 Last month, on 17 April, I was invited to attend the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales ( ICAEW)'s annual Cloud accounting event - Winning business in the cloud: reap the benefits of SaaS. A great title with with the promise of making the case for deploying Cloud. The hashtag for the event was #icaewcloud - it's now at the stage that if your event hasn't got a hashtag, you're missing out in a big way. Actually this event was generally good, except for one presenter who was well off message, and with whom I have to take issue - more on that later. First I have to disclose that ICAEW is one of my biggest customers (we provide the technology supporting their on-line community), and that I have a huge amount of time and respect for Richard Anning, the head of the IT Faculty. He and Paul Booth do a good job putting on events like this one, and fostering IT Counts which is a great resource for peer to peer technology advice in the accounting space. I should also disclose we resell Twinfield's online accounting - they presented last year and the year before, but not this time.
Richard did a fine job chairing and asking instant poll questions to test audience reaction with feedback from little handsets we all had. The event had 3 product showcases as well as 2 expert presentations. Chartered Accountant's Hall is a great venue for this kind of event.
Simon Rose of Intuit did a merely adequate job of presenting Quickbooks Online. He didn't handle some of the basic questions well, and I can't work out why all the presenters focused too much on basics - I know your accounting system can do debits and credits - I want to see what's different, why I would switch from the traditional Sage/Quickbooks/whatever accounting solution but merely hosted, to actually doing things differently, doing things better. QBO being hosted in America, Simon was asked whether the US tax authorities could interrogate a customer's data, and just didn't really answer properly - data integrity and protection is crucial, and I'm sure Intuit have it covered properly, but that didn't come across on the day. QBO must have more potential than this?
Hugh Scantlebury did a better job presenting Aqillla. It looks a good all round solution but came across a little like an Excel spreadsheet put on-line, with a user interface that's nothing special. The best job on product was done by Kevin McCallum of FreeAgent. Their solution takes a business rather than double entry bookkeeping style approach, works for freelancers and small companies up to 15 people, and has a very nice user interface. FreeAgent started in 2007 in Edinburgh and I know the founders (Roan Lavery worked with me on the ICAEW project). They've grown to 53 people and 30,000 paying subscribers which is impressive! They're probably the largest UK cloud accounting provider in the SME space. They also mentioned they're hosted in 2 nuclear bunkers at The Bunker (more disclosure, The Bunker is a customer of ours too).
Andrew Joint a partner of Kemp Little, and Ian Dunn, Assistant General Counsel of KPMG did a double hander on Cloud legal issues. They highlighted significant Cloud benefits both companies have achieved and went through all of the contractual, IPR, data protection, lock-in and service level issues to consider. They were great.
My main concern was with Chris Tiernan's "The Business Case for Cloud". The second presentation of the day which should have supported the "reap the benefits" title but didn't. I can understand that ICAEW want to present a balanced view - accountants are risk averse at the best of times and they don't want sales hype, but it became clear from Chris's presentation and answers to questions that his opinion of Cloud solutions is anything but balanced or accurate. He was giving a précis of the document of the same name he authored for ICAEW (attendees got it free, others have to pay). In questions he was asked about Cloud advantages and his opinion was that Cloud compared to traditional solutions are generally cost neutral, and asked about advantages his answer was that Cloud was "just sizzle!". I have to apologise to the other people sitting on my table because I was heading towards incandescent during most of his session and Q&A and that overflowed to disgruntled, strangled  noises as well as comments on Twitter. His presentation did contain a slide of Cloud business case benefits (shown here), which Kevin Salter has listed in a blog post and and put his own sensible spin on here. Paul Booth also blogged about Kevin's spin and mentioned the controversy caused by Chris's pitch during questions and on Twitter. However, Kevin's words of explanation and Chris's slide bullets (or in the longer business case document) did not match the way Chris actually presented on the day. It's quite clear that Chris's experience of public Cloud solutions like QBO, Aqilla, FreeAgent, FinancialForce (who had a stand at the event), Twinfield, e-conomic, Kashflow, or more importantly larger scale solutions like Saleforce, Workday, Netsuite, or SAP's various Cloud offerings is very limited. Pretty much all of his examples and positioning was around traditional IT software being hosted in the Cloud versus an outsourcing approach, or around private cloud solutions. A business case it definitely wasn't! Instead of presenting the advantages of Cloud solutions, comparing the differences with on premise, explaining where you'll get a return on investment, he kept listing all of the things you will need to worry about. He also kept mentioning how the cost of change to a new system needs to be considered. I asked about this. Surely the cost of change is there whether the new system replacing the old is Cloud based or on premise (he talked as if this was only a Cloud thing). One of the two big things he ignored is how these costs are different. Implementation and training with Cloud solutions happens in a different way - a smaller, leaner project. Training itself is different because Cloud solutions generally have a better UI, more self help, more on-line training, different support and on-line forums. I asked about this in the Q&A and he just didn't understand - a clear lack of real world experience implementing any of the type of public Cloud offerings I listed above. The other huge thing he ignored was how Cloud solutions help a company do things differently in ways you can't with on premise. Where was that concept in his "business case"? In so many surveys asking why people have deployed Cloud offerings they answer agility ahead of cost savings. The return from that agility has to form part of the investment case.
