Been forever since I blogged, just haven’t been in the mood I suppose. So hopefully this will be a good one.

As nearly everyone who has read The Innovator’s Dilemma knows, every so often a new disruptive technology comes along and wipes out companies who are based on an older technology. In the book, Clayton Christensen studies steam shovels and hard drives. Turns out companies that made a certain size HD rarely made a smaller one, and eventually died when the smaller ones became as good as the big ones. Same with steam shovel companies being replaced by backhoes.

Now, a whole lot of people out there, including me, believe that the cell phone is the disruptive technology that destroys the PC, and any company whose business is based on the PC. Yeah, I’m looking at you Microsoft. To their credit, they saw this years ago as well and invested heavily in Windows Mobile. Which, to date, has been a staggering failure. There are lots of reasons why, but what I thought was rather promising with good experiences like the Audiovox 5600 turned into a Blackberry also-ran with products like the T-Mobile Dash (my current phone, and I’m counting the days until the contract is over).

I can’t detail all the specifics of why Windows Mobile has failed so badly, but here are the big ones:
- A complete lack of vision. Windows Mobile didn’t have an idea what they wanted the mobile experience to be. Rather, they looked around, saw Blackberry as the leader in the business space, and copied it with a Windows look-and-feel. Now, in fairness, there’s lots of good precedent for this (copying Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Mac) but of course there’s also been other failures, or at least works in progress (Bing, Zune, XBox). However, once a better vision came out (the iPhone), it dwarfed Blackberry, which wiped out the nascent Windows Mobile.
- A lack of focus. Or rather, the focus was on the OS. JUST the OS. Not the phone / OS experience, not the phone / OS / application experience. Just Windows Mobile. The integration and applications were left to carriers and 3rd parties… some of which did a good job, but most didn’t for a variety of reasons.
- A stupid business model. The Windows Mobile model was like the Windows PC model - carriers would pay a rather large licensing fee for the OS. The business plan here was one of many that come from Microsoft that start with, “Imagine everyone in the world uses your product. Then…” Turned out, that wasn’t true in Mobile, and the carriers weren’t so stupid that they didn’t remember what happened when Microsoft did this to IBM years ago. Go figure.

Part of the Windows Mobile experience that was just poor was the application experience. There wasn’t any place to find them (no app store), and when you did find one, you had no idea if it would work on your phone or not, and if it did, how well it would work. Screen size? Resolution? Windows CE or Mobile? Stylus? who knows. Aside from a few apps shipped with the OS, it was a total wreck.

Now, to be fair, Windows Mobile DID do a couple things right:
- Sync with mail and calendar, esp. Outlook, worked amazingly well. Ever since the AudioVox 5600 I could look at my phone to see my calendar, and check any mail.
- Reply to mail. Writing tomes wasn’t a good idea, but short SMS-style replies worked well.
- Be a phone. In particular, Windows Mobile looked for things that looked like phone numbers and let you dial them quickly — a huge win when a phone number might be in Calendar (such as a conf call-in number).

So, where am I going with this?

Well, last week I decided to hop on the Nexus One bandwagon. I have a nice plan with T-Mobile, and turns out buying the phone & keeping the plan was a few hundred bucks cheaper than AT&T with an iPhone or Verizon with the Droid. And the Nexus One had many things that the iPhone didn’t that are attractive:
- A beautiful OLED screen (and it is SO pretty)
- A camera with a LED flash (I have kids, turns out the camera phone is key)
- True multi-tasking, so you can have a GPS-centric app run in the background (like SportyPal, which records where you are while running / cycling)
- Removable battery and expandable storage. Not that I care that much, come on Apple, $100 for 16G of SD RAM?

Now, in addition to the above bonuses, the most important big is what I thought I was getting, which is what everyone has with an iPhone:
- A decent phone
- Decent e-mail reading and writing
- Integrated Exchange (mail + calendar)
- Good web browsing

But fundamentally, the Nexus One, not to mention the Motorola Droid, were clearly the first starts at a true disruptive technology. The focus here was to have a mobile device that integrated well with applications in the cloud. And while I personally don’t use most of those applications (just Search & Maps…. don’t use GMail at all as I just get spam, and only use Calendar ‘cuz my wife uses it), seemed like a good opportunity to try them.

