to create a lightweight core distribution based on Qt, under the brandname “Mer” (“MeeGo Rebooted”), on which vendors can build custom user interfaces. The MeeGo Handset Community Edition will be the first consumer of Mer’s core operating system. The MeeGo community mailing lists are full of developers wondering where they stand now. The announcement suggests that no software will be released from the Tizen project for another 6 months. According to Joel Clark, MeeGo IVI Program Manager, the MeeGo 1.3 release has been shelved, and only incremental updates to the previous 1.2 release can be expected until then. While the MeeGo community certainly has some enthusiastic community supporters, it is unlikely that any major vendors will adopt the community-supported Mer. Ironically, the move away from MeeGo comes at a time of potential wins for the project. Nokia’s MeeGo-based N9 is finally shipping, and getting rave reviews. And continued demand for netbooks has fueled the launch of several MeeGo based netbook and tablet products, including the Asus EeePC X101, the Acer Iconia M500 and other devices from Samsung, Lenovo and Fujitsu. Perhaps Intel ran out of patience just as the project was about to take off. Tizen = SLP, with a pinch of MeeGo Technically, Tizen is a successor of the Samsung Linux Platform, a reference platform of the LiMo operator consortium, with some components taken from the MeeGo stack. The project governance and infrastructure, however, will look a lot like MeeGo. According to Imad Sousou, the director of Intel’s Open Source Technology Center, and head of the MeeGo project: “in the new project, a lot of things will be the same as they were in the MeeGo project”. We also know is that the primary APIs for 3rd party developers are targeting HTML5 and WAC environments. WAC stands for Wholesale Applications Community, a set of APIs for building and delivering rich HTML5 applications, based on APIs from JIL (Joint Innovation Labs) and BONDI (a platform specified by the now-defunct Open Mobile Terminal Platform, OMTP). The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), are also set to be a key part of the platform. We can infer two things from this: Qt will be taking a back seat in Tizen, if it is part of the platform at all, and it appears that SLP will be the basis of the Tizen platform. One thing which has not changed from MeeGo is the wide range of participants being targeted by the project. At the moment, the target audience can best be summarised as “everyone”. Tizen is aimed at platform developers, integrators, vendors, application developers, and mobile enthusiasts. That’s a very wide range of target audiences, each with different needs and expectations. Not knowing your target customer is a surefire way to throw money down the drain. Challenges, challenges, challenges Tizen’s main difficulties at this point can be broken into three groups. First, there will inevitably be teething problems between the project founders. The fact that Samsung have not yet mentioned Tizen in any press releases or announcements, and the lack of new information coming from Intel representatives since the launch announcement, suggests that there may be some communication issues to be worked out in the relationship. In fact, at this point it looks like the active partners have not yet agreed on what will and will not go into the platform. Intel and Samsung will have to work hard to overcome the cultural dissonance which is inevitable given the very different corporate DNA. On top of this, unless something changes soon, there could be a major mismatch between the reality of working with Tizen and the public positioning of the project. The project isn’t yet open for business, and when it is, it will only be useful for a small subset of its target market. If it were a new project, they might get away with it. But with the legacy of MeeGo, Moblin and Maemo, disappointing early adopters could be a very dangerous thing to do for Intel and Samsung. Getting the project governance and community dynamics right from the start is vital to learning from the mistakes of MeeGo and Moblin. Beyond the community, there are question-marks over Tizen’s potential to make an impact in the industry. Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility, not just a patent portfolio play, has created a disturbance in the force around the Android universe. Samsung does not want to find itself competing with Google at the same as they are dependent on them for their smartphone platform. This creates an opportunity for Tizen which it is too immature to exploit. For third party developers, concentrating on HTML5 is great. But will there be a demand for a native API also? And if so, will Tizen be capable of providing the kind of unified developer experience you get on iOS or Android? It will be interesting to see if Intel and Samsung manage to get substantial support from other ARM vendors. As long as Intel are seen as the main custodians of the project, that seems unlikely. It will also be interesting to see the effect which Nokia’s first Windows Phone based devices, due to be announced at the end of October, will have on the project. The main challenge for the Tizen partners will be getting devices to market. The key constituency for the change, vendors who were committed to MeeGo before, appear to have been neglected during the announcement. Intel and Samsung need vendors to adapt the platform to sell more chips, to give breadth to the ecosystem around the project, and to give credibility in the industry that this is not a party of two. The Long Road Ahead To succeed and make a space for itself in the mobile ecosystem, execution will need to be flawless on Tizen. If the internal bickering which dogged MeeGo rears its head again, if the initial release of the platform does not meet vendor and community expectations in terms of functionality and quality, or if there is an 18 month wait for well integrated finished products running Tizen, then the project may not have a second chance to make good. Tizen seems set to be another victim of misaligned incentives across several industry partners. Samsung is bringing SLP to the “standards” table simply to find a new home for it, now that LiMo is winding down. Intel is seeking another marriage of convenience, trying to tempt a major OEM to ship significant x86 chip volumes. – Dave [Dave Neary is a regular columnist at VisionMobile writing on how companies can work more effectively with open source community projects. Dave is the founder of Neary Consulting and  has also been an active member of the GIMP, GNOME, OpenWengo, Maemo and MeeGo communities, with over 10 years of experience in open source community issues. He can be contacted at dave (at) neary-consulting (dot) com] #meego #mobileplatform #comicstrip #tizen #nokia #opensource #intel #samsung

[Apple and Google have locked app discovery and distribution within their app stores. VisionMobile’s Andreas Constantinou explains how Facebook is using the web to disintermediate Apple/Google and why the web needs a new leader]. The platform duopoly. In just the space of 3 years, the mobile platforms landscape has changed from an election race to an oligarchy. The network effects at the heart of the Apple and Google business models have created formidable barriers to entry. The growth in device shipments and apps created seems to continue a relentless climb, showing no signs of developer fatigue or consumer segment saturation as we discussed in our earlier analysis. Beyond the duopolists, competitors have been forced to jump from their burning platform into a chasm of uncertainty or to give up altogether. The Apple/Google duopolists are now behaving like proper autocrats. Apple is imposing a 30% revenue share on all in-app payments. Google is keeping Android Market and Motorola patents for the exclusive use of its protégées. The duopolists have been able to run such a tight game by locking together four elements: development, discovery, distribution and monetisation. That is, you can only discover, download and pay for Apple apps through the App Store. Plus development happens through Apple tools only. Google is equally fanatic in controlling development, discovery, distribution and monetization, but is more open to affiliates – for example it allows Sony Ercisson and Vodafone to run their own branded shop within Android Market. The results are measurable: Over 65% of Apple and Android users discover games via the native app stores, according to Nielsen. Web discovery kills distribution With the duopolists amassing so much control, other industry players are getting uneasy. Amazon is creating its own Android tablets and own app store to circumvent Google’s control points. Facebook has shed its Flash dependency and is working on project Spartan – believed to be an app store for HTML-based mobile web apps – that will circumvent Apple/Google app stores. In the mobile world app distribution is locked to the platform, discovery is still a bottleneck due to the abundance of 100,000s of apps. Developers and media brands alike will pay dearly whoever can put their app in front of the right consumers and help that app get “discovered”. This is similar to the desktop web where distribution is commodity, but discovery is still king due to information abundance, which is what makes search such a lucrative business. This is where HTML and the web come in. HTML implies browser-based access and browsers are the only de-facto installed runtime on all handsets that is not bound to any proprietary ecosystem. HTML and browsers are being used to bypass distribution silos. As such, HTML is being promoted not as a platform (i.e. apps), and neither as a technology (i.e. APIs), as we argued in our recent report. HTML is being promoted as a business model. Facebook is using the web (in effect browsers) to help users discover Facebook apps and bypass proprietary Apple/Google distribution silos. Facebook is using discovery to kill distribution. Web purists will argue that the mobile web will always stay open. But we know this is not the case on the web where social networks (Facebook, Twitter) have built silo’d mega-portals which you can only access through carefully crafted, ajar APIs. Similarly, you can expect Facebook to restrict access to mobile Facebook apps to its own mobile web store, much like how Google can eventually restrict Chrome apps to be only discoverable through the Chrome web store. And here you have it: web will be the new closed. Back to square one. Mobile Web as the 4th horse There are many benefactors or sponsors of the mobile web evolution and they are all in to help drive their core business. Facebook is expected to use the mobile web as a development, discovery and distribution platform. Qualcomm is pushing the web to drive browser sophistication and