After the session we talked. I agreed to go through his business case document and give him feedback if he would go through my Intellect's Business Case for SaaS document (free download, no capture of contact details necessary) and give me feedback. Although first published in October 2009 (I was only one of over a dozen contributors, but oversaw the editing job) I stand by everything it says today. Please take a look at it.
If you do get the ICAEW document you'll see Chris's business case isn't a business case. There is little explanation of the advantages of Cloud and the only case study example is negative. The language is positioned very much in the pejorative and the negative throughout. Nowhere does it cover the proper ingredients of a business case of any kind. It comes from an old world IT perspective and raises the many different things to consider versus on premise traditional applications or outsourcing. It feels like the topic is being presented as so complicated you need the help of experts. Is it a business case or an argument to suggest you employ a consultant to help you through the maze? My recommendation is only read it if you can get it free, don't pay for it. The ICAEW have an excellent brand, and this document isn't worthy to be published under it.
In email dialogue since the event I've given Chris detailed criticisms in writing. Up to now he hasn't responded about the Intellect Business Case in detail apart from to say that we view things differently. We certainly do that.
UPDATE: My friend Dennis Howlett, well know in the accounting world, also attended the event. As I was writing this and having my email discussions with Chris I wanted to corroborate whether my opinions of Chris Tiernan's so-called business case were just me or I'd got it wrong. See this post on diginomica he just published yesterday: ICAEW flubs cloud case
 Last Monday I visited a data centre housed in a nuclear bunker. Visiting data centres isn't usually that inspiring - rows of server racks, cabinets with uninteruptible power supplies (UPS) and the like. This one's different, which is why I want to tell the story. Can you think of anywhere safer for your data than an underground bunker capable of withstanding nuclear attack? But I must start with two disclosures. The first is that this company is our latest customer - we're helping them with product messaging, website content and social media strategy. The second, you may know anyway, is that I'm a bit of a business geek and I never tire of doing the tour of a new company or industrial site. I'm fascinated by the way organisations set themselves up, from the layout of the office to the machinery on the "shop floor", and all the processes in between - whether it's an agency using words, design and a bit of technology to heavy manufacturing and big machines making "things" I get excited. This visit was a bit more than special though.
I've known The Bunker for years. I thought they had just picked a cool name for their company. I hadn't realised they have an ex-RAF nuclear bunker at Ash in Kent and an ex-USAF nuclear bunker that some would recognise as Greenham Common, Berkshire. Ash was the radar station and Cold War command centre, directly linked to Greenham Common which housed the missile silos for a nuclear response. During the tour we saw the actual Plessey terminal that would have initiated a retaliatory strike - I couldn't see any red button, but that's effectively what this piece of kit was.
 Approaching and moving around the site is much like visiting any military site - fences, guard posts, and iron gates to negotiate with photo ID checks at various points and CCTV everywhere. A guy called Ben conducted the tour. The Ash bunker is inside a modest Kent hill, and Ben pointed out the two separate connections to the National Grid, one of which is dedicated to The Bunker so that no residential or other properties are on the same circuit. Backing up each grid connection is a generator - each chosen from a different manufacturer to minimise the chances of a common fault. Down inside the bunker we saw the UPSs that give them half an hour to switch over to generators if the grid power ever goes down. Ben told us the bunker was extended a few years before the radar station was decommissioned, and that extension holds the tanks for 250,000 litres of diesel. That gives them 80 days worth of power on generators to survive a major power outage or incident. Ben mentioned N+1 redundant air conditioning, but I didn't quite get what that was about. Then we went through the big green blast door, through a further manned security gate and a single person turnstile, to go down below and enter a world that felt rather like walking on to a James Bond or Bourne style movie set - Blofeld not included!