But, while Nexus One delivered well on all the “why we’re better than iPhone” features… it turns out they didn’t deliver on the basics! The phone as a phone is OK, but I found it getting hot while I used it. Not so good. Web browsing isn’t nearly as good as the iPhone, although the Dolphin Browser you can download makes it closer than the built-in Google one. But e-mail… ok, yeah, syncs nicely with GMail, and the built-in email client talks to Exchange and does IMAP better than any other client I’ve seen. But writing e-mail… wow. Does that suck. The keyboard itself just doesn’t work… in upright mode, the keys are too close and require too much concentration. Horizontally, it’s better except for keys near the space bar (like “c”) or the period. Then you keep typing the wrong key. Plus, two spaces are translated as new sentence. The infuriating thing here is that selecting one of the type-ahead words automatically adds a space, so typing space after that actually puts in a period and capitalizes the next word… which is usually never what I wanted.

It also turns out that the Nexus One doesn’t come with Exchange Calendar sync built in. I suspect it’ll come in a month or three, but come on, how do you not release that with Exchange mail sync? A decent app called Touchdown (which is also a better mail client) can be had for $25, but really, I shouldn’t have to be paying $25 for calendar sync.

OK… mail clients will be improved… but a letdown as one of the primary apps this thing is pushing. Perhaps I can get used to the keyboard. My pal at Google says his wife tends to use the voice dictation bit… so I try that. It’s eerily similar to handwriting recognition on the Newton. While most words were accurate, random others were not, which led to a lot of editing. Not super horrible on the Newton, but man, huge pain on two lines for the Nexus. But whatever, new technology, doesn’t quite work, not a big deal.

And then, the clincer. I was complaining to my pal that I couldn’t copy and paste text from the quoted message in an e-mail. He pointed me to this Google discussion which basically highlights that copy/paste isn’t really implemented on the Nexus anywhere in any consistent fashion, nor is Undo, as they are on the iPhone.

What? You mean I can’t just hold my finger down to start selecting something, and then move it over the text to select, and then copy it? Such an obviously intuitive thing that “just worked” on the iPhone is a feature request on Android *2.0*?

At this point, I realized that there is something fundamentally wrong with Android and the Nexus. In fact, I will go so far as to say it’s the same path to failure that Microsoft is already taking on Windows Mobile. With Android, Google is focusing again on the operating system. Yup, they copied a bunch of stuff from Apple correctly, and yup, they added some fun features and got a couple other want-to-have’s done. But a removable SD card and battery are easy (especially when everyone EXCEPT Apple does it). Yup, they’re not charging carriers but going all open-source. Yay client + cloud business model. But how do you miss copy & paste? The fundamental building block of cross-application interaction? You miss it because you’re not thinking of how the entire thing works together — phone, OS, and applications. You miss it because you’re not thinking of how people are going to use the phone. You miss it because you are making a great operating system, but leaving the hard part — the integrated customer experience — to someone else.

So, looks like I’m getting an iPhone after all. Fundamentally, disruptive technology has to work. The iPhone just works. Sure, it’s not integrated as well into tons of cloud apps, but it does mail and calendar just fine - and that’s what I need. Details are considered and handled. The entire package is the product, not just the hardware, OS, or apps. And fundamentally, there’s an overall vision — it’s not just an OS on a phone, but there’s a real mindset to what people will do with the iPhone.

At any rate, perhaps I’m just venting a bit as the Nexus One is a $45 restock fee frustration. But my wife really pointed it out to me when, after a few days playing with the Nexus One, we went to the Apple Store and she played with the iPhone — and immediately loved it, despite really not wanting to.

And thus, let me end this with my sole prediction: Android will go the way of Windows Mobile. Which is to say it’ll be out there and embedded in lots of things, but as far as a real competitor to Apple and even Blackberry…. not so much.

Bing is live! Live is dead!

Although I gotta say, who thought it was a good idea to use as the first background image a montage of things that rise, powered by hot air, and then just travel slowly wherever the environment happens to take them?

Still, nice work guys. Nice to see something new finally!

I’ve been meaning to write this for some time, but the recent Microsoft Search announcement is forcing me to write this faster than my schedule would normally allow. Probably a good thing.

We interrupt this blog to shamelessly hock…

The Kindle!