help sell more smartphone chipsets with web-acceleration smarts. Apple is pushing the web because it wants to have the most “street-compliant” web browser. Google is pushing the boundaries of browser sophistication so that it can auction smarter, more lucrative ad formats across more eyeballs. Facebook and Google are leading web discovery through social discovery and mobile search. Telcos are hoping their own web-based app stores will compel users to switch away from Apple/Google lock-in to a buy-once-use-everywhere app concept. But there’s a paradox here: the mobile web platform has many benefactors but no leader. Everyone is promoting the mobile web as a business model, i.e. to indirectly drive their core business or benefit from free PR and implicit goodwill. But no one is promoting the web as a platform. The mobile web as a platform has no leader, no general to command the troops, no governor to set the rules. It’s a headless platform. This presents an unprecedented opportunity for the next challenger to the Apple/Google duopoly. We believe that the next player with complete metal-to-cloud consumer ambitions will use the mobile web as a platform. Such a choice has many benefits; firstly a mobile web platform offers access to “virgin” segments of web developers who are new to mobile; secondly it comes will many billions of dollars of free developer marketing – already in our measurements of developer mindshare (see our Developer Economics 2011 report), the mobile web comes 3rd after Android, iOS platforms; thirdly, it is a kind of patent haven since web technologies are in the public domain and not behind corporate legal walls; and finally because it allows content providers and brands to get on board from day one with their legacy web content. The mobile web is waiting for a new leader. – Andreas You should follow me on Twitter #google #Apple #html5 #mobileweb #appstores

[Many analysts have speculated on the strength of mobile ecosystems based on the size and download traffic of app stores. But is this economically sound? Business Analyst Stijn Schuermans quantifies the network effects behind the Apple and Google ecosystems and the market barriers they have built.] The holy grail in business is to create a product that sells itself, a momentum that automatically drives the business forward and that at the same time raises high barriers for competition. In the mobile domain, Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS are seen as such holy grails. Much has been written about the power of ecosystems. The race for large app stores with hundreds of thousands of apps has caused a lot of speculation about who the winners will be. But how powerful are those app store assets in reality? Our analysis shows that Apple and Google have indeed managed to create an ecosystem that shows significant network effects. Developers and mobile phone users move in lock-step to create more and more value for each other. Windows Phone, Blackberry and Symbian on the other hand have not succeeded in starting up such network effects. Their sales remains dominated by other events. The following two graphs show the relationship between the number of apps available on particular platforms at a particular point in time, and the number of devices shipped for that platform in the quarter just preceding it. The number of apps available can be considered a metric for how attractive a platform is for developers. Device shipments  is likewise a measure of the attractiveness of a platform for its users. As time progresses, we move along each line towards the right. For Android and Apple iOS, there is a surprisingly strong correlation between device shipments and amount of apps available. On a scale of 0 to 1, with 1 being a perfect straight line, correlation coefficients of 0,96 and 0,97 respectively indicate a very tight match. The two measures move so well together that there is no doubt that they are interdependent. This is a clear and unambiguous illustration of the strong network effects that are in play in these platforms. As more devices are sold, the platform becomes more attractive to developers, who subsequently write more applications, hoping to reach a large user base. Likewise, as more applications become available, the platform gains more functionality for users, who will then be more inclined to buy a mobile phone that supports these apps. This becomes a virtuous cycle, a positive feedback loop which is so strong that it dominates all other aspects that might affect sales or app development, like promotions and advertisements, or the coolness of a particular technology for developers. So far, there doesn’t seem to be an effect of diminishing returns. That is, an increase in the number of apps will drive an increase in the number of devices shipped, and vice versa, at a constant rate. You might expect that at a certain point, once for example half a million apps become available, the needs of most users would be covered. How many more QuadroPop of Hold ’em poker clones will people need? However, this point apparently is not yet reached. We will leave the speculations about what that implies about the saturation of the targeted user segments to the reader. Another interesting observation is that the relative rate of app versus devices growth is different for iOS and for Android. The data indicates that to persuade developers to write a thousand extra apps, 220.000 Android devices have to be additionally shipped each quarter versus only 45.000 Apple devices. This implies that users and developers (apps) assign a different level of value to each other depending on the platform they use. Several tidbits of information support this last hypothesis. The Android market store has much more free applications available relative to Apple’s App Store. The difference is even larger in download behavior. Android users seem to spend less money on apps as well as other services like data plans. Two thirds of the mobile add revenue for Google actually comes from Apple devices, which again suggests that Apple users are more likely to use internet on their phones (and pay for the data plan). The fact that Android users spend less money would, in a very direct way, make Android users less attractive to app developers. Hence, reading the graph ‘in reverse’ (with axes switched), the amount of extra users needed to entice an Android developer to write an extra app – the “marginal users per developer” – is higher (compensating for their lower spending), explaining the difference in slope. So what about the other smartphone platforms out there, like Blackberry, Windows Phone or Nokia’s Symbian? Here we see another story unfolding altogether. These platforms have not succeeded in kick-starting or sustaining significant network effects. While some traction in app development has been achieved, this has not had the same overwhelming influence on shipments or vice versa. Since network effects don’t dominate as in the case of Android and iOS, other factors come to the foreground. For Nokia, this is the deal with Microsoft, where Symbian became a victim of Microsoft’s ambition to become Nokia’s exclusive smartphone OS provider, leading to its accelerated demise. BlackBerry’s lack of innovation in an environment where messaging (its key selling point) has become a commodity is causing it to steadily lose ground. While both of them might have benefited from network effects earlier in their history, they are now failing to sustain there ecosystems and losing the race for customers as a result. Windows Phone is the most recent challenger. Microsoft has managed to convince developers to start writing software for the Windows phone platform, obviously trying to kick-start the network effect process, but device sales have not (yet) followed. Network effects are a formidable barrier to entry. Once an ecosystem is well established, it is extremely difficult to lure participants away from it to competing platforms (breaking its back), or to stop its momentum. So far, despite similar efforts from its competitors, only Apple with iOS and Google with Android have been able to get the flywheel going. For these two platforms, the momentum will drive both consumer sales and developer enthusiasm with little extra investment needed. We might see diminishing returns effects in the future, but for now the feedback loop is going as strong as ever. Their rivals seem condemned to a futile catch-up race. – Stijn follow us on twitter: @visionmobile [Want something more than a glimpse into the complex world of apps and platforms? Check out our Software Economics seminar] #ios #ovi #appstore #symbian #Android #windowsphone #Blackberry

[In a game of ecosystems, it it possible to bend the rules? Research Director Andreas Constantinou examines the few technologies that can bring the Android ecosystem on non-Android devices – compatibility layers, virtualisation or emulators – and their impact in a post-‘Googlerola’ world] A game of ecosystems The mobile industry in 2011 is an industry ruled by ecosystems. The Android and iOS platforms are jostling for the top spot in terms of number of applications and developer mindshare. Earlier this year, Nokia had to jump from a burning platform (its in-house Symbian OS) into an ocean of uncertainty (Microsoft’s Windows Phone).  