I spent some time today putting together a Christmas gift list on behalf of my daughter.  I’ve been promising various family members I’d get it done for a while now.  One of her favorite things is the ‘phone, so I searched on Amazon to see what kind of interesting kids phones they might have.

Go to Amazon and search on “Toy Phone”, I dare you!  Or click here if you’re feeling lazy.

Sandwiched cleanly between item 12 (Vtech - Pull & Lights Phone by V Tech) and item 14 (Disney Princess Little Mermaid Interactive Purse Set by CDI Toys) is item 13: Make Your Own Sex Toys: 50 Quick and Easy Do-It-Yourself Projects by Matt Pagett.

Now I’m sure Matt has mad skills and the book is worth every penny to the right customer but I can honestly say that even my twisted mind had never connected the two before.  Kudos to Amazon for broadening my narrow horizons…

P.s. After being subjected to the “Ariel’s Beginning” DVD, I was pretty convinced that the Little Mermaid was a shallow good-for-nothing hoochie — getting listed after the sex toys just confirms my suspicions…

I’m all done with the gaming side for now, so back to the enterprise…

On the enterprise side of things, I’ve worked with CAD and document management systems.  In both, when I got started, incredibly closed proprietary systems were the norm.  In CAD, some companies made their own hardware to run their software and sold the whole thing in one expensive package.  In document management, the real money was in system integration which was deliberately kept hard so clients couldn’t do the work themselves.  But data exchange became increasingly important, plugin architectures got created and quite suddenly enterprise players found themselves stuck with openess.

Again, this wasn’t open source, but it was a new kind of openess that hadn’t existed before.  Eco-systems flourished, hundreds of developers sprang up for every platform, much money was made and customers gained all kinds of new abilities they’d never had before.

You could make a reasonable argument (especially if you weren’t as lazy as me and actually researched numbers that bear out this thesis) that the closed players mostly died out and the big successes were the platforms that became more open. i.e. the exact opposite of the games industry.

So the question that’s bugging me is this: why did closed work so well in games but open was the solution in enterprise?

My current thoughts:

1. Enterprise software is more mature in its development than the games industry.  Perhaps every industry goes through a cycle of random noise/wild west craziness, evolution of successful closed systems, the eventual destruction of those systems and their replacement by more open systems.
2. The nature of the usage of the technology dictates which will work.  Enterprise software was inevitably going to have to become broadly interoperative and collaborative in nature.  That forced openness.  Gaming (and perhaps mobile) can live with interoperability at its fringe and not at its core, allowing closed systems to continue to survive.
3. It just is.  Sometimes you need one, other times you need the other.  Sadly, you’ll never know in advance which is right for any given industry, but hindsight will be 20/20.

All comments welcome!

Enjoy your Thanksgiving, if that’s something you happen to celebrate.

As I stewed on it some more, I realize I’ve seen this game played before in multiple industries.  The two that spring to mind are enterprise/high end B2B software and gaming, and the outcomes were not the same.  Since the latter seems much sexier, I’ll start with that.

When I first joined Rainbow Studios (mid 90’s) they were developing titles for the PC.  The consoles of the day simply didn’t have the horsepower our dev team needed.  But anytime you write code that really stretches a desktop PC, you find out very quickly that one system is not the same as another.  Different graphics cards, RAM, CPU, drivers or whatever will all conspire to make your life pretty miserable.  So even though we were nominally supporting a single platform, there was a lot of time spent on testing and patching for different system configurations that we might encounter.

But just about anybody could publish a title for a PC.  While not an open source platform, development was pretty open, well documented and fairly well understood.  There were no gate-keepers between us and the market place, and although Microsoft controlled the OS, they never interfered with, approved or shot down the titles that were created.  Microsoft’s suite of dev tools were pretty good too. They were clearly the result of many different opinions and a long history of product development for a broad target audience.

When we got word on the specs for the PS2, we were very interested.  Rainbow ended up with a contract for a launch title.  Thanks to the incredibly closed nature of the PS2, we could guarantee that if our code ran well on one PS2, it would run on another.  And every PS2 had more than enough horsepower to do some cool stuff.

But there was a trade-off.  Every title had to be approved and manufactured by Sony.  If they didn’t like your game, you could not bring it to market.  What’s more, the development environment was pretty lousy and had a lot of gaps in it.  I distinctly remember talk of writing our own compiler because we were unhappy with the one that was provided.  It was the antithesis of Microsoft.

But we had more success and made far more money from the console titles than any PC game we ever created.  And while I don’t have the numbers to hand, closed consoles clearly dominate games industry revenue.

When you consider the iPhone and Apple’s control of the eco-system, it reeks of Sony-style control.  And it really is just a focused evolution of the closed model that has been used in mobile for the past 10+ years.

In stark contrast, Google’s efforts with Android follow the Microsoft model rather precisely.