I got one for my wife for Christmas, although it arrived just in time for her birthday. It rocks. She uses it, far more than her iPod I got her years ago.

On a recent flight back from Seattle, the guy next to me had a Kindle I, and the guy in the aisle across from me also had a Kindle I.

My brother-in-law asked my wife if we could get him a discount on one. He’s not a nerd. He sells Hyundais in Pittsburgh.

The point is, the Kindle has entered the US vocabulary in much the same way as the iPhone. Books are great, and eBook readers exist, but the Kindle… rocks! And people are talking about it, and coming up to people when they see one to check it out. There’s this huge energy around it.

THAT is how to tell if your product is relevant, or not. If people are talking about it, it’s relevant. If people are complaining about the price, it’s relevant. When you see non-early adopters, and non-techies to boot, use it - it’s relevant.

In a few days, we’ll be seeing what an 80M ad campaign can do. My measure for its success will largely be whether or not I hear anyone talking about it. Will my family and friends mention it to me, and ask me if it’s any good? Will they ask me if I feel bad for leaving? Will they ask me whether I use it or Google?

If so, then Microsoft might well be back in the game.

But if they ask about a Kindle discount…

Oh - answer is, “no, sorry.”

Looks like Microsoft has gone with Bing! as their new search engine name.

I guess they think it’s different enough from SouthWest’s Ding that they won’t get sued (or already worked something out with them… not like www.ding.com isn’t clearly for sale), and enough time has passed from the Soprano’s Bada Bing strip club…

The very interesting thing will be whether they can start to get traffic. They’ve apparently got an 80M rollout for it. But I’m still skeptical that they’ll be able to actually get into people’s heads.

I haven’t been very consistent in blogging, especially about search, largely as it’s been rather tedious. I left the group over a year ago, and for the most part the search offering is pretty much the same as when I left. The market share has eroded. And while there is wild rumors of a plan for a rebranding… well… we’ll see.

I’ve also been very frustrated with Microsoft. I admit, I’m a fan, and Microsoft’s recent actions have left me feeling… well, let’s just say the peanut gallery is unimpressed.

No, it’s worse than that. The peanut gallery is disheartened, and disappointed.

In a recession, there are a number of companies that flail - not just the AIGs and WaMus of the world, but small companies struggling to make a profit. There are lots of companies that hunker down to make it through the lean times. There are a decent number of companies that do well - I work at one. Turns out that discounters, and Amazon.com is one, tend to do fairly well in tough times.

Then, there are a few special companies out there that can actually change things, and be the leaders of a new way of doing things.

Sony comes to mind. Sony is the company that, almost single-handedly, turned “Made in Japan” as a stamp of poor quality trash into a stamp of excellence, completely transforming an entire country’s production after it had been devastated by war.

I would have thought Microsoft could be that company during this recession.

When Balmer announced Microsoft would be laying off 1400 people, out of 90,000, that was about as weak a statement as I’ve seen. Citing that Microsoft wasn’t immune to the global downturn, they laid off 1400, told their employees that 3600 others would also be gone, and that it was time for extreme belt-tightening. All because they only made $2 billion in profit that quarter.

What I had expected was that Microsoft would just say, “Yup, profits are down, but we’re still making $2 billion, so we’re going to invest and come out of this just fine once the economy heats back up.” That had been the SOP for other downturns; if there were layoffs, it was the musical chairs type. Divisions would be re-orged out of existence, and people in them would have 3-6 months to find a new job or go away. Unbeknownst to them but knownst to all the hiring managers, good people were on a “save this person” list, and bad people… weren’t. So things got sorted out pretty quickly.

What I had hoped for was that Microsoft would be that Balmer would come out fighting. Not only would Microsoft be investing its massive earnings now, gearing itself up for when the economy heated up, but Microsoft would be investing heavily. Because of Microsoft’s diverse, and somewhat inelastic, revenue streams, Microsoft could do this. Microsoft was not going to be just another company hunkering down, Microsoft was going to invest for the future. And when that future came, Microsoft would be in a prime position to take advantage of the situation.

At least, that’s what I had hoped for. Ah well.

Well, that didn’t last long…. Jan has decided to go work for Qi over at Microsoft. Win some, lose some.

