Nick Jones

Over Christmas I spent a few hours looking at mobile retail applications in the Apple store. The app store provides lots of interesting information on apps and their success, including ratings, user reviews and so on. And after looking at a collection of iPhone apps created primarily by US and UK retailers a few messages seem to be emerging:

Customer expectations are rising fast. Users already have sophisticated expectations often set by the retailer’s web presence. Retailers such as Ikea who delivered a simple application version of their catalogue with no shopping capability and a weak search facility were criticised. Mainstream mobile retail features already include store finders, full online catalogue and stock status checks. If you can’t do it well, don’t do it at all because there is no lack of vocal reviewers ready to criticize inadequate functionality.

People seem to be gaming the system. There seemed to be too many content-free and suspiciously similar positive reviews such as “marvellous app” or “if this app had a price tag I’d pay for it”. When I see these associated with an application that also has a significant number of negative reviews, especially if the latter seem to be reasonable criticisms, I get suspicious.

Mobile and the web are synergistic. Retailers such as Amazon have integrated their web and mobile presence so the applications share common favourites lists and provide common facilities such as order status tracking.

Multinational mobile retail applications are difficult. Most retail applications are limited to a single country, the only multinational multilingual retail application I found was from Zara (a European fashion retailer). It seems as if the challenges of multinational operation compromised the app features because reviewers complained it didn’t show prices, store stock levels, or even store locations.

Mistakes are very visible. The best iPhone apps are very good, and sophisticated iPhone users have high expectations, so if an app doesn’t live up them they say so in no uncertain terms. Some applications had significant numbers of review comments complaining about bugs or performance issues that were a month old; and a month is a lifetime in the app business. Old unaddressed comments are very public statement that the retailer doesn’t care; if you’re not committed to a mobile app, don’t deliver one.

People always want more. Many apps had review comments from users wanting more features, e.g. one Amazon reviewer wanted track listing as well as CD listings. Retailers must think carefully about diminishing returns and how much to invest in mobile applications, especially at this early stage of the market.

You have to do better than the web. iPhone has an excellent browser, and if a native application can’t provide a better experience than accessing the web site on the iPhone it’s worthless (and attracts negative comments).

There’s not much radical innovation – yet. Many retail mobile applications are “me too”, either some form of customer magazine which is basically a marketing channel, or an online mobile shopping tool. There’s not a lot of really innovative stuff yet, and very few apps exploit the unique advantages of a mobile device. I did find a few a few interesting examples:

-     Amazon has integrated its mTurk-based service “Amazon remembers” allowing users to take a photo (e.g. of a book or an item of clothing worn by a stranger) and find out what it is, and whether Amazon stocks it.

-     Walgreen offers a mobile “refill prescription” service and allows you to order prints of photos on your iPhone to be collected in-store.

-     Nike – who are both a brand and a retailer – can convert an iPhone photo into a personalised colour palette and advise which Nike products match it.

Dead time isn’t always connected time. Some retail applications seem to require the user to be connected but others such as the Waitrose Ocado (grocery shopping) system cache the entire product catalogue on the handset. This is a good decision for a grocery store where people could spend long time filling their virtual shopping basket and may move out of signal coverage while they’re doing it.

After looking at all these apps I still have a niggling worry: were they really worth the money the retailer spent to develop them?. iPhone is doing really well but it’s still a high-end expensive niche platform owned by relatively few people. After all if everybody had one it wouldn’t be cool and exclusive. The number of a store’s customers who (a) own an iPhone and (b) use retail apps is likely to be tiny. We see this in other areas too, my US colleague David Schehr recently did some research into mobile stock trading and found that under 5% of the average discount brokerage’s clients actually use mobile trading, so the investment in developing the capability wasn’t really justified. Before mobile shopping becomes a sensible investment I think retailers must add some compelling features that really exploit mobility, and also move their mobile apps onto more mainstream platforms than iPhone.

It’s been unnaturally cold here in London and there’s about 15 cm of snow lying in my garden; so the three household cats have been demonstrating one of their feline core competencies – inaction. Cats have evolved an amazing ability to monopolise the most comfortable snoozing spots in any house, however inconvenient they are to the human occupants. Before I could type this, for example, I had to remove a protesting cat from the home-office chair.