MeeGo has to find foster parents, as both Nokia and Intel (its founders) seemed unable to gather enough momentum. Nokia is re-launching its effort at building the Qt ecosystem through a more ‘open’ platform governance model. Qualcomm is trying to rebuild loyalty in BREW MP by investing in online marketing. The platforms today are fighting for who can build the biggest, most active and most sustainable developer ecosystem. What determines the success of a platform? We know it’s the wealth of its ecosystem (lets call it developer ‘mindshare‘) as well as its consumer reach (the ‘market share’). It’s also patents, as these legal instruments can create not just barriers to entry (see how Apple barred Samsung tablet), but also market costs (see how HTC, Acer and Viewsonic are paying patent royalties to Microsoft). Therefore, ecosystem wars are fought on three fronts: mindshare, market share and patents. Let’s focus on developer mindshare. Developers are extremely critical as ‘platform consumers’. Anyone who has tried to recruit developers through traditional outbound marketing has failed. Developer marketing is about evangelising developers to a higher cause, more like crafting a software-centric religion – what can be called “religion engineering” (see evidence here on Apple as a religion). More importantly, building developer mindshare is extremely costly and tricky – you need software marketing know-how to execute successfully. Which is why many ecosystem-building efforts, including Java ME, Symbian, MeeGo and Palm OS 5, have failed. Crashing the party Developer marketing needs a very different toolbox and billions of investment; unless you can crash the party. Two types of solutions exist that allow OEMs to piggy-back the Android ecosystem on non-Android devices: compatibility layers from Myriad, OpenMobile and virtualisation technologies from OK Labs, Red Bend, and VMWare. RIM has also been using an emulator approach to bring Android apps on QNX. Myriad (www.myriadgroup.com) (SIX Symbol: MYRN). is a mobile technology company that offers browsers through to messaging infrastructure, with mobile software deployed in more than 2.2 billion mobile handsets. Based on the earlier acquisition of Esmertec (the early Google partner on the Java virtual machine) Myriad offers an Android emulator it calls Alien Dalvik. Launched in February 2011, the emulator allows “thousands of Android apps” to run on non-Android platforms like MeeGo. Myriad claims that once the APK files are repackaged for Alien Dalvik, applications can run unmodified and with no loss of performance. The company is focused on making its emulator compatible with popular apps like Dropbox, IMDB and Evernote, presumably focused at OEMs that want to bring the out of box apps experience on proprietary platforms. OpenMobile (www.openmobileww.com) is a Massachusets-based company founded in 2010. The company is privately funded and led by Nachi Junankar, a serial entrepreneur, and Bob Angelo, a software veteran who, as COO of Phoenix Technologies, led the team that opened up the clone business and later created the PC BIOS. OpenMobile has developed an Application Compatibility Layer (ACL) that claims to bring all 250,000 Android apps to non-Android device. The ACL is available for MeeGo (webOS and Windows support are in the pipeline), and claims 100% compatibility as “all Android Apps run exactly as they do on an Android device”. Moreover, OpenMobile says that app developers don’t have to modify, recompile or repackage their Android apps to run under ACL.  OpenMobile doesn’t use virtualisation or emulation, but integrates the Android application runtime into the native OS and supports Android API Level 4 or higher, as well as NDK 6 or higher. The alternative approach to bringing Android apps on non-Android devices is to use a virtualisation technology from Red Bend, OK Labs or VMWare (see our earlier analysis of virtualisation technologies). Virtualisation allows the Android OS (including the apps ecosystem) to run in sandbox, completely isolated and independent of any other platform (including OEM proprietary OS). Like on desktop virtualisation, the apps from both platforms can surface on the same menu, so that virtualisation remains transparent to the user. Challenges and the new shape of Googlerola Can an OEM crash the Android party? Yes, but only with a bodyguard. We suspect that the above vendors will be facing two primary challenges that they‘ll need to muscle their way through. Firstly, keeping in sync with the Android upstream changes is no small task, as new Android (including NDK) APIs have to be integrated into the target platforms and Google introduces API changes every two months on average. Secondly, OEMs who use an Android compatibility layer will also be exposed to potential patent lawsuits. Now getting access to an Android Insurance Policy (see our Googlerola article) from Google will also mean complying with Google’s tight software/hardware specs. The one region which seems opportune for Android-compatible technologies is China, where telcos and OEMs have long been trying to develop their own OS flavour, but have been stuck with antiquated OS versions as they haven’t been able to keep up with Android upstream. So can an OEM crash the Android party? Yes, but you‘ll need some pretty good bodyguards to escort you in. – Andreas you should follow me on Twitter #virtualization #rim #openmobile #myriadgroup #Android

A recent rumor placed the current value of HP’s webOS at hundreds of millions of dollars, but in all likelihood less than the $1.2 billion the company paid for Palm Inc in 2010. Would they settle for even less? Here’s our second comic strip – hope you like it! #comicstrip #hp #webos

[Google’s pending acquisition of Motorola creates a dilemma: Google must choose between staying true to its core business or reshaping into the new vertical giant that will challenge Apple at its own game. Research Director Andreas Constantinou discusses Google’s dilemma and why both outcomes stand to radically change the rules of the Android Empire] Google’s forthcoming acquisition of Motorola for $12.5B has been largely dubbed a patent deal. And it is. But beyond the patents, Google faces a fundamental dilemma for its core business, and one that will determine the future of the Android Empire. In mid-August Google announced it intends to buy Motorola Mobility Holdings (MMI), which includes the mobile phone, set top box and DVR businesses, for $12.5B. The true cost to Google is much less though, given that MMI has cash and accrued tax benefits. The move has seen an unprecedented amount of analysis in the blogosphere, with a fair amount of guesswork as to what Google’s motivations were in buying a hardware company. We believe that Motorola’s acquisition is not just about patents. The move marks a major turning point in how Google runs the Android Empire. Let’s see why. The post-Motorola dilemma We believe that the Motorola acquisition was sold to the Google board as a patent deal, with the hardware business being an unwanted but inseparable part of the package. Now Google faces a fundamental dilemma. The combination of Google and Motorola is like building a skyscraper in the middle of the ocean; the two companies are built on very different business models. Google is a profitable, 28,000-strong direct marketing company. Google uses Android as a platform with which to commoditise mobile handsets, flatten network access and reach billions more consumer eyeballs. Motorola, on the other hand, is an unprofitable, 19,000-strong hardware company, one that uses Android as a ticket to sell more hardware to more consumers and more carriers in the form of smartphones. We have no doubt that Google will divest a large part of the Motorola business. A hardware business would not help Google sell more ads, i.e. drive its core business. Motorola accounts for less than 10% of Android devices sold in Q2 2011 – third after Samsung and HTC who shipped 18 million and 11 million Android devices, respectively, according to data from Gartner and Arete. By fully incorporating Motorola, Google would be just nudging forward Android device sales, while at the same time upsetting all of its major OEM partners. In other words, incorporating Motorola would have the same market impact as buying a local network carrier. The question then is which parts of Motorola Google plans to keep, besides the patents. This presents a major strategy dilemma for Google – and one whose outcome will have fundamental impact on how Google runs the Android Empire. Android as a software autocracy Motorola’s IPR portfolio is substantial: 15,000 wireless patents, another 6,200 pending, and 3,000 granted or pending patents in the Home division, according to Arete research. More importantly, Motorola has a host of essential (blocking) patents around GSM. These patents buy an Android Insurance Policy that Google can issue to “compliant” OEMs that are intended to protect these OEMs from “patent taxes” levied by Microsoft, Nokia and others. This Insurance Policy is essential to protect the vast Android handset population from stalling its so-far phenomenal growth. At the same time, this insurance policy is not sufficient if Apple does attack the mid-priced smartphone segment, as it is rumoured to do. Android has been built on very shaky legal grounds, heavily “borrowing” from the Java language, the Java SE APIs and integrating with copious amounts of GPL-licensed code. Contrast that with how iOS, Symbian and Windows Phone platforms were built from scratch with very little inbound software licensing above the kernel. In other words, Google is buying Motorola to remedy the lack of IP strategy that threatens to undo 5 years of software craftsmanship. Google is paying for its past sins. Moreover, the Motorola patent portfolio is comparable to Nokia’s, which not only buys Google insurance but puts Apple and Microsoft on the defensive – see the outcome of the Apple-Nokia patent dispute in which Apple has to pay Nokia 8 EUR per iPhone sold in the future, in addition to a substantial one-off payment. But beyond the Android Insurance Policy, Google is getting something much more important: it strengthens the Android software dictatorship. As we discussed here and here Google licenses the Android platform under an open source license but uses several control points to incentivise OEMs to stick to a tight software implementation (and one that goes way beyond APIs). Google’s Schmidt explains eloquently how “OEMs feel like they have a choice” with how they implement Android  [see video segment starting at 28m 50s] but in fact, they have to comply with Google’s requirements as they need G’s permission to add Android market and use the relevant trademarks on their handsets. What patents buy by extension is practically a software autocracy; Google is now going to extend its Android Insurance Policy only to compliant OEMs. This means that if an OEM doesn’t follow Google’s precise software requirements, they will be prey to patent taxes by Google competitors. This now makes it untenable for an OEM to not pass Google’s Android certification. Android as an Experience Licensing business Besides software, there is a great deal of value that Google can leverage from Motorola. But that means a substantial change to Google’s business model. Google’s business strategy is based on the economics of complements – that is, if you want to sell more cars, you need to lower the price of gas. In Google’s case, if you want to sell more ads, you need to lower the prices of smartphones (Android), commoditise the networks (GTalk, Google Voice) and advance the state of web browsers (Chrome). Notice how everything complementary to Google’s business is “open”, while everything core to Google’s business is closed (Adwords, Android Market, Google Maps) The Google strategy is to make Android smartphones as ubiquitous and as cheap as possible, with the lowest possible barriers to entry for OEMs and ODMs, so that the last citizen on Earth can be exposed to Google inventory. However, the trouble with Android is that it has turned into a price-driven battlefield. The vast majority of devices compromise on the industry design and experience with cheap me-too plastics and poorly tested OEM apps and UI overlay. So far Android has managed to grow impressively fast as most devices are well below the iPhone and iPad price points. But with Apple rumoured to be releasing a lower-priced phone design, we expect Google’s empire of Android me-too clones to be challenged by the integrated, consistent and entwined experience that Apple offers. This is where Motorola comes in. To counter Apple mid-priced phones, Google needs to tightly define and control the experience delivered on OEM licensee phones. In this scenario, Google would use Motorola’s design teams to develop a complete “reference experience” that encompasses industrial design, hardware specs, complete software specs, marketing specs, pricing norms and of course the Google app suite. The Android open source “take it and fork it” mantra becomes much closer to a contractually enforced “experience licensing” business, in which OEMs that choose Android can compete with Apple on the same level, and get guaranteed margins through Google’s contractually-specified boundaries for Android handsets. How are OEMs going to differentiate you ask? Through regional marketing deals, retailer agreements and pre-loads with local service providers that deliver an additional rev share. We envisage Android’s Experience Licensing scenario as borrowing heavily from the franchise business model widely practiced in the retail industry.  