 The concrete walls of the bunker are 3m thick and the main operational area is 30m underground - along corridors, down stair wells and through more blast doors. On the way Ben pointed out cabinets and cables for The Bunker's connections to the Internet and the outside world. They have a fully resilient self healing ring network with 10 Gb capacity. That provides multiple circuits meshed together. It's as redundant as you can get, as traffic can reroute so every individual client connection has multiple backups. Apparently they can also connect to clients via microwave or satellite too. Further in we went through a double door "air lock" to go in to one of the co location server rooms. These were blast doors that had both an airtight seal to keep gas out, and an interlocking tongue and groove to maintain a complete Faraday Cage circuit around the server room. That means that the kit inside would be protected from both an EMP event (an electromagnetic pulse designed to knock out all electronics) or a sophisticated cyber attack using radio signals. Inside the server room there were the usual racks of kit. I like them, although I realise some would find that a bit boring. However, I was impressed by their fire suppression system, with separate controls and feeds to each individual rack. If a fire occurred in a particular rack, the system would deal with it locally, and so keep as much of the rest of the installation protected and running as possible. Actually this was as far as we could go. Deeper in to the bunker through more blast doors there are other co location rooms, the main server room, and other managed service rooms. Visitors like us, and The Bunker's own general staff aren't allowed in, even if escorted. Only a specific short list of personnel have that level of security clearance.
 Back out through the airlock and along the corridors, we didn't pass any of Blofeld's henchmen in their uniforms. We were, however, shown the last remaining Plessey radar terminal and 70s style phone to show off a bit of Ash's history as a missile command and control centre. Awesome, although I wasn't allowed to touch any buttons (and none of them appeared to be red)! As we moved out Ben explained how, on the software side of things, The Bunker are PCI DSS compliant (that's the stringent payment card processing security standard) across all of the 12 levels of that accreditation. Ben also explained about how all personnel are vetted, CRB checked, and certified annually in line with their ISO27001 status. It's quite clear they have the most comprehensive set of physical, human and digital security systems in place that I've ever experienced.
I found it quite inspiring - partly because of the experience of going behind the scenes at this kind of ex-military facility, and partly because because of the attitude and commitment of all of the people I met there - they live and breathe security. And then there was the "red" button! Now I need to find an excuse to visit Berkshire.
photos courtesy The Bunker
I've been pushing the concept of using social technologies for collaboration and connections both inside and outside of business to make companies more effective since early 2006. The naming has changed from web 2.0 to enterprise 2.0 to social business, but the concept is the same. However, when some areas of technology like smart phones or tablets have made such an impact on business in such a short space of time, why is the potential of social media in business, apart from use in external marketing and customer support, still largely unrealized? I believe it's the C word (and that's context). To explain that, three things came together over the last few weeks - a briefing session with Appian CEO Matthew Calkins, a blog post from Sigurd Rinde about the fallacy of the Information Age and the need to move to a better framework, and one from Simon Wardley on flow structures and what he explains as the move from Pioneer, to Settler, to Town Planner.
First, let me set the scene by reminding you that we've been running businesses with incomplete ERP systems for decades - they usually cover a company's core processes but leave plenty of gaps. I was reminded of some of the long forgotten vendor names watching the Workday Rising keynote and tweets from Dennis Howlett and Vinnie Mirchandai last week - McCormack & Dodge, MSA, D & B, Pansophic, ASK, Baan (I'll stop there, it's a long list!). From the advent of personal computers, even back at the start with the Apple II and Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc, companies have been using spreadsheets on PCs to fill in the gaps. After that Apple II came IBM PCs and Lotus 1-2-3, but then Microsoft Excel took over and became pervasive, and we all got used to building mini systems and processes using spreadsheets and email. How did accountants and business people end up as programmers? However, it was a real jump in personal productivity back then, but 30 years on and we're still doing it - there has to be a better way!
With the advent of social tools I was convinced we could break the spreadsheet and email habit and make businesses more effective. At very least the document or spreadsheet is shared, and we don't have a copy for every email recipient's inbox - who's got the latest version? Wikis meant we could collaborate on content in real time. Blogs and forums meant we could capture meaningful conversations around any topic. Twitter style functionality brought micro-blogging for team communication and all of these tools and their profile information made it much easier to search, discover and connect with the right expert, or watch for conversations that could help my particular project. Implemented well, with the right company culture to facilitate employee engagement, these social tools can really make a difference in ways that knowledge management systems or intranets never quite managed. Tools like Yammer or Jive or Telligent have made headway, presenting a horizontal solution laying across the departments and processes of the organisation, but like the spreadsheets before them, the connections between these productivity tools and the core business processes they are trying to supplement are almost always human.