There’s a very appropriate quote, and lest you think I’m some kind of literary type, I can assure you I either heard it on the radio or read it on my breakfast cereal.  But T.S. Elliot once said:

“One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”

I think there’s a good argument to be made that Google are playing the role of mature poet, stealing the core of Microsoft’s game plan (definitely alien to Google) and reinventing it for their own needs.  Apple are effectively doing the same with with Sony’s plan too.

Goosoft and Appley, anyone?

During the 2 day event, there were a number of fascinating stats that were thrown out.  Here they are, in no particular order, for your number noodling pleasure.

1.    Over 3 Billion mobile phones exist worldwide.
2.    1.3 Billion were sold in 2007.  To give you context, in the same year 800M cars were sold, 850M personal computers and 1.5B televisions.
3.    In the US there are 260M mobile subscribers. 200M are signed up for SMS and 100M have mobile web access.  Of those 100M actually use SMS and 44M actively use mobile web.
4.    In developing countries, an increase of 10 mobile phones per 100 people has been shown to lead to a 0.6% increase in GDP.
5.    The increase in power demand in handsets is increasing 25% year over year.
6.    The increase in power density is increasing 5% year over year.

And finally, my favorite stat…

7.    49% of the devices purchased in the past six months are 3G capable, smartphones, or 3G smartphones.

As the saying goes, chew on that!

The Kindle was another device touted as “open” by various folks, and again that’s a pretty absurd contention.  It is carrier independent, but hardly open.

I like the idea of the Kindle, but I can’t see buying one.  My TIBH (toddler influenced buying habits) leave me unconvinced that an eBook is a wise investment.

First of all, it’s pricey.  Secondly, if it should be jumped on, vomited on or assailed with any other kind of liquid, playdoh or WTRS (weird toddler related substance), I’m guessing it won’t remain as useable as its paper-based cousin.  Thirdly, I simply don’t read enough at present to justify the purchase.  And finally, I need another device that has to be charged like I need a hole in the head.

But it is selling, and Amazon’s library of content is growing rapidly.  They’ve more than doubled the number of available titles to 200,000.  I can’t find my notes at present, but the numbers for how many eBooks each customer bought were impressive.

When you look at sales of individual titles in the e-version versus print, they’re seeing solid revenue growth.  For the available 200k titles, every $100 of revenue breaks down 90/10 for print versus eBooks.

Aesthetically, I can’t get excited about the thing.  But, like Apple and the iPhone, the way Amazon have made it work is seamless and I believe that is what makes it sell.

Every Kindle is personalized.  When you fire it up for the first time, it (a) knows your name and (b) is linked to your Amazon account, making future purchases easy.

As soon as it’s on, you are presented with a personally addressed letter from Jeff Bezos, and in the background it will immediately start downloading whatever titles you’ve already purchased.

The presentation included quotes from happy customers.  One was convinced that the device was pre-loaded with his purchases at the factory.  But in fact, it all downloaded automatically while he was reading the welcome letter.

So again, like Apple, you have a device that is completely closed.  But consumers don’t care because the user experience is seamless.

I’ve spent the past couple of days at the “Open Mobile” conference in San Francisco.  It was my first real brush with the traditional mobile industry since I added Sony Ericsson to my client list.

Mostly the conference did a great job of highlighting how utterly screwed up the mobile industry really is.

Openness was definitely a hot topic, with a borderline verbal brawl breaking out between Android and Symbian at one point (my favorite part of the whole conference.  But I spent a good chunk of the time having flashbacks to Enterprise software circa ’96 – ’99.  Everyone was desperate to explain how incredibly open they were, while making it very clear that they were anything but.

In mobile right now, the height of rebellious openness seems to be “off deck” distribution i.e. distributing software and/or content outside of the carriers.  And the poster-child for this radical notion was Apple.

Now in the circles I usually move in, Apple and openness aren’t words that spend much time together.  I don’t believe anyone from Apple was in attendance, but I think even they would have been embarrassed by the label.

Many reasons were cited for Apple’s success, ranging from “the number of applications” to “it’s a very attractive phone”.  And there were the usual collection of nay-sayers – “won’t last”, “no-one is making money from the App Store” etc.

But all of these opinions rather miss the point.

Over lunch I had a very enjoyable chat with a gentleman from Intel and we chewed on the subject of Apple at some length (almost as long as the bad beef we were served).

The iPhone works as well as it does because it offers a compelling and complete end-to-end experience.  The device is sexy, with a slick UI, a largely great user experience and some novel uses of technology.  Once you’re registered, it is very easy to find an application and install it on your phone without a desktop machine anywhere in the process.  I’m personally not a fan of the device as a phone, but as a complete mobile eco-system, you have to respect what Apple have built.

But open?  It’s not an open system at all.  It’s firmly, squarely closed.  It’s not so much “off-deck” as it simply changing the definition of “on-deck”.  AT&T doesn’t control the App Store (although they clearly have influence) but you can only use your Apple device to download Apple approved content from an Apple approved supplier.