In franchise stores, the experience is as tightly controlled as the products, the marketing strategy and the pricing policy. In other words, Experience Licensing is about running the Android Empire with Apple’s grip. To accomplish this strategy, Google needs to seed the market with “Hero” devices that epitomize the Android experience. Here is where Google can leverage on Motorola’s device production assets. A quick backgrounder: so far, Google has designed Android to offer three types of handset projects: Experience handsets (based on Google specs and branding), Partner handsets (compliant with Google’s Android specs, but with no Google involvement or branding) and DIY handsets (take the source code and fork it, but you ‘re on your own, e.g. China Mobile’s oPhone). The purpose of Experience handsets is to advance the state of the platform, by working closely with 2 pre-selected OEMs 6-9 months prior to the public release of the codebase under an open source license. Experience handsets (see full list here) are run under tight Google control and co-marketed by both Google and the OEM. Google would be adding “Hero” handsets to the existing three tiers, which delivers two benefits. Firstly, it allows Google to divide and conquer among OEMs without giving anyone “special privileges” or know how – it is rumoured for example that Google has been unhappy with the know-how HTC developed as a result of their long-standing relationship in the early Android days which has given HTC the fastest time-to-market for handsets based on the public codebase (note how HTC is no longer involved in Experience handsets for some time). Secondly, it allows Google to better compete for carrier deals with Apple, by offering carriers exclusive access to the latest and best Android features on Motorola hardware. As we know, carriers die for exclusives, so rather than run Motorola device business at cost, Google can just keep the crown jewel features for carrier-exclusives from Motorola. Redefining how Google runs the Android Empire The purchase of Motorola makes Google the emperor of the Android Empire. Whichever parts of Motorola Google decides to keep, the laws of the Empire would be irreversibly changed. The how depends on which scenario Google opts for. 1. In the software dictatorship scenario (which we take as the default option), Google would make it untenable for OEMs not to follow its software specifications to the letter or to fork Android. Google stays true to its core ad business and divests everything apart from patents to a Taiwanese OEM wanting to break into the North America market. 2. In the Experience Licensing scenario, Google keeps the hardware design and device production capabilities to allow Android to compete head-to-head on every Apple price points, both the current high-end iPhone/iPad pricing and the rumoured mid-tier pricing. Here Google would have to take a hit on its cash flows and profitability by putting its hand deep in its pocket (both in terms of CAPEX and OPEX) to more favourably compete with Apple. Irrespective of Google’s mobile plans, the Motorola acquisition offers the search giant a means to control the hardware and software make up of set-top boxes and offer a similar licensing program to Android TV licensees. We know that the first attempt at Android TV failed because there was very little premium content as content producers were concerned with DRM and content security. By controlling the hardware and software specs for Android TV, Google could bring the content producers back on board. Historically, Apple has been fundamental to the success of Android. As it turns out, it is going to fundamentally challenge the Android business. Stephen Elop noted in June 2011 that “Apple created the conditions necessary for Android”, by incentivizing carriers and OEMs to offer iPhone-killers at less than profit-killing prices. Now Apple is creating the conditions necessary to challenge Android’s growth, by milking Android OEMs for patent taxes and challenging the Android clone empire with unique product experiences at more price points. Whatever route Google chooses to take, it will fundamentally change the rules of the Android Empire. – Andreas you should follow me on Twitter: @andreascon [Mystified by the intricacies of Google’s  Android strategy? Check out our Android Game Plan workshop!] #Android #handsetmanufacturer #iphone #motorola

[Much has been said about open source projects – and open source platforms are now powering an ever-increasing share of the mobile market. But what is “open” and how can you measure openness? As part of our new research report (free download), VisionMobile Research Partner Liz Laffan introduces the Open Governance Index – a new approach to measuring the “openness” of software projects, from Android to WebKit] Update: We have been amazed by the amount of interest to our Open Governance Index (OGI) report that we published just over two weeks ago. Our report was covered in mainstream media across Wired, ZDnet, PCPro, Gizmodo, ARS Technica, BGR, Zeit Online and ReadWrite Mobile. Our intention was to start a debate around ‘what’ openness is, ‘how’ it can be measured and ‘why’ it is important – and we certainly got the ball rolling! Openness = governance We at VisionMobile have been researching, investigating and helping to educate the industry about open source for the past five years.  In this time open source software has been transformed from geekware to business as usual. Much has been written and debated regarding open source licenses – from the early days of the GPL license to the modern days of the Android platform. Despite the widespread use of open source, from Android to WebKit, there is one very important aspect that has been neglected: openness and how to measure it. Openness goes far beyond the open source license terms and into what is termed Governance. While licenses determine the rights to use, copy and modify, governance determines the right to gain visibility, to influence and to create derivatives of a project, whether in the form of spin-offs, applications or devices. And while licenses apply to the source code, governance applies to the project or platform.  More importantly, the governance model describes the control points used in an open source project like Android, Qt or WebKit, and is a key determinant in the success or failure of a platform. The governance model used by an open source project encapsulates all the hard questions. Who decides on the project roadmap? How transparent are the decision-making processes? Can anyone follow the discussions and meetings taking place in the community? Can anyone create derivatives based on the project? What compliance requirements are there for creating derivative spin-offs, applications or devices, and how are these requirements enforced?  It is governance that determines who has influence and control over the project or platform – beyond what is legally required in the open source license. In today’s world of commercially-led mobile open source projects, it is not enough to understand the open source license used by a project. It is the governance model that makes the difference between an “open” and a “closed” project. Measuring openness Our research (free copy of full report here) showcases eight mobile open source projects: Android, MeeGo, Linux, Qt, WebKit, Mozilla, Eclipse and Symbian.  We selected these projects based on breadth of coverage; we picked both successful (Android) and unsuccessful projects (Symbian); both single-sponsor (Qt) and multi-sponsor projects (Eclipse); and both projects based on meritocracy (Linux) and membership status (Eclipse). All of these are open source projects, whether platforms (Android, MeeGo, Qt, Symbian) or engines (Linux kernel, WebKit) or multi-project initiatives with a single, uniform governance. We appreciate that these projects are unique in many ways but they are all ultimately open source projects and to that extent our governance measures can be applied to them all equally. For example all of these projects have decision-making groups and processes that are directly comparable. In the Open Governance Index we attempted to document who these decision-makers are, how they operate, what processes are used to determine project decisions and how easily is to influence these project decisions. Our research, carried out over a six-month period, included analysis of these popular open source projects, through discussions with community leaders, project representatives, academics and open source scholars. This research was partially funded by webinos, an EU-funded project under the EU FP7 programme, aiming to deliver a platform for web applications across mobile, PC, home media (TV) and in-car devices. We quantified governance by introducing the Open Governance Index, a measure of open source project “openness”. The Index comprises thirteen metrics across the four areas of governance: 1. Access: availability of the latest source code, developer support mechanisms, public roadmap, and transparency of decision-making 2. Development: the ability of developers to influence the content and direction of the project 3. Derivatives: the ability for developers to create and distribute derivatives of the source code in the form of spin-off projects, handsets or applications. 