Nick Jones

Regular readers will by now be used to my habit of getting tips on business strategy and prediction from the three cats who live in the Jones household. I like cats, but I don’t have many illusions about them. Cats flip from being predatory and selfish to cute and friendly, depending on who (or what) they‘re dealing with, and whether or not it has something they want. Just like large vendors really.

Just because you’re top of the food chain doesn’t mean you’re always smart, and it’s interesting that cats and large vendors make similar mistakes at times. One of the most amusing feline mistakes is based on not being able to see the world from another creature’s viewpoint. Cat’s think if they can’t see their prey, that the prey can’t see them. So a large black cat will hide behind a few blades of grass thinking that it’s invisible even though the bird a few metres away can see it clearly.

I mention this because the mobile space provides us with lots of illustrations of this sort of corporate blindness. Large vendors sometimes get carried away with the value of their brand, and think that excellence in one domain guarantees excellence in other domains. They find it very hard to envisage the world from the viewpoint of an individual mobile user or mobile app developer. This produces lots of odd behaviour.

For example Jonathan Schwartz has been talking on his Sun blog about project Vector which appears to be an attempt to create a huge Java appstore. Yes it looks as if Sun has been infected by the appstore pandemic. From Sun’s perspective which is technological and steeped in Java this looks like a great idea. But how will it look to 15 year old kids who don’t know that Sun or Java exists? At risk of repeating myself, people are basically only motivated by four things: sex, fear, greed and chocolate. And somehow I don’t think the average consumer sees Sun as a source of any of those.

Intel makes a good illustration too. Intel put a lot of effort into evangelising new consumer device form factors like UMPC and platforms like Moblin. But somewhere along the way they didn’t stop to ask how UMPC would look from a consumer’s perspective. Did the average consumer want a device which was too big to put into their pocket but had a smaller and less usable screen than a mini laptop or netbook?. There are almost no situations when a consumer could carry a UMPC and not a superior if slightly larger (and probably lower cost) netbook. So netbooks seem to have won that battle. And Intel don’t seem to have done much to build a Moblin ecosystem that would make it attractive (or even visible) to either developers or consumers.

So if you’re a large vendor hunting some new prey, try to behave a bit less like a cat.