But as I relocated the complaining cat it occurred to me that there’s a business lesson here that many corporations would do well to learn. Sometimes the right strategy is to do nothing. We work in an industry dominated by instant gratification and techno volatility, so there’s always something new coming along, and we’re being pressured by someone to adopt it. If you’re responsible for mobile devices you’re going to have a horrible few weeks with a slew of announcements at CES and MWC and (if the web rumours are to be believed) a new Apple device as well. Those of your users who aren’t immune to marketing will be kicking the door down infatuated with some glossy new techno-toy and wanting you to support it as a corporate standard. But it’s probably best to wait until the dust settles and not make any significant device strategy decisions before about March.

My cats know that waiting is sometimes the right thing to do, and if you doubt their business judgement remember that their opinion is shared by the world’s greatest long-term investor Warren Buffet who said: “Much success can be attributed to inactivity”.

I’ve heard people say that 2010 will be the year of the mobile app store. The fallacy in that statement is the word “app”. We tend to think of apps as something special, somehow different to other digital downloads such as music. But that’s not the case behaviourally or technically.

Behaviourally, the number of apps people download is far greater than the number they actually use. I’d guess that in a few years the average smartphone user will be downloading 30 or more apps a year, at the far end of the bell curve some sad addicts will likely download over a hundred. (Rehab will be available for these unfortunates). Most of these apps won’t be used regularly, they will be played with briefly and discarded after a day or two. There’s no real difference between an app, a song and a video; they’re all just different forms of transient entertainment.

Technically, in 2010 many applications are a bit different to media such as sound and movies because the latter are passively consumed and the former actually do something useful. Well, maybe not always that useful. But the distinction is blurring fast. Flash can create animations or applications, many games are as much about imagery as function,  and there are lots of exciting if rarely-used features in MPEG-4 for embedding scripting and Java code in media streams which totally blur the distinction between content and code.

Digression: The narrow view of “content” is one of the things that really annoys me when talking to some e-book enthusiasts. A business model based on putting yesterday’s content (books) onto an electronic reader is wasting 95% of the potential of the technology. The average e-book reader is basically a functionally crippled computer, and is massively over-priced as a way to read linear text. Why can’t we use its full potential? E.g. imagine Java animations and simulations embedded in my textbooks to make learning more exciting and compelling. E-books and readers must escape from the archaic assumption that a book is text, and reading is a passive activity. And when that happens it will become obvious that an e-book reader is just another portable computer. End of digression, short pause while blood pressure returns to normal.

2010 will be the year of the mobile store, but let’s not call it an “app store”; it’s just a store. The best mobile stores will stock a wide range of digital deliverables and it will be increasingly irrelevant to label some of items on their shelves as “apps” and others as something else.

Yesterday Google announced its Nexus One “superphone”; colleagues attending the launch event report that it’s a very nicely engineered device with great specs, an AMOLED WVGA screen, 1GHz Snapdragon processor, packed with features. However, when all’s said and done it’s yet another high end smartphone, in this case manufactured by HTC. This is the year when smartphones will get very competitive indeed and other people will manufacture devices as nice as this. What’s more interesting is that Google is getting into the handset distribution business. They’re creating an online Google phone store where you can buy Nexus both with and without subsidies and contracts, apparently Verizon and Vodafone have signed up already. So will they stop at Nexus? I guess not, if your goal is to get more Android devices into he marketplace then stocking more device models in your store would seem a sensible long term strategy. And maybe Google won’t stop at phones, perhaps we’ll see Chrome OS netbooks and Google voice services on the shelves in the future as well.

2010 is going to be the year when Android really takes off, and not just on handsets. Android is appearing in other places as well, Wireless Watch Japan reports NEC have announced some Android web tablets for example. I don’t personally expect web tablets to be a huge success, something that’s too big for your pocket and too small for useful work seems like a strange way to spend $350. However if you do want one, Android seems like as good a platform as any other.