4. Community: a community structure that does not discriminate between developers The Open Governance Index quantifies a project’s openness, in terms of transparency, decision-making, reuse and community structure. Does openness warrant success? But what is it that makes an open source project successful? Why do some projects become an immediate success, while others barely get off the ground before crashing and burning? We know that just like commercial ventures, open source projects have different cultures and drivers – but we do believe that you should be able to measure the way that open source projects interact with the community of users and contributors that they build up around themselves. Our research suggests that platforms that are most open will be most successful in the long-term. Eclipse, Linux, WebKit and Mozilla each testify to this.  In terms of openness, Eclipse is by far the most open platform across access, development, derivatives and community attributes of governance.  It is closely followed by Linux and WebKit, and then Mozilla, MeeGo, Symbian and Qt. Seven of the eight platforms reviewed fell within 30 percentage points of each other in the Open Governance Index. Moreover, our research identified certain attributes that successful open source projects have.  These attributes are timely access to source code, strong developer tools, process transparency, accessibility to contributing code, and accessibility to becoming a committer.  Equal and fair treatment of developers – “meritocracy” – has become the norm, and is expected by developers with regard to their involvement in open source projects. The Android Paradox We found Android to be the most “closed” open source project. In the Open Governance Index, Android scores low with regard to timely access to source code in that the platform does not provide source code to all developers at the same time; it clearly prioritises access to specific developer groups or organisations and has acknowledged this with the delayed release of Honeycomb. Additionally Android scores low with regard to access to developer support mechanisms, publicly available roadmap, transparent decision-making processes, transparency of code contributions process, accessibility to become a committer (in that external parties cannot ‘commit’ code to the project) and constraints regarding go-to-market channels. Android ranks as the most closed project, with an Open Governance Index of 23%, yet at the same time is one of the most successful projects in the history of open source. Is Android proof that open governance is not needed to warrant success in an open source project? Android’s success may have little to do with the open source licensing of its public codebase. Android would not have risen to its current ubiquity were it not for Google’s financial muscle and famed engineering team. More importantly, Google has made Android available at zero cost, since Google’s core business is not software or search, but driving eyeballs to ads. As is now well understood, Google’s strategy has been to subsidise Android such that it can deliver cheap handsets and low-cost wireless Internet access in order to drive more eyeballs to Google’s ad inventory. Equally importantly, Android would not have risen were it not for the billions of dollars that OEMs and network operators poured into Android in order to compete with Apple’s iconic devices. As Stephen Elop, Nokia’s CEO, said in June,2011, “Apple created the conditions necessary for Android”. Moreover, our findings suggest that Android would be successful regardless of whether it is an open source project or not, to the extent that the vast majority of developers working on the project (the platform itself) are actually Google employees. Evolving the Open Governance Index Having published the report, we aim to continue the discussion on governance, to refine our criteria even further and to make the OGI measure as meaningful as possible for the open source community. One of the first suggestions has been with regard to having a time dimension to the criteria i.e. does openness change over time. Mature open source projects such as Eclipse, Linux and WebKit that have stood the test of time, score quite highly with regard to openness of governance. But this has not always been the case. For example consider the following. Apple forked KHTML to create WebKit in the early 2000’s, releasing the first WebKit open source project in 2005 but with reviewer and commit rights restricted to Apple personnel only which effectively sidelined the KDE community. In 2007 however Apple reversed this decision allowing allow non-Apple developers to have full commit access to the WebKit source code version control system. This shows that openness can and does change over the project lifecycle. Our vision for the Open Governance Index is to for it to be a robust, and as much as is possible, an objective measure of Governance for open source projects. We believe that this is necessary such that users and contributors to open source projects, including commercial entities, understand the means by which they can, or cannot, influence the direction and content of the project. Download the full report for an in-depth analysis of the openness of Android, MeeGo, Linux, Qt, WebKit, Mozilla, Eclipse and Symbian. Drop us a line and tell us what you think. – Liz Addendum – Is copyleft more or less open? We awarded a higher score to those licenses that are permissive and not copyleft licenses. Firstly it should be noted that all the licenses used by the eight mobile open source projects are Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved and meet the Open Source Initiative Definition, which provides for free redistribution of source code, access to source code and ability to create derived works amongst other requirements. We believe that the OSI is the appropriate arbiter of the appropriate Open Source License definition and all of the licenses used by the open source projects researched in this report meet this definition of being ‘open’. However we also believe that from a commercial viewpoint there is still some concern about using code that is under a copyleft license – our experience of working with mobile software development organisations confirms this. Our findings suggest that organisations will be more comfortable using permissive licenses which do not mandate copyleft requirements and we reflect this in our criteria and scoring. We are happy to continue debating these findings further with the community. For example it has been suggested that the problem here is not with copyleft licenses but with the business model used by those organisations. Be that as it may, our experience is that this concern is still a valid one being expressed by many organisations, especially in the mobile device domain. Finally we had a methodology typo which unfortunately survived the proof reading: assigning a bonus to “copyright assignment”. We fully acknowledge that copyright assignment is unnecessary – indeed we state this in our analysis of Qt whereby we acknowledge copyright assignment as inappropriate and a heavy-handed requirement. [Liz Laffan is a Research Partner at VisionMobile. Liz has been working in the telecoms and mobile industry for over 20 years, with large telco organisations, start-up technology ventures, software development and licensing firms.  Liz’s interests lie in open source software governance and licensing and in particular how best can commercial organisations interact with open source projects.  She can be reached at liz [at] visionmobile.com] #meego #eclipse #qt #opensource #webkit #linux #symbian #Android #mozilla

[The term ‘platform’ is used for describing things as diverse as social networks, web browsers, on-line retailers and open source software. VisionMobile Research Partner Michael Vakulenko delves into the platform economics to uncover why not all platforms are born equal.] Since different platforms types have very different origins and purpose, it is close to impossible to evolve one platform type to another. And while platforms can be compared in terms of adoption, direct comparisons of platforms of different types is like comparing oranges to apples.Platform typePurposePrimary audienceNetwork effectsExamplesSoftware platformSharing of software development costs and risksDevice makersNoneSymbian, BREWApplication platformConnecting app developers and users (and handset OEM in some cases)Developers– Users to developers – Users to users – Developers to developersAndroid, iOS, Windows PhoneCommunication platformFacilitating communication between usersUsers– Users to usersTelephone, fax, BlackBerry Messenger Software platforms A software platform is a common software stack that is used for developing multiple products. As such, software platforms are optimised for flexibility and sharing of development costs when building products based on the same technology foundations. The technology platform approach is also used in other industries such as the automotive or construction industries. Many open source projects have evolved into successful software platforms, such as Webkit, Apache and Linux operating system. Symbian is a characteristic example of a software platform. Symbian Ltd. was established by Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola in 1999 for the purpose of sharing the costs of building a mobile software operating system. The Symbian software stack was subsequently used by these handset makers as a basis for wide range of mobile devices introduced in the last decade. Symbian is still the most widely deployed mobile platform ever with over 480 million devices shipped up until Q2 2011. As a software platform, Symbian has been optimised for flexibility in customizations by handset makers and mobile operators. Symbian served its purpose quite well until Apple changed the basis for competition by introducing a different kind of a platform. Applications, developers and app stores suddenly became more important than serving OEM needs. Changing design focus of the platform proved to be impossible for Symbian and Nokia.  