Well, looks like Microsoft is readying it’s latest search update. The internal site is Kumo (as in www.kumo.com), but the latest speculation is that Microsoft isn’t going to go with that branding. Whatever. Ina Fried over at CNet even picked up a screenshot, which I’ll copy here:

A couple of things come to mind. First, tabs are now on the side, and there are lots of links to sections on the page. Taylor Swift web pages, songs, lyrics, biography, music, albums, videos, etc. Then there are related searches, and then a very interesting section: “your history.” So, looks like they’re finally going to start to show you your previous searches and possibly let you do something with them! It’s about time some of that work started to see the light of day!

Another thing to notice… after every URL, there’s a “mark as spam” link… which I’m sure all the SEOs are talking about now, as this will allow them to mark their competition as spam in very entertaining ways. We’ll see how that goes.

Now, what really struck me about this look is that I’ve seen it before. In Korea. This is essentially the Naver look-and-feel:

Naver is the #1 search engine and portal in Korea, and everyone else, esp. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, aren’t even on the radar there. There are a few reasons for this, but the #1 reason is that Naver established an Answers section early (prior to their search engine if I recall), and thus they have a large knowledge base of useful answers. Yahoo Answers and Microsoft Q&A are essentially clones of Naver Answers.

Two things come to mind with this design:

1. It’s too busy.

OK, 3-column displays are back, like Ask 3D. Fine. And linked sections. OK. Now, I’m not terribly familiar with Taylor Swift, but presumably people who do queries on her are looking for fairly specific things, which is why the top relevant items should click so well, and related searches should do well. Come on, I know Microsoft has prior knowledge of what people do when they make that query. But this design ignores that in favor of bombarding the user with every facet of knowledge that is present.

2. They’re going for the women.

Huh?

Remember a year ago when Ask.com decided to abandon its quest to be a general, all-purpose search engine to everyone and just focus on women? A lot of people heaped scorn on the idea. I personally thought it was good; in any business, you need to identify and service your customer. Trying to be something, or everything, to everybody typically doesn’t go over well. And there are plenty of examples of niche search products doing well… for example, my original project, MetaCrawler, is still doing reasonable business for InfoSpace for a small cadre of a few million people that want to search multiple search engines at once. It won’t get you a trillion-dollar valuation, but it’ll make a good living for a 100-person company.

Well, when the showcase image is an entertainer, it means the features are going to be very heavily skewed towards people who want to search around and consume a lot, especially in the entertainment space. People who like Celebrity xRank, another feature Microsoft has been touting for a while. These are not features for the Microsoft Office Information Worker segment. No, these are features targeted at the same demographics as People Magazine - older women, typically stay-at-home mom, controlling the family buying. Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s a great demographic to target, and People Magazine just prints money every month. But, well… really? That’s the demographic?

Well, the cat is finally out of the bag - InfoWorld is reporting that Microsoft has registered kumo.com, and will be using Kumo for it’s new search engine as well as other search-related services.

Heard that before? Well, it’s essentially the same thing as Live, except that the name doesn’t mean much in most languages (means “cloud” or “spider” in Japanese, though…. which aren’t bad puns, all things considered). Now, granted, Kumo may go over better than Live, especially if it has more marketing behind it. I’d also imagine that unlike Live, they’ve probably spent a year or so working on the name, testing it with focus groups versus others. Although I personally am worried that it’ll sound either too close to Kumon Learning or “kum-o” which might be slightly, uh, risque. But that’s besides the point - the major issue is that, like Live, nobody has heard of Kumo, and Microsoft has rarely shown itself able to launch a new brand. For people to move over, it’ll take more than a brand - it’ll take good reasons for people to try it out. That’s what will be interesting.

What’s surprising is that at CES, there hasn’t been any talk so far. Balmer’s keynote was all about Windows 7. OK, that pays the bills, and it’s a huge mea-culpa about the suckage that is Vista…. but the message was, “Look forward to the new Operating System.” It wasn’t “Look forward to Kumo, our new search and online service offerings.” CES is the place to announce that, unless of course you’re waiting for the SuperBowl or something (and again, please Microsoft, if you’re doing a commercial, don’t make it the 3rd after the halftime show. Please?)

