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.