Changing the license terms to open source only  further sidetracked the platform. Application platforms Application platforms, often also referred to as computing platforms, are designed from the ground up for connecting two disjoint markets: users and application developers. Application platforms are a special case of so called two-sided networks, in which platform owners extract value by allowing members of disjoint markets to transact through the platform. Two-sided networks describe businesses as diverse as dating agencies (match.com), credit cards (VISA), stock exchanges (NYSE) and digital media formats (Blue-ray).Application platforms live and die on the applications built for these platforms. Users consume applications to satisfy a wide spectrum of needs, from word processing to killing time. Since applications are locked to the platform, users need to obtain the platform in order to benefit from applications. Microsoft Windows is a classic example of a successful application platform. Since application developers drive adoption of a application platform, the platform is only as successful as the developers who build apps for the platform. Even though the number of apps is frequently considered as an ultimate measure of application platform success, it’s really the long-term health and sustainability of the developer ecosystem that will determine if developer investment will sustain, grow or decline. Application compatibility is the key success factor for a application platform; applications must work unchanged on different variants and versions of the platform (imagine if Microsoft Office would only run on Dell computers). Raymond Chen’s blog on the New Old Thing offers a flavour of the lengths that Microsoft went into ensuring application compatibility. When a application platform reaches a critical mass of developers, applications and users, it starts to grow exponentially. This is because of network effects, i.e. a positive feedback loops between users and applications, users and users, and developers and developers. Applications attract users, which motivate developers to create more applications, which attract more users, which attract more developers, and so forth. From the end-user perspective each new application adds value to the platform. From an application developer perspective, a platform becomes more valuable with each and every new user. Apple iOS set a gold standard for a mobile application platform. It’s hardly surprising that iOS comes from a company with decades of experience in personal computing. iOS is end-to-end optimised for nurturing and reinforcing network effects between users and developers. With each of over 400,000 apps adding to the reasons to buy an iOS device, Apple reported all-time record revenue and earnings for Q2 2011. For now, Google’s Android is the only close competitor to iOS. Google comes from a background of advertising platforms. An advertising platform is also a special case of a two-sided network connecting two disjoint markets of on-line users and advertisers. It’s hardly a surprise that Android has been designed from the ground up as a free application platform, which is monetised by driving traffic to Google on-line advertising services. Communication platforms Communication platforms are designed to facilitate communication between people. Examples are telephone networks, email, fax, and social networks (Myspace). Communication platforms also exhibit network effects: Every new user makes the network more valuable for other users. BlackBerry has the history and DNA of a communication platform. It was originally designed to extend an email communication platform to the mobile domain. BlackBerry exploits network effects of the email platform and creates value on top of it by improving  the availability and usability of email communications. Once the BlackBerry email platform reached significant scale in 2005, RIM introduced a proprietary communication platform, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service. BBM is a proprietary instant messaging service that uses the BlackBerry PIN programed in the device to identify users. In other words, someone needs a BlackBerry device to join the social network formed around BBM. It’s like a members-only club for BlackBerry users. Because of the narrow focus on communication needs, the user-to-user network effects in the BlackBerry communication platform are weaker than those in iOS and Android. Moreover, the benefits of mobile email and mobile instant messaging are no longer exclusive to BlackBerry. Mobile email is used today by 80% of US phone subscribers, and multi-platform mobile messengers such as Whatsapp, Kik and KakaoTalk are quickly gaining in popularity, each amassing audiences of millions of users. So how does RIM remain competitive? RIM needs to evolve BlackBerry into an application platform. So far, the company has not been successful in achieving this goal. On the contrary, given the direction and speed of innovation of BlackBerry platform, RIM’s chances to achieve this goal looks less and less promising. Much like Symbian, changing platform focus on the fly proved to be extremely difficult for RIM. Moreover, replacing the legacy BlackBerry OS with the “high-performance” QNX operating system will not make much of a difference. It could even make things worse by making the platform even more fragmented and confusing developers with multiple development alternatives. Platforms are not born equal Mobile application platforms will always have significant advantages over software and communication platforms. Mobile application platforms exhibit multiple, self-reinforcing network effects, user lock-in and the ability to attract external investment. Nokia stood not only on a burning platform, but also on the wrong kind of a platform, trying to reinvent the Symbian software platform as an application platform. The self-reinforcing network effects of iOS and Android application platforms are much stronger than Nokia’s scale and distribution power. The stark contrast between the Q2 2011 Nokia and Apple quarterly results is excellent example of the power of application platforms. On the contrary, Windows Phone, Nokia’s only hope to get back into smartphone game, has all the characteristics of an application platform: from application compatibility to the steadfast commitment towards app developers. Application platforms are bread and butter for Microsoft. Yet, the jury is still out on whether Microsoft will be able to grow Windows Phone into a credible competitor to iOS and Android. It is very difficult to displace leading application platforms like iOS and Android which are protected by self-reinforcing network effects and user lock-in (think of firefighters trying to contain large-scale wildfires). It is not enough to be marginally better. To win, Windows Phone will need to offer users and developers something radically new, over and above the current leaders. Only time will tell if Microsoft will be able to achieve that by combining the resources of Skype, the partnership with Nokia and the relationship with Facebook. Platforms will continue to be a central theme in the evolution of mobile ecosystem. It will only become more interesting with the recent entry of Facebook (social platform) and Amazon (retailing platform) into the mobile scene. – Michael [Michael Vakulenko is a Research Partner at VisionMobile, where he focuses on mobile platform research. Michael has been working in the mobile industry for over 16 years, starting his career in wireless in Qualcomm. Michael has a broad experience across many aspects of the mobile industry, including smartphone ecosystems, mobile services, handset software, wireless chipsets and network infrastructure. He can be reached at michael [/at/] visionmobile.com] Want to know more about mobile platform strategies and economics? See our Software Economics in a Telecoms World, an executive, 360° seminar on how the telecoms industry is being disrupted by the new software economics. #ios #mobileplatforms #symbian #Android #windowsphone #Blackberry

We’re proud to present our latest infographic, The Mobile Platform Race, showcasing some of the most important findings and insights from our Developer Economics 2011 report (free download here). Developer Economics is the definitive report on mobile developers, apps and brands going mobile. Developer Economics was created by VisionMobile and sponsored by BlueVia. We hope you enjoy the infographic – and feel free to embed it in your own website. Comments welcome, as always. Feel free to copy the infographic and embed it in your website. 600 pixels wide version 760 pixels wide version 1000 pixels wide version [sociable_code] #ios #mobiledevelopers #java #mobileweb #symbian #Android #windowsphone #Blackberry

[Developers are currently the hottest property in the mobile industry. Tens of developer programs have sprung up, aiming to woo developers.  However, besides Apple, Google and perhaps Microsoft, other developer programs have had at best a lukewarm response. Guest author Gyanee Dewnarain investigates what makes developers tick and the faux-pas to avoid.] Have you been ramping up your developer marketing efforts lately with a view to attracting more developers to your programme? How are your efforts faring? Let’s have a look at what works and what does not. First and foremost – who to target? Before you set out on your quest, it is important to know who you are targeting. We have all come across the perennial cliché of a developer as being the unshaven geeky guy with long hair and sandals. This image is outdated: developers nowadays are a rapidly expanding community that includes software engineers (architects, implementers, discoverers, thinkers, inventors) within small, medium and large enterprises, hobbyists or indie developers (working on open source or proprietary software), high school kids aspiring to go to MIT, commissioned developers, brands developing  B2C apps, system integrators targeting B2B apps, investors funding mobile development and 100s of start-ups. Each developer segment has varying goals and incentives and the ways of engaging with them vary too. It pays to do your research first and understand who you are targeting and how to do so. However, irrespective of the segment you are targeting, there are a few key ingredients (so-called hygiene factors) that need to be in place in your developer program for the greatest chances of success. These hygiene factors are covered extensively in VisionMobile’s Developer Economics 2010 and 2011 reports. This post focuses more on developer marketing strategies and tactics. First Impressions Matter The first step in a developer marketing program is to create a solid first impression. Developers expect you to invest considerable effort in the way you present your tools, APIs and documentation to them as well as the way you present their applications to your customers. This is a competitive marketplace and if you want to stand any chance of getting noticed, your offering needs to stand out from the other developer programs which are vying for developers’ attention. It is equally very important that your messaging and your branding are consistent across all your digital assets – website, blog, storefront etc. If your branding and messaging is confused, developers’ confidence in your developer program will erode rapidly. Developers also have an aversion to long, convoluted, legal terminologies; don’t make them read and sign long T&C’s before they can access any of the exciting stuff (code, APIs, tools and documentation). Second opportunities come seldom in this market. The “coolness” factor Developers like cool companies (think slide, smoothie bar, collectable pins) and cool brands and if you appear stuck-up, they will run a mile. If you want to engage with them, you have to think about the image you and your company project – you have to speak their language and dress like them. The language on your website should be simple and straightforward (cut back the marketing blurb). While more technically inclined, developers still like devices which have mass market appeal (both from the perspective of personal interest and also from the perspective of user reach and revenue generation). Engage with other brands and channels to increase the desirability of your device, your storefront or your cloud platform. In addition, make sure that your products are able to get developers excited (from the development tools, emulators and documentation through the storefront to the actual devices that you are selling in the market). Encourage openness and interaction Do not bind your developers into contracts and NDAs that forbid them from sharing useful hints and tips. Even Apple realised the mistake it was making by preventing discussions amongst its developers and had to retract its NDA three months after the launch of its iPhone developer program. You should encourage your developers to share their experiences, best practices and code snippets by creating places and opportunities for them to meet and interact with each other. Online forums, blogs, mailing lists (both on your own website and on popular 3rd party fan websites) are must-haves. Such communication amongst developers helps build a sense of community.   