When micro-blogging came to the fore less than 5 years ago, I expected most forward thinking business application vendors to do what Salesforce have subsequently done. They built Chatter and integrated it in their product's business processes. This gives the collaboration mechanisms explained above but they are connected "in context" where they can help directly with the business process. TIBCO came out with tibbr, and promised to make use of their encyclopaedic integration expertise to connect collaboration in context to a variety of different enterprise business apps. Microsoft bought Yammer, but they haven't really done anything with it yet, although as I write this I understand they are announcing integration with SharePoint 2013 and Office 365.
Two weeks ago I discussed these topics with Appian CEO Matthew Calkins. They are aiming their solution at this same place, the interstices between process and social. They are connecting enterprise social functionality with their business process management (BPM) tools or what they call work automation - together they call it Worksocial. Mathew's argument is that BPM tools do a job, but usually only for a small group, and they are often too complicated and difficult to learn. Adding a social layer with emphasis on ease of use allows the approach to be picked up and used easily, and gives it the chance to become ubiquitous. No one needs to be trained because the tool is intuitive. He argues you can catch people on the road, include people and accelerate their responsiveness. Work automation gets elevated to changing the way an organisation works, but he says:
"This doesn't add up to anything unless work gets done, otherwise it's just a distraction."
He explains that the tools need to be wired in to the company's databases to pass back decisions and delegations. He talks about the relationship between everyone who contributes to making a decision and the need to to translate that state in to behaviour, to have awareness. This is where social tools on their own can fall down, in not being able to turn good communication in to real action.
I asked Mathew specifically about Salesforce and TIBCO as potential competition for Appian. He admitted these are two companies he watches. He thought Chatter was closest in term of their core idea, but wasn't so impressed with their workflow as it doesn't have the rigour to handle more complex business rules. He didn't think TIBCO was as close to them in philosophy, and speculated on how they might put tibbr and webMethods together in the future. He talked of Microsoft as a possible worthy contender at some future stage.
He explained how they have 3.5m paid users and started to talk about customers. Every Starbucks is inspected using Appian on iPads. They use GPS to pick up the store location, take photos, upload forms, add voice notes and collaborate in real time on tracking shipments, arranging repairs, making decisions from the communal observations. Because of this they feel they are 5 times faster than McDonalds at rolling out new products or store changes. He talked about the US Veterans Administration running job fairs. Attendees are met by volunteers with an iPad who take them through a questionnaire which provides them with a schedule for their visit. In 2 fairs they've made 16,000 job offers - a very effective outcome, and the software only takes 20 minutes for the volunteer to learn.
Mathew went on to talk about how processes can be invented on the spot or improvised, with a task being assigned and given accountability alongside formal tasks. He said:
"The key to automating is to automate the way it really is."
This connects me to Sig Rinde's post where he worries that Information Technology has mostly produced faster ways to do the same thing. There are only marginal gains from upgrading to the next version of your ERP. He argues that:
"Now is the time for IT to refocus on the effectiveness of the whole value creation chain and "what" we do."
Around the same time Simon Wardley was explaining an effective organisational structure that he refers to as Pioneer, Settler and Town Planner and goes on to worry that he's tired of being told you can be innovative or customer focussed or efficient, but you can't be all of them. He believes you can, and I do too if you've got the right tools.
The common thread here is the flow of business tasks from innovation to commoditisation and back again. Those traditional ERP solutions we created were too rigid and incomplete and were designed for the easily repeatable stuff, and we ended up needing something else to fill the gaps not covered or to handle the barely repeatable tasks - the exceptions that happen on a regular basis, to a lesser or greater extent, in every organisation. Social tools can do a better job at these than email and spreadsheets, but actually we need joined up thinking and a properly connected solutions. Appian, Salesforce and TIBCO are doing something different by integrating social in context with the associated business process to handle the exceptions as well as the standard flows.
As I publish this I'm just heading to SAP's SAPPHIRE NOW and TechEd in Madrid. One of the sessions I'm most looking forward to is a briefing with Sameer Patel to find out more about SAP Jam - their new social platform aimed at solving discrete business problems - exactly what we are taking about here. There's no doubt in my mind that business process and social tools connected in context is the next wave for enterprise software. Hopefully social media applied to business will achieve it's potential this time.