Can you choose your carrier? No.  Can you download applications outside Apple’s carefully controlled App Store?  No (okay, you can jailbreak your iPhone, but then you face a whole host of other potential issues).  Can you release an app that improves on Apple’s contact app?  No.  Do you need more direct access to the underlying hardware, or flash support?  Good luck.

Need to do anything that the Gods of Apple (or their friends) might in any way take offense to?  Fat chance.

But 6M+ consumers could care less.

And are you ever going to get the same experience from a Windows Mobile or Android device?  It seems unlikely.  Whether the tradeoffs will be worthwhile remains to be seen.

By mobile phone standards, the entire iPhone customer base is a tiny fraction of the total market.  But to ignore what Apple have done so successfully is as foolish as missing the point of why they’ve had the success they’ve had.

More on the mobile industry in my next post…

But that was before I’d encountered an ongoing, and doubtless lucrative scam that they run.  Just my opinion of course — freedom of speech & self-expression, not a libelous statement

Here’s the way it works.  If you deposit cash into your account after 2pm, it won’t clear until the next day.  Yes, cash.  What’s more, they have a nifty system that typically clears debits before it clears credits. Or at least, debits seem to clear at any time of the day whereas credits only clear at certain times.  The same applies to checks, but I guess that’s not quite as unreasonable - I can at least see a rationale there.

But wait, there’s more…

The bill pay system is pretty erratic and poorly linked to the checking account section of the website.  Once payments are scheduled in the billpay system you have no idea (or indication from their system) of when the cash will actually be deducted from your account.

Net effect: if your income and expenses are finely balanced, this double-whammy will guarantee that you routinely go overdrawn.  And as a freelance consultant, things often get stretched a little thin on the cashflow side of things.

Why don’t I have overdraft protection?  Because they won’t approve me for it.  They’ll happily clear $600+ in debits and charge me $400 or more for the privilege, but they won’t approve me for a $500 overdraft facility (and this was well before the current credit crunch).

I finally lost patience with this on a day that I happened to have some free time.  I’ve always found that making a public fuss in an allegedly customer friendly environment can be an effective way to resolve things.  On this occasion I went all the way to the branch manager.

Here’s a summary of the manager’s response:

1. It’s “the system”. You can deposit cash before 2pm at the counter or by 4pm at an ATM (!?) and it will clear the same day.  However, a large deposit (more than a few hundred) made at an ATM will have a hold placed on it until the deposit is verified.
2. I should consider opening a savings account to act as my overdraft facility (there’s a small flaw in the logic here, but I’ll let you point that out)

   and my personal favorite:

3. I should keep a written ledger as well as use their online service.

I can’t wait for Wells Fargo to roll out their systems and fix this…

My current gigs include biz dev work for Shoeboxed, marketing for F-Origin and technology scouting for Sony Ericsson. It’s an interesting and diverse group that certainly keeps my mental juices flowing.

But it’s also left me with little time for blogging… and that lack of time has been complemented by a lack of inclination too.

But like a toddler in a time-out, my urge to speak is getting the better of me.  So I’m back, and ready to blitch.

More soon!

The trouble is with an over-levered financial system built on a house of cards comprised of under-collateralized toxic paper that was applauded all the way up by “housing is the American dream” nutters who couldn’t see that vast expansions in thinly-traded credit are a path to economic ruin. Focusing on the short-sellers will lead to completely wrong and counter-productive non-solutions to the current crisis.

This is certainly not my area of expertise, but I agree with Paul 100%.  If only he were in charge.

<sigh>

The Democrats are acting like a startup with a big idea.

You ask them “what’s it about?” and you get a hundred answers.  The economy, the war in Iraq, healthcare, education, welfare reform, George Bush, foreign policy… The list goes on.  When they remember they say “we’re new, this could be huge, it’s all about change.”  They know there’s a big opportunity and they’re chasing it hard.

But the Democrats are so sold on how they’re new, exciting and different that they are completely unable to deliver a compelling and simple value-proposition.

I swear it gives me flashbacks to my days of pitching disruptorMonkey and a number of the startups I’ve consulted with.

Back to the NPR show.  One of the panelists was talking about Obama’s tax policy versus McCain’s and pointing out that Obama’s was fairly similar to what Bill Clinton did when he was in office while McCain’s was largely a continuation of Bush’s program.  Okay, so what?  The guy went on to say that under Clinton ~22M new jobs were created.  Under Bush, it was ~5M (one of the lowest rates of job growth under any President).

Ay caramba!  Now that’s a value proposition.

Obama:  “My plan is a lot like Bill Clinton’s.  His plan generated 22M new jobs over 8 years.  The Bush plan you’ve had for the past 8 years generated 75% fewer jobs.  Under McCain, you’ll get more of the same. If you want 15M fewer new jobs in 8 years, vote for McCain.”

Yes, there are many more features and benefits that they can talk about, but like any good startup, they need to get focused and deliver a value prop that’s compelling for the vast majority of their audience.

I think that one is a good one — it would work on me.  Maybe there are others.  But they sure need a mentor who can get them to that point of clarity. And like a startup, they need to do it before time runs out.