Developer events are equally de rigueur in any developer program. Your events should ideally favour hands-on code oriented tutorials and workshops as opposed to marketing presentations. Learn the art of listening Building communities means extending bridges. The mantra is – communicate, communicate, communicate; whether it’s through one to one e-mails, social media, developer forums or third party developer events. Keep in touch with your most loyal developers, as much as you can, and in a personalised manner. Formulate your message in such a way that you make them feel important; the focus should not be on your company but on them. The worst thing you can do is have a big developer bash and disappear off the radar for a while. That might have worked a few years back but in the current market, with everyone competing for your developers’ attention, if you do not constantly keep in touch, someone else will snatch your developers away in the blink of an eye. Honesty is the best policy Changes to existing APIs and introduction of new APIs are a natural part of software development. However, be as transparent as you can with your developer community. Inform them about the changes that you have made to your APIs and try to have a sensible upgrade path so that there are no rude awakenings. Ensure compatibility with previous versions; this would show that you are respectful of the time and effort that developers are committing to your program.  Despite facing a lot of criticism with regards to fragmentation risks across its multiple releases, Google has gone to great lengths to explain API updates to new Android releases. Share your vision of the future Sharing your vision for the future is a critical part of engaging with developers. It is therefore essential that you communicate the rationale behind your business strategies, technology decisions (e.g. moving from native to web) and the future direction of your program very clearly to your developer following.  Endeavour to provide your developers with the opportunity to provide their feedback, comments and suggestions. Arguably, developer programs such as BONDI and JIL failed due to their inability to communicate any tangible vision to developers. Unfortunately, WAC seems to be following a similar path. Favour substance over style If your platform does not ship; if your tools look good but do not deliver;  if your code samples are too difficult to learn and use, your developers will churn to greener pastures. This means: If you are going down the route of having your own platform, then you have to ensure that the tools that you provide are easy to learn and your programming paradigms enable quick coding and prototyping. Provide APIs that are rich and that offer developers the opportunity to go the extra mile in creating truly innovative applications. These could include select hardware APIs (that are normally hidden) and in some cases network APIs such as billing, location, user profile etc. Provide debuggers and emulators that are fast and provide accurate target device mirroring. Make sure that your development environment includes an app porting framework and solid emulator integration. Choice is good – provide options for advanced use cases for example both a basic command line text editor and a web based IDE. Moreover, if you get lethargic and do not constantly look at ways of evolving your tools, being innovative with your business models, and seeking newer markets, boredom is likely to set in and your developers may start looking at other alternatives. Therefore, continuously check how your program is faring against competition. Several operators dismissed Apple and Google for more than 2 years until it was too late to figure out a positioning strategy. Bridges to developers need constant maintenance You’ll need to set aside a significant budget to finance various types of seed programs as well as developer competitions. Seed programs include many incentives for developing such as: Releasing early builds of your platform/ SDK version to developers, both to get feedback about bugs and other issues as well as to give developers lead time to test software or experiment with adding new features. Commissioning developers to develop apps specifically for your platform or port existing apps from other platforms. Fast tracking the certification of apps for a select group of your target developers (especially useful when you need to get an app ported from a competitive platform to your own) Distribution of free reference hardware or commercial devices to your installed base of developers in order to build loyalty. Show me the money Many of the developers that you want onboard (especially those with a commercial role) want to see a return on their investment. From the outset, it should be clear in your own mind how your developers are going to make money from their apps and you should communicate this in a very clear manner to them – what are the devices that you support, how many people are using those devices, how do they get their apps on those devices, how do customers find, download and pay for the apps and how, when and how much do developers get paid. The other thing to note is that developers are smart and discerning consumers who will fact-check you before they can trust you – make sure you have the figures to back your marketing assertions. One of the critical issues facing developers currently is “discovery” of their apps by customers. The developer programs which come up with the most original ideas to improve discovery and present new business models for increased monetisation are likely to gain traction with the largest number of developers. Casual settings work better When socialising with your developers, small informal events work much better than large formal conferences. Make sure that the developers and software engineers from within your company get the opportunity to interact with each and every developer, answering their questions, listening to their issues, encouraging them to interact regularly and share experiences and difficulties. So far, BlueVia has been amongst the operator developer programs that have most successfully embraced this philosophy by holding small developer events in pubs around London. Jump onto the social bandwagon – Facebook It, Tweet It Studies show that over 60% of people within the 15-35 age group (and that includes the vast majority of your developers) spend on average 20 hours per month on social networking websites. This is where you are likely to find them and this is the medium they will use to spread the word about you if they like you enough (viral marketing). Social media is where you need to advertise your events, inform developers about the availability of the latest release of your SDK or the latest device you are planning to launch. Locate your Evangelists Find out who are the people who believe in your platform – the fans, the early adopters– the people who would be willing to fly the flag for you. Check the people who write favourable blog posts about you, who comment on your blog posts, tweets, participate in your forums and Facebook or LinkedIn discussion groups. Approach them and provide them further incentives to spread the good word. Developers listen to their fellow developers – therefore, get your early adopter developers to talk about how easy it is to create apps using your APIs and SDKs and how fast it is to certify the apps and get them published. Reward your successful developers – promote their apps in the media, ask them to come and talk about their success stories at your events; publish their success stories on your website and in your marketing collaterals; encourage them to publish stats about number of downloads and the amount of money they’ve made. Putting it all together In summary – decide who you want to target, make sure the hygiene factors are in place, keep your messaging and branding consistent, keep legal blurb to a minimum, be a cool brand, encourage your developers to share experiences and best practices, value feedback from your developers, be transparent about changes to APIs and code, communicate your vision and roadmap, provide high quality tools that are on par with competitive offerings,  prepare to invest, show developers the return on their investment, interact frequently with your developers preferably via small informal events and via social networks, locate and draw upon your evangelists and last but not least, reward your successful developers.  Many have tried and many have failed over the years. Sometimes, a few decisions can make or break your program. Be quick to learn both from the failures and the success stories! Happy Community Building! – Gyanee [A mobile technology aficionado, Gyanee Dewnarain has 8 years’ experience working within the international telecoms business environment. Gyanee has worked for a host of companies within the mobile industry ranging from consortia (LiMo Foundation) and start-ups (Carrier IQ) to large corporations (Gemalto and Alcatel). Prior to that, Gyanee was involved with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and co-chaired the ITU Youth Forum in Johannesburg. Gyanee holds an MSc in Telecommunications with Distinction from University College London (UCL). She can be reached at gyanee.dewnarain (at) gmail.com] #developercommunities #mobiledevelopers