 Last week's Apple event has been widely reported in detail, but with a minimum of real analysis on the importance of the why, the how and the what being communicated. For me there were three significant aspects:
- Apple improving their leading position in the tablet business by making the leading product even better, as well as opening up a new sub segment of the market to flank the low end competition.
- The whole event demonstrating that design is still at the heart of the Apple vision.
- Showing there is life after Steve Jobs - the vision, culture and team he put in place are carrying the torch and keeping up the pace. (I wish I'd bought shares around about the time the iPod was first announced or before!)
Plenty of reporters and commentators presented most of the facts and the numbers corectly, misunderstood the pricing of the new iPad Mini thinking it too high, and then made the mistake of missing the .9 after the 7 in the size of its screen. So much technlogy reporting these days seems repetitive, regurgitating the technical specifications and processor chip models in the press release with little analysis and thought of what the technology is for, how well it will work and how people will use. That's a topic for another post. Let's talk through the announcements.
Tim Cook (CEO and the man Jobs hired in 1998 to clean up Apple's manufacturing and supply chain) and Phil Schiller (SVP World Wide Marketing and the guy who had the idea to use a scroll wheel on the iPod) did the talking on stage, with (Sir) Jony Ives (SVP Industrial Design and a key influence from the iPod project onwards) appearing on video. No one was wearing a black turtleneck, but there is no doubting who set the scene and the tone. Tim told us that the iPhone 5 is the fastest selling phone ever, and then went on to tell us one of the most important, but little discussed, aspects of Apple's success in the mobile device market. They try hard to make it possible that as many devices as possible run the latest version of their operating system. They told us there are 200 million iOS 6 devices already - an operating system that had only been available for 34 days! This is a powerful message and a big number. Even someone with an iPhone 3GS, 3 generations of hardware back from the 5, gets to run the current software. It's the same for my iPad 2. Of course the processors on these earlier devices aren't fast enough to do absolutely everything, but other device manufacturers build in redundancy, even when using Android, and force their users to continually upgrade to the next handset (or tablet) in a way that Apple does not.
They explained that the Mac is the #1 desktop in the USA and the #1 notebook in the USA and went on to announce new thinner versions of the iMac and and a 13 inch version of the MacBook Pro with retina display. These don't bother with CD drives in this new world of the Cloud and the download. They went on to talk about a new hybrid flash/hard disk - the "fusion drive'. All well and good for the desktop and laptop market, but I was really interested in what was coming next.
 You have to remind yourself that the iPad was only announced in April 2010. 100 million iPads have been sold in just 2.5 years. There are 275,000 apps available now in the app store - that's quite an ecosystem. They explained that more iPads were sold in Q2/2012 than PCs from Acer, Dell, Lenovo, and HP. There are other tablets, but what are they being used for? Apple have looked at the overall tablet web traffic - iPad has a 91% share, with only 9% for all of the rest (all manufacturers in all sizes). That's consumers, what about use in business though? They explained 94% of Fortune 500 companies are either testing or using iPad. That's what you might call a market leading product!
What do you do when you've got a fantastically successful product that's in the lead? You make it a bit better to extend that lead. Only 6 months after the announcement of the 3rd generation iPad with retina display they announced the 4th generation. They doubled the speed of the processor, improved the front camera, expanded LTE so the device supports 4G here in the UK, and added the new lightening connector to replace the 30 pin connector, but all maintaining the same 10 hour battery life AND the same price. Now the timing of this update has been criticised by some people who only just got the 3rd generation device. They feel cheated somehow. I sort of get that, but not really. My wife is using my iPad 1 - it's still a great device. My daughter and I are ecstatic with our iPad 2s (except for maps!). The 3rd gen iPad was announced back in March. In June a CIRP report found that iPad 2, which Apple continues to sell even now, comprised 41% of all of Apple's iPad sales. The report also indicates that previous iPhone models are still strong as well. 27% of all iPhone sales were for models other than the then current model iPhone 4S. If you really want the latest version, you'll be able to get a pretty good price for your 3rd generation iPad device, because it's still pretty awesome even though a slightly better one has come along.