Happy New Year. The vacation is over and now we return to real life, or some approximation thereto. I think 2010 is going to be a really interesting year because I think it will make or break a number of companies and technologies in our industry. By the end of 2010 we’ll likely know the answer to a number of really interesting questions such as:

Will iPhone remain on top?2010 is the year when some serious multi-touch iPhone competitors will arrive. Apple has been top of the pile for a long time, and while I don’t expect a catastrophic fall, I do expect the gap between Apple and its competitors to shrink a lot by the end of the year. Apple needs a new iconic product (perhaps the rumoured tablet) as the shine will fade from iPhone a bit in 2010. However, maybe Apple don’t have so much to worry about because although creating a handset as usable as iPhone is an achievable target, creating  a competing app store and iTunes ecosystem is much harder. And when (if) the new tablet arrives the business model that accompanies it will be as interesting as the technology.  

Will WiMax survive? I as an individual and Gartner as a company haven’t ever been very positive about WiMax, especially in mature markets. But if WiMax is to gain a significant foothold it must do so in 2010. By the end of 2010 LTE will be appearing in more markets, and that puts even more pressure on WiMax.

Will anyone  buy Linux netbooks (or any other netbooks for that matter)? You can always convince a few optimistic people to buy anything, but maybe the question should be: will Linux netbooks or MIDs running OSs such as Moblin or Chrome gain any significant market traction in 2010? Personally I doubt it. I’m not even sure if the concept of a “netbook” will be that meaningful by the end of 2010 when we see the next generation of small & thin PCs.

Can Nokia fix its problems and remain ahead? I mentioned in a previous blog that 2010 will be a make or break year for Nokia. Nokia has several strategic projects that absolutely have to deliver in 2010. These include a new S60 interface, a better app store, decent Symbian development tools, one or two N900 series devices with wow factor and a  user experience that can compete with Apple. Nokia also has to remain on track growing its Ovi services to reach at least 300 million users by 2011. That’s a heck of a lot to get right in just 12 months.

Will people continue to put up with Google (and everyone else) snooping on them?I wonder if 2010 might be the year when people run out of patience with Google? Google’s business model is all about institutionalised snooping, watching what you do to monetise your behaviour with advertising. My guess is that that most non-IT people don’t realise just how much effort Google and many other online services put into analysing their behaviour. I expect a privacy backlash, and I think 2010 could be the year it happens.

Will we run out of spectrum? Spectrum is a finite resource, but that never mattered when data usage was minimal. But this year over 40% of the handsets sold in Western Europe will be data-gobbling smartphones, and the US won’t be that far behind. Operators cut back on capex during the recession and the strain is beginning to show. I expect to see a lot more capacity stress in several markets in 2010, and that probably means higher prices for anyone wanting predictable bandwidth.

Cnet reports a Harris Interactive poll that asked US adults how long they spent online every week. The average was 13 hours, and 14 percent of people were apparently online for 24 hours or more.

I think Harris Interactive is asking a dumb question. Labelling time as “online” vs “offline” is so last decade. For many of us that distinction already vanished. Many of the things we do at home and work mean we dip into web services continually throughout the day. We post updates to social networks, stream media, check information, stream feeds and tweet (not the latter in my case as I’m a twitter refuser). And behind the scenes loads of gadgets in our home and pocket silently and continuously communicate to access web services, updates, information….. There is no “online” vs “offline” any more, there’s only online. And with wireless broadband online can be pretty much anywhere. We have quietly become the “always on” generation we used to predict a decade ago. And it’s a generation defined by attitude, not by age.

The interesting question now isn’t whether we’re online or offline, but what’s the quality of “online”. Online via wireless is still a bit of a second class experience, which is why I was delighted to see the emergence LTE last week. But even with LTE most of us will suffer a degraded online experience in some contexts for a decade or two because of wireless coverage and congestion issues. It would be wonderful to get a decent connection on a train here in the UK for example.

One of the numbers Harris published which I found more interesting than the “online time” was the percentage of US respondents who never went online. Back in 1995 (when dinosaurs still roamed the earth) only 9% of people used what we used to call the “World Wide Web”. In 2009 that figure was 80%, and it seems to have stabilised at that value since 2007. So it looks as if around 20% of US individuals are either inveterate web refusers or located somewhere that lacks decent connectivity. This is interesting because 20% is a significant proportion of the population and suggests that corporations and governments need to be careful about assuming they can deliver certain services only through online channels.