[Are cross-platform tools a better solution than HTML5 to the challenges of platform fragmentation? Guest author Jonas Lind reviews the landscape of cross-platform tools and argues that such tools may become as important as the native platforms themselves.] The Android vs. iOS vs. Windows Phone platform battle has been the talk of the industry for the last year. But the market share battle between handset platforms might not be as critical for the industry as many believe. A popular view in the industry is that the market is inevitably moving towards an Apple-Google duopoly. Apple’s app store has more than 400,000 apps. Android is growing quickly from a base of more than 250,000 apps and is predicted to catch up with Apple later this year. Nearly 80 percent of all apps in app stores are controlled by these two market giants according to Distimo. Figures for Q1 2011 from Gartner show that the market share in the smartphone market for iOS and Android combined is 53 percent and rising. But the duopoly may be challenged by the mobile web and cross-platform tools. HTML5 empowers all other platforms to offer apps through the browser. VisionMobile’s recent Developer Economics report shows that the mobile web (of which HTML5 is a subset) is already the third most popular platform in terms of developer mindshare after Android and iOS. At the same time, HTML5 is overhyped and the belief that HTML5 will replace almost all native apps is in need of a reality check. Native apps will still offer richer functionality, better performance, and higher security compared to HTML5-based apps. A study by quirksmode.org has shown that every mobile WebKit implementation is slightly different, which could cause a problem for HTML5-based apps. In a recent whitepaper, Netbiscuits measured smartphone support for 18 features in HTML5 and showed that leading smartphones only offer partial (or no) support for a significant number of these features. Implementation is also fragmented. What works on iPhone will probably not work on RIM or Samsung handsets and vice versa. Or to quote Forrester’s take on the HTML5 vs. native debate: “The ‘Apps vs. Internet’ Debate Will Continue…to be irrelevant.”, “it’s not a question of ‘either/or’ when it comes to a choice between apps vs. the mobile Web, but both.” The Landscape Of Cross-Platform Development Tools The new types of cross-platform tools are more interesting than plain HTML5 because they can deliver higher performance and functionality than browser based HTML5. These tools produce apps as output and fall roughly into two categories: 1) Web apps/hybrid apps. These apps exploit the web engine (“web browser”) and are typically written in HTML/CSS/JavaScript. 2) Native apps. These apps are compiled into machine code and often written in C++ or similar languages. Cross-platform tools are a nascent market with a flurry of startup activity over the last few years. The following diagram illustrates different trade-offs between complexity and performance in the cross-platform tools market. Traditional websites: In the lower left corner is the traditional website, limited in performance but providing access to all platforms with no added complexity. Plain HTML5 could be included here once all browsers support the standard. Web apps/hybrid apps: Adjacent in the diagram are HTML5 web apps that can be downloaded to the browser’s cache and run offline. They will offer better performance and only slightly higher complexity. One step up in the diagram is a market segment of cross-platform tools running simulated native. These tools deliver better performance but the complexity is also higher if the tool has to support multiple platforms. Here we find tools that produce web apps built on HTML5/CCS3 and JavaScript, with some added native elements, typically inside a native wrapper. These cross-platform tools often add native extensions that provide access to some low level native functionality. An example of a player in this market segment is PhoneGap, which is often used in tandem with the Sencha Touch framework. Other tools that run on top of PhoneGap are WorkLight and appMobi. A closely related market segment is hybrid tools, where the HTML5/JavaScript input is translated into actual native source code. An example of a hybrid tool vendor is Appcelerator‘sTitanium. Other types of solutions which fall under the main heading of web/hybrid apps are based on Java, Lua, ActionScript or less common languages. The diagram shows how the heavily-fragmented Java ME offers inferior performance in spite of high complexity. The cross-platform tools Corona SDK and DragonRAD are based on Lua. Rhodes is based on HTML/Ruby while OpenPlug uses ActionScript (Flash) as source language. Kony uses drag-n-drop for building enterprise web apps. There is no reliable information about the performance/complexity trade-off for most of these solutions, so their exact position in the diagram above should be viewed as illustrative. In general, tools in which the resulting code is compiled or recompiled to native ARM machine code will have a higher performance. Native apps: The second main category is native apps. In cross-platform tools for native apps, developers often work with a codebase in C/C++ or C# which is then semi-automatically ported to the target platform and device. Performance is significantly higher with native code, but so is the complexity. Players in this sector include Airplay, Qt and MoSync. The Airplay SDK (now Marmalade) originates in 3D gaming but can also be used as a general C++ cross-platform tool. Qt is a cross-platform UI framework that also can be used for native C++ porting. Qt primarily supports Nokia’s legacy platforms. MoSync is a cross-platform tool for general purpose C++ development, integrated with the Eclipse IDE and also available under an open source (GPL) license. Cross-Platform Beyond Java – Native Extensions The traditional approach to cross-platform development has been a lowest common denominator one – much like that taken by Java, Flash Lite and mobile HTML. This approach sacrifices performance, UI pizzazz and access to specific device features. A workaround is to add native extensions. These can provide additional SDK/NDK libraries for the IDE and also give access to low level hardware functionality. Access to low-level hardware functionality can be managed by a device database that controls which conditional code will be executed on a given device. Several of the cross-platform vendors have built such device databases with various levels of detail. A device database contains information on screen size, input modality and exact OS version, extending to detailed hardware configurations and known bugs with workarounds. Using native extensions, it is possible to overcome the inherent limitations that plagued Java. Instead of “write once, run everywhere”, developers can spend 90 percent of their time developing a common codebase and 10 percent adding native tweaks and extensions for each platform and device. For software purists, the 90/10 solution might not seem very elegant, but it is a way forward that can handle the incredible complexity with thousands of devices running more than five OS platforms. In this way, app developers can manage one codebase and port it to target devices without losing functionality. In principle, using a (C++) cross-platform engine with extensions should be able to offer similar functionality with minimal performance penalty as compared to direct development for the target device. There will be significant economies of scale when the common codebase is tweaked for 100s of devices. The Disruptive Potential Of Cross-Platform There are few signs that platform fragmentation will disappear. It’s not just Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7, which are backed by corporate giants with deep pockets, but also smaller players like QNX (RIM), WebOS (HP), MeeGo (Intel, China Mobile) and Bada (Samsung). Add to that legacy platforms, which will be around for at least a few years: Windows Mobile, Blackberry OS, Symbian, BREW, Java ME and Flash. If we also include the main desktop platforms (Windows, Mac OS, Ubuntu), gaming consoles, set-top boxes, cars, and other gadgets, the number of platforms becomes unmanageable. App developers whose clients need to reach the entire market, face the formidable task of supporting all platforms and devices. If they can use a cross-platform engine the productivity gains will be dramatic compared to paying for separate in-house dev teams for each platform. Early adopters of cross-platform will most likely be large consumer businesses who need to target the mass market such as media companies, games houses, entertainment companies, banks, and any brand developing B2C apps. Similarly, government agencies are often required to provide non-discriminatory access to their services and cross-platform tools will enable them to do just that. Another group of early adopters of cross-platform tools is CIOs of larger corporations. They face increasing demand from senior staff who want to use their favorite smartphone for secure access of internal company data. Once these early adopters have driven down the prices and sorted out stability issues we should expect to see a fast uptake of cross-platform tools in the mainstream app development market. Assuming more developers move to cross-platform tools, the power distribution in the mobile sector will be challenged. The difference in the number of available apps between dominant and up-n-coming platforms will be reduced. This will allow smaller platforms to compete on a level playing field. Web apps and HTML5 should make the largest dent in the market power of traditional platforms. But the final nail in the coffin will come when C++ cross-platform engines can offer almost the same performance and functionality as coding directly on the target platform. This is possible if the cross-platform engines can fully integrate native platform and device extensions. In that case, developers of native apps might reconsider Android, iOS and WP7 and choose to code to a cross-platform IDE, not to the platform. In this scenario, the cross-platform IDEs would become players of equal or even greater importance than the native platforms. At the very least, today’s OS platform wars will move to a totally different level. Jonas Lind [Jonas Lind has been working in the TMT sector since the late 1990s. Among other things, he has worked as an industry analyst for TeliaSonera HQ, with trend forecasting and scenarios in a project commissioned by Ericsson Research, as a strategy consultant during the dot com bubble and with femtocell concept development. He runs the blog Mobileforsight and is currently a strategy analyst at the seed stage VC fund STING Capital.] #developertools #html5 #mobileweb #softwareplatforms #webkit