At this point in the presentation the new iPad Mini slowly appeared from behind a full size iPad. Apple do this kind of reveal so well. The Mini is 7.2 mm thin, weighs .68 Ibs which is 53% lighter than the iPad and has a 7.9 inch screen. Most of the pundits seemed to have missed that .9 after the 7. This is an "8 inch" tablet, not a "7 inch". There is a reason for the size difference and this is Darwin's theory of evolution applied to product categories (read The Origin of Brands by Al & Laura Ries). Product categories don't converge, they diverge. Apple are actually flanking the low cost 7 inch tablet market that Samsung, Google and Amazon are playing in with a premium product in a new sub-category just next door to their battleground. Schiller explained the reasons for the size difference:
- It runs existing iPad apps in portrait and landscape without the need for any further development.
- They could engineer a screen this size that was the same 1024x768 resolution of the iPad 2.
- The same user experience as an iPad 2 but it fits in one hand.
He went on to compare it to one of the current 7 inch Android based tablets. The Mini is made of aluminium versus plastic. Even though this other device has a smaller screen it's thicker and heavier than the Mini. He compared the Android's screen size of 21.9 square inches versus 29.6 - that's 35% larger for the Mini. What about surfing the web? They showed the actual real estate of a visible web page without the surrounding framing, tabs and noise - the Mini was 49% larger for surfing portrait, and 67% larger in landscape. He suggested these other (Android) apps were phone apps stretched out, not specifically designed for a tablet and demonstrated that by comparing the user experience for Ebay, Pandora, and Trip Advisor across the two. It highlighted that this "8 inch" tablet really is a different form factor and category of device.
I've seen some pundits suggest the screen display " lacks Apple's crystal clarity" or is " noticeably worse than its rivals". Rubbish (although I would have preffered a word beginning with B)! These commentators are calculating the number of pixels per inch and focussing on the arithmetic. The iPad 2 screen experience had a wow factor when it was announced such a short while ago. This new device has the same resolution on a smaller screen and so characters will be a bit sharper. It's the user experience in practice that is much more important than the numbers and specifications that the average technology journalist and blogger seems to fixate on.
They showed a video of Jony Ives talking through the design of the new device. He suggested there is an inherent loss in just reducing a product in size. He explained the new iPad Mini is a ground up internal redesign of all components to make it a concentration of, and not a reduction of the original (iPad 2). They decided that 7.9 was the right screen size (in other words the lowest they could go to achieve the equivalent user experience) but they needed to reduce the borders so you can pick it up in one hand. They have produced their largest and thinnest single cell battery so that it still has the 10 hour life of the rest of the range. They've made it "incredibly thin and light with remarkable levels of fit and finish". It looks gorgeous.
Lastly, the price - the entry level model is $329 in the USA and £269 in the UK with the same capacity, wifi and cellular options as its 9.7 inch big brother. It fits well in to a range where the larger iPad 2 (which still sells well) starts at £329($399) and the iPad 4th generation starts at £399($499). Some pundits have suggested it's too expensive compared to the Kindle Fire HD or the Google Nexus 7. It's a different category to these devices. Some pundits have suggested that they should have priced it lower to kill the competition. They're missing the point. Pricing it lower would kill Apple's margins and profitability, they're leaving that low cost space to somebody else. Jobs said that the 7 inch form factor is not a good size for tablet applications and you would need sandpaper to file your fingers. Of course he has misdirected before, when he suggested video wouldn't come to the iPod, and then it did. Actually Apple are saying this new "8 inch" category is the smallest they can go whilst keeping the iPad experience that customers love and have got used to. They are flanking the low cost products on a new front, and maintaining their strategy of beautifully designed products at a premium price.
I'm reminded of a Steve Jobs sentence from a Wired article from 1996 when he said:
"My best contribution is not settling for anything but really good stuff in all the details"
That spirit shows in the new iPad Mini. When I look at recent Android tablets some of them look great, they feel a little too complicated and geeky, but many of them fall down in the details. When I look at the various Chrome Books that Google have launched, the concept is great but it doesn't feel like a completely finished product. When I look at the current Samsung range of products, from the 5.3 inch Note 2 to the Tab 2 10.1 I see a much more coherent range with a greater attention to detail - they are the real challenger. But the Apple experience in design and attention to detail is a level above these competitors. These new iPads will be hugely successful, very profitable and maintain Apple's stamp of authority and lead on the tablet market. When you see analysts talking about total tablet market share percentages, please take care with these raw numbers and look to the growth in actual numbers of units and profitability There is an area of the battlefield which Apple is avoiding strategically because they are sticking to higher ground.