I wish everyone a Happy Christmas, or happy holidays if you don’t celebrate Christmas. I hope you all have a successful and prosperous New Year.

Here in London the snow is melting, but despite that it’s easy to tell that Christmas is nearly here because of the massive queues of crazed shoppers in the supermarkets, and because the TV channels have started showing old movies. One of the weird things about old movies is the total absence of mobile phones, think of how much stress could have been avoided if some of those characters could have called for help. Richard Hannay wouldn’t have been chased around Scotland for days for example. And while I’m musing about movies and TV can anyone answer a simple question for me? why don’t vampires carry mobile phones? Whenever a vampire is destroyed by a hero/heroine it turns into a cloud of dust, but you never see a mobile hitting the floor as the vampire vanishes. So I guess they don’t carry them, maybe vampires are sensitive to rf and are the only beings who actually need warning labels on cellphones.

I’m not going to fill this blog with predictions for 2010, because we have about 60 separate research notes on that topic (sorry, behind the paywall). I’m also going to resist creating an end of year list, even though it’s very tempting to solicit suggestions for a list of great movie mobile phone moments. One of my personal favourites is the huge, ungainly and barely transportable mobile used by Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon when he talks to the psychologist about Riggs’ instability. That must be one of the first cells on celluloid.

I do have one big worry for 2010; my colleague John Pescatore mentioned in his blog that he’s expecting lots more questions about iPhone security when people return after Christmas clutching their shiny new mobile presents and demanding they be connected to corporate email. My big worry for 2010 isn’t corporate security, because we understand that pretty well, it’s consumer security. It’s security breaches caused by Trojans, worms, viruses and other malicious code uploaded to app stores pretending to be a useful game or utility. The app store submission filters won’t be rigorous enough to eliminate all of these.

2010 is going to be the year of the app store, and the hackers and cyber criminals know that just as well as anybody else. So beware what you download onto your new mobile Christmas presents.

I suspect that many analysts – whatever their age – have a reputation for being conservative grumpy old men or women. This stems from the fact that we often fail to gush with the expected level of enthusiasm over the latest products and technologies. Their proponents therefore assume we don’t understand them, irrationally hate them or are just stuck in the past. So as I seem to be cast as Scrooge in this season of goodwill let me stay in character for a moment and remind you of a few facts about the cruel world in which we live:

People aren’t rational, reasonable or knowledgeable. Most people don’t know enough about technology to make reasoned purchase decisions, emotion drives most selections. So the best technology often doesn’t win. Human beings are also very bad at objective risk assessments, I’ve been told that more people are killed in the US every year by collapsing holes they dug in the beach than by sharks. But people worry more about sharks than holes in the sand. So if people think something might be a risk their first reaction is not to quantify it, but to ban it.

Everything takes longer than you expect. Sometimes it takes a LOT longer than you expect, in an interview last year one of the authors of the HTML5 standard suggested it might not be officially complete until 2022. Every generation of wireless takes about a decade to roll out, so you’re not going to be making calls to the majority of your friends on LTE before 2015.

Social issues are more influential than technical excellence. The success of a technology depends on society. And in many cases the people who set societies’ agenda don’t understand technology, e.g. politicians, lawyers, some of the tabloid journalists. I got a lot of flack in a recent blog post when I discussed the fact that someone suggested to me that a domestic fabber (3D printer) might not be such a good idea because it would enable every household to create lots of little plastic objects and pollute the planet with plastic waste. Lots of fabber enthusiasts immediately jumped on my head crying that I misunderstood the technology and it was going to revolutionise the universe. The point that most of these technologically sophisticated people missed was not whether the concern was justified, or whether there were technological solutions such as using bio-degradable plastic. The point is that if people think this is an issue then they will behave as if it’s an issue.