I haven’t been blogging as much lately for a variety of reasons… but the biggest is that the Search Wars seem to be, well, over. Certainly Microsoft is still very much agitating about them, and the Yahoo! death watch continues, but… there isn’t anything there that I can see. More to the point, now that I’ve been out for over a year, a few things come to mind:

Awareness

Here’s the biggest problem I see with Microsoft’s search now that I’m not working there and in the middle of things. Most people aren’t aware that they’re an option. People know about Google, they know about Yahoo. They remember MSN, but people don’t equate that with Search, and nobody who isn’t in the industry knows about Live. There’s just zero brand awareness there. And so far, nothing has changed in the past year. Now, I know Microsoft is planning on rebranding and relaunching Live (again) this spring; I suspect we’ll see a big SuperBowl splash to get the word out (hopefully better than last time, which was a lame commercial that was the 2nd in after the half-time show!). But when will they actually be in the game?

A reason to care

I’m tech savvy, and I pay attention to what happens in Web sites. But as a customer and user of search, I’m blissfully unaware of anything that would attract me to use Live. OK, they have an image on www.live.com, and they bought FareCast and are doing this CashBack thing. Um…. OK. Really, that’s it? And I know that just because I’m sorta paying attention. But it seems largely that there’s really no feature additions that would attract new people and generates people talking about them. And it’s not like there aren’t ideas out there. Where’s a People Search?  Or how about when I type in “Review D700″ I get, you know, reviews, and not pages trying to sell me the D700 that have a link saying “Review yours here!” Personalization maybe? I mean…. come on Harry and Brian, give me something to talk about!

BRIC

Everyone out there either uses Google, or doesn’t. The above spoke about converting people who use Google to switch. Now, let’s talk about the group that doesn’t use Google. Who and where are these people? Well, most of them are in countries that are rapidly coming online - Brazil, Russia, India, and China, aka BRIC. They don’t use Google because they don’t use anything. Thus, they’ll pick the best when they come online. So where’s the huge international expansion there? Google’s pushing there, and they sort of win by default by just being the dominant player. But Microsoft, which has footprints globally, doesn’t appear to be pushing here at all.

Mobile

This is a tougher one, but strikes me as another miss already. One of the strategies that Microsoft has used is to wait for a major paradigm shift and have the right product at the time, thus winning over converts who make the shift. For example, Office was the paradigm shift that enabled Word and Excel to dominate over WordPerfect and Lotus123 — a single business package that had the major software applications people used and that worked together. What’s the next paradigm shift? Well, I don’t know if it’s a huge shift, but I’d say Mobile is the best bet for one. However, while the Live Search app on Windows Smartphones is pretty nice, it’s really just Live Maps. And turns out Google is better on SmartPhones, at least in my opinion, because it loads faster and runs faster. but the bigger issue here is that nobody uses Windows Mobile… the original iPhone has outsold all Windows Mobile devices ever sold combined. Score another one for Google. Yeah, Google is competing with Apple with the Google Phone, but who cares… Google is still on the dominant player (iPhone), and RIM (BlackBerries) seem to rapidly be losing their luster, even if Microsoft buys them. So…. there anything there?

OK… so there’s my four reasons on why I don’t see much excitement in Search. I wish there was something there. Certainly, a product space is interesting when there’s good competition and good features. Remember the mid-90s? There were a bunch of search engines, and people I knew DID compare one to the other. Certainly there was a lot of, “Oh, I use Lycos / AltaVista / Excite / etc. because it’s better” type comments, but all these guys were still offering new features - like image search when it came out, or stock quotes, or whatnot. Things that made people talk, and want to try out a different engine. That’s what’s missing…. there’s no talk, no reason to try something new. People are becoming set with their tool — and until something changes in a major way, the war is done.

OK… since I demonstrated how uncannily uh, inaccurate I am, here are MORE predictions for 2009. Remember, I’m under 50%, so best bet is to bet against me!

Politics

1. Senator Al Franken
2. Ms. Caroline Kennedy
3. Universal Health Care Plan introduced

Search

1. Microsoft rebrands / relaunches Search. Again.
2. Microsoft query share remains within 3% of what it is today.
3. Microsoft buys RIM, pushes Live Search as default Web search for RIM
4. Google stock battered, as economy hits advertising hard (hits others worse)

Sports

1. No movement on Seattle basketball team
2. Mariners, Seahawks, Huskies all continue to suck
3. Steelers head to Miami!

OK… I’ll stop at 10 predictions. We’ll see how things are in a year. Happy New Year!