 After 6 years happily thumb tapping my way around my email and messages with the real keyboard of the BlackBerry smart phone platform I defected to the Apple iPhone back in July (even though the new iPhone 5 was imminent). It's such a shame - I've been a big fan of Research In Motion's BlackBerry approach and the integrated nature of their software, but to me this highlights how even strong and successful technology companies can lose their way and loyal customers with the wrong strategy and end user experience in a very short space of time. In today's technolgy landscape, if you aren't always challenging your current product range and reinventing yourself, your toast!
Things were so different back in April 2006 when I followed Ross Mayfield's advice and replaced my Treo PDA and Sony Ericcson K700i phone with a BlackBerry 8700v smart phone, instead of the HP iPaq and Sony Ericsson P990i I had been looking at. It was great advice! I loved the simplicity of the click wheel interface and the way the email, messaging, contacts and phone functions were so elegantly integrated. It actually worked well as a phone too. Along the way I upgraded to an 8300 Curve, then a Bold 9000, and then a Torch 9700 with touchscreen, but still a real keyboard. When the iPhone first came out in 2007 I went to play at the Apple Store, but I could never get on with the soft keyboard. Way too many mistakes compared to my real BB keyboard - you get pretty dexterous with those thumbs. The fact that the BB browser never worked well up until when the Torch came out didn't particularly bother me too much - email and messaging integrated with contacts and phone were the key apps. Things got better with BlackBerry's Webkit based browser on the Torch, but still weren't near good enough. Compared to the iPhone or the Android devices that have come on the scene in recent years it was too too slow, and BlackBerry have never reacted properly to get alongside, or even better, ahead of their friends at Apple (or Google).
I'm loyal to the brands I like, but BlackBerry have managed to push me away. They made a complete mess of their foray in to the Tablet market. They have a great reputation as the enterprise friendly device, but managed to misshandle their problems with outages. They have a fantastic following with young people who love the keyboard for SMS, updating social networks, and using the "free" BB Messenger to keep in touch with their friends, all done on a tight budget. You can see Will.I.Am tweeting from his Torch standing on his chair on TV programmes like The Voice, and even with all this BlackBerry haven't capitalised on being "for the cool kids" as well as Enterprise. But the real problem is in not helping me want to stay on the platform, and instead trying to make money from me on incremental upgrades. My Torch is on the BlackBerry 6 operating system. If I want the features in the BB 7 operating system I have to pay to swap my 9700 for an almost identical Torch 9710 to run it - crazy! The next, even better, operating system BB 10, which combines the best of BB and the QNX operating software they aquired and which is used on that failed Tablet, was going to arrive this autumn, but will now be sometime next year. Need a new handset for that too. And did I mention web browsing is too slow? This is not the way you treat your existing customer base - other people do it better.
A few months out from my Vodafone contract renewal (which was around this day in September) I started to look at upgrade alternatives. I was reasonably certain I would go Android, even though I've been using an iPad since May 2010. My son replaced his beloved Google Nexus One with an HTC One X in May. Initially I loved that big screen, and I started to try out available soft keyboards like Swiftkey and Swype. I had a serious look at the Samsung Galaxy S III - the phone that has supposedly been hitting sales of the iPhone 4S. It's a tough choice between the HTC and Samsung that probably comes down to whether you prefer HTC's Sense add ons or Samsung's smart overlays and apps. Then my daughter's original Galaxy S came up for renewal in June and she looked at these two alongside the iPhone 4S. She decided for iPhone on three issues - usability vs the Android she'd been living with for the last 2 years, the Apple cool factor, and the fact she has an iPad 2. I think there was another, less conscious aspect - the form factor. Are these big screens making the phone too unwieldy in the hand, trying to be a mini tablet as well as a smart phone?
I started to play around with her 4S, much to her annoyance, to see how much the soft keyboard has improved on this small device since that first iPhone - the answer, a lot! Even accounting for the smaller 3.5 inch screen of the Apple compared to the 4.7 inch screens of the One X and S III, I was doing a more accurate job of typing. This is down to two factors - the auto correct suggestions, but more importantly the fact that the iOS keyboard predicts what you might type next and makes the sensor area for that key bigger to improve your chances of hitting it. The software even picks up names from your contacts, learns from what you regularly type, and there is a work around for you to be able to add your own auto correct suggestions. Once I was over that major usability hurdle the choice to move to iPhone was easy - more and more useful apps compared to Android (700,000 with 250,000 optimised for iPad), slick user interface that I already know from the iPad, the Siri intelligent assistant and iCloud. If you add a contact or make a change on the phone, within a second or two the iPad has been updated, and vice versa. But should I switch now or wait for the iPhone 5 to come out?