Smart innovators understand that technologies which are aligned with the zeitgeist can exploit social attitudes to accelerate their deployment. E.g. in Victorian times I suspect that railways were aligned with a social need for speed and progress, as well as an economic need to move more people and goods faster. Low energy light bulbs make us feel we’re saving the planet, so obliging European politicians have made it illegal to sell some traditional light bulbs which has provided an amazing driver for the market.

So if you’re trying to impress me with your latest product, initiative or technology, make sure you tell me about its social strengths as well as its technical and financial benefits.

On Friday night I picked up my daughter from the airport. The weather was bad, London had one of its rare snowy days, and Londoners just go to pieces as soon as a few cm of snow falls. They are unprepared and disorganised and all forms of transport get massively disrupted, including baggage handling at Heathrow. So my daughter’s plane was late, and once it landed the baggage took forever to arrive so I spent ages waiting around in Heathrow T5. But no-one with a smartphone and a data connection should ever be bored, so I jumped onto the Ovi store and downloaded some free games. I started with Minesweeper, a simple classic that’s been available on Windows for years, and it was a real disappointment. It was absolutely unusable.

The handset of the evening was an N97 mini which is a decent little touch screen Symbian smartphone, which doesn’t have a stylus. Minesweeper displays an 81 cell (9 x 9) matrix on the screen which means my large British finger covers about 9 cells. So clicking any individual cell on the touch screen is almost impossible unless you have long pointed finger nails, and I don’t. OK, someone will undoubtedly say that I got what I paid for; but I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Cosmetically the app looked OK, and there weren’t any bugs. But the developer had obviously not paused for a microsecond to consider usability, or to think about what would happen on a touch phone without a stylus. Speaking as someone who both developed apps and managed developers (admittedly many aeons ago) this is a common disease of programmers. They’re great on the functional stuff, but most make terrible user experience designers. This doesn’t matter too much if the app is being developed by an organisation that can afford a few good UI designers, but it matters a lot if the developer is an individual or tiny company where no-one is a UI specialist.

And just in case you think I’m being unreasonably nasty to developers, I can provide some objective evidence; look at the numbers below from Forum Nokia which is probably the world’s largest mobile developer community:

Mobile Java – 36K threads, 129K posts
Symbian C++ - 67K threads, 281K posts
Mobile design and user experience – 113 threads, 428 posts

So measured in terms of thread numbers there’s about 0.16% as much developer interest in user experience as in Symbian C++. And sometimes it shows.

It’s been quite an entertaining week with a nice mixture of Christmas fun and fantasy interspersed with a few interesting events. First some fantasy: a new version of the Mozilla Fennec mobile browser arrived yesterday and Jay Sullivan VP of mobile at Mozilla claimed it would kill off app stores. As if. I’m sure that HTML 5 will displace some native apps, but it’s going to be years before that standard crystallises, and even then native apps will always beat the mobile web in terms of quality of experience.

Secondly LTE arrived in time for Christmas; a few hundred lucky Scandinavians in Oslo and Stockholm can play with TeliaSonera’s new network which is more of a public pilot than a product launch. TeliaSonera only has a few PC LTE adapters and these do LTE only, no option to drop back to 3G, multimode PC adapters arrive in Q2 next year. The price seems a bit steep, about EUR 59 per month with a cap of 30 Gb. Before you get too excited, remember that every new generation of wireless takes about a decade to roll out, so half of Europe will still be on old-fashioned HSPA even in 2015. So maybe it’s a bit premature to throw away your DSL line.

The rumours of a Google phone intensified during the week triggering all sorts of speculation. Personally I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Google-branded Android handset, possibly using some sort of innovative business model like a subsidy from advertising and with a Google specific interface. Yes, yet  another Android UI; the Android user experience is fragmenting faster than a sandcastle in a gale. Some people have resisted this scenario asking why Google would build a phone because it would alienate operator and handset manufacturer partners. But as my colleague Jeff Mann pointed out, why should we imagine that Google worries about alienating anyone? they’re big enough that they don’t need to care.

As for me, it’s time for my seasonal panic because this is the last shopping weekend before Christmas, and even my talent for procrastination can’t defer present-buying any longer. So my daughter and I will be going into London to join the other lemmings leaping into the retail ocean tomorrow.