Two months ago when I was considering this puzzle the Internet was awash with iPhone 5 rumours and leaked photos of what the case might look like, screen size and the like. There was enough evidence to be reasonably certain of key things Apple would announce. It seemed like the launch was going to be in early September. It looked like the device wasn't going to be radically different from iPhone 4S with a screen that was bigger, but not as big as the 4.7 inch screens of the opposition. It was highly likely that the 30 pin connector would be dropped for something smaller - I've already got lots of 30 pin connector accessories and using them with an adapter would be a pain. It will handle 4G, but that won't be available in the UK on my provider's network for a while. Even if the phone was released almost immediately in the US, it always takes longer to arrive in the UK. Demand would be high, and actually getting hold of a phone before Christmas would probably be a struggle. Two weeks in to July the smart people at Vodafone rang me and offered me the chance to upgrade my contract early - that tipped me over the edge and I picked an iPhone 4S without hesitation which duly arrived on 20th July. It's a brilliant little device, but there is one killer feature that Apple get right, that so many other manufacturers get wrong.
As well as all of the great things about the handset, it doesn't have the redundancy that is built in to so much of the opposition's handsets. There are some really cool new things in iOS 6 (new Maps, Facebook integration, shared photo streams, Passbook for boarding passes and cards, extra phone features) that I get on my "old" Apple phone for free when the new one comes out. Even users of the iPhone 3GS two generations back from me and three generations back from the iPhone 5 get the new operating software as a free upgrade. It's available tomorrow - awesome, can't wait. This is how you keep your customers loyal. This is why BlackBerry is on the ropes.
As you know the iPhone 5 was announced last week with some availability in many countries before the end of this month. As you know the reaction from journalists and analysts has been mixed - some of them don't quite get it and expected something "Earth shattering". The reaction from customers though is different - they get it. The phone is pretty much sold out everywhere and there's a waiting list. The biggest risk Apple have taken is in re-engineering the connector from the 30 pin that we've used with our Apple gadgets for the last 9 years. It's a logical, necessary and painful move to save internal space and external size across the whole iPhone, iPod, iPad range, and to improve the platform for the next 9 or 10 years. All products need to attack themselves with the new version to improve. It's one of the factors that helped me decide to go settle the 4S over waiting for the 5. The new iPhone has a 4 inch screen, a faster processor, is a bit longer, a bit thinner, but the same width and definitely lighter. I'm surprised they didn't cram in NFC (Near Field Communication) for mobile payments and information exchange too but I'm sure that will come next year. I wouldn't be at all suprized if the timing is related to the availability of more real World apps to use it effectively so that when it reaches iPhone it has a bigger, practical impact. In any case, you have to be impressed with the beauty of the engineering job they have done. The Apple keynote announcement itself is well worth watching. The difference between an Apple launch and most other technology companies comes down to two things - a proper explanation of why they do what they do (start with why!), and real emphasis on what the product can actually do for you and how you use it. Features and specifications get a mention but in the context of faster, easier, better ways of doing things and not just a list of numbers. Apple have done enough to to make the best smart phone better and to lay the foundations for where they go next. They have also made available some of the most significant new functionality to owners of 3 of the previous generations of handset owners making us even happier Apple users.
I wonder where next for BlackBerry and whether they are heading for acquisition. Nokia haven't done enough with their recent Windows 8 announcement to even start to reclaim the smart phone ground they've lost. HTC make good hardware, I wonder what Google will do with Motorola and Samsung are doing the best of the Android based opposition, but nobody has the coherent strategy, developer ecosystem, direct route to market through their retail chain, loyal customer set and execution skills of Apple. The iPhone 5 is out and is roughly what I expected. I'm still delighted with my 4S choice and I'll be happy to live with it for the next 18-24 months safe in the knowledge that I'll get new goodies from new iOS versions every year or so. And last, but not least, if some company, organisation, school, college, or service produces a mobile app for what they do, it almost always comes out on iPhone first. I was walking round Goldsmiths, London as a prospective University for my son on Saturday - signs up promoting their iPhone app everywhere. The recent combined Android market share numbers look good, but they're spread across many manufacturers with differing strategies and they don't yet reflect the impact of iPhone 5. I just can't see Apple losing their smart phone supremacy for the foreseeable future.
More Recent Articles
|
|
|
