Mobile Is Eating The World (continued)
This isn't the first post I've written with this headline. That was here. But both of the posts are about slide decks I saw.
I was looking at Henry Blodget's Future of Digital 2013 deck this morning and saw this slide in it:
TV is hanging in there admirably. It seems to be weathering the mobile onslaught even better than the desktop web. But the mobile monster is eating everything. The jump from 2012 to 2013 should be terrifying to anyone who has a business based anywhere but mobile. That includes me. Wow.
Comments (Archived):
what is the distinction between ‘online’ and ‘mobile’ in the slide?
Simply desktop vs cell phone. @jimhirshfield – disquss comments on the mobile is still acting up… Problems writing, I have to hit “done” and then reopen the comments to regain the ability to type. I also find replying to people (on mobile) shockingly difficult, I know we are still in beta, just saying.
Hmm…what OS are you on?And yes, still in beta, limited release.
7.0.3
Thx
Jim, still true: You need to rewriteyour code for doing a ‘flow’ on whatusers enter in a standard HTMLmulti-line text box. That is, somehowyou are not handling logical end ofline or ‘carriage return’ appropriately.HN does it well — maybe think a littleabout what they do and copy that.Next, if insert a URL via a standardpaste from the clipboard, e.g., as inhttp://www.youtube.com/watc…then instantly get the multi-line text boxcontents rewritten as double space.There is no way to add an imageduring an edit of an existing post.This post shows some of thedouble spacing. And in this paragraphget a blank line between “image” and”during” for no good reason.The usual way I make a clean post isjust to type into my favorite text editor,copy to the system clipboard, and paste into the Disqus text box. Thatworks fine.
Thanks. Having our Product Team looking into it.
Great question, Jason! I tried to find the detailed report to help determine this but couldn’t. I’m certainly not arguing the trend but would like to better understand the definition of “mobile” vs “online” vs “other”. If is it simply “desktop” vs “cell (smart) phone” (as Brett Goldberg suggests) then what about tablets and notebooks which can clearly be mobile devices. Once this is clarified, the results would be more meaningful and relevant. The devil is most always in the details.
Seems like the focus and consensus here is that “Mobile” means “Smartphone”. I believe that at some point soon, the “smartphone” will become our personal computing device and replace all others. The only wild card will be how we interface with it. Will we always be relegated to the small screen or only while truly mobile? Alternatively, when in a fixed location, our smartphone will leverage other interface devices to improve our overall experience (keyboards/monitors, TV Monitors, glasses etc). So, when considering building applications for this architecture, we need to keep in mind where this may be actually heading so companies don’t lock themselves into just “small screen” options.
> I believe that at some point soon, the “smartphone” will become our personal computing device and replace all others.My desktop will be pulled hard from my cold dead fingers. I want a bigscreen, a keyboard, all my files andsoftware, my ability to write software,good quality speakers for music,my laser printer, etc. I want a biggerscreen, not a smaller one, a betterkeyboard, not some ‘image’ on a touch screen, etc. And my favoritetext editor, my most important program, too, runs only on x86 based machines.Mobile has a role, but let’s not say thatit’s really a direct competitor for desktop.
Oh for sure, this won’t be for everyone. But, eventually the smartphone will have more power, storage and apps than any desktop. You’ll likely have a Bluetooth enabled screen and keyboard that the smartphone will connect to. And it’ll be fully backed up in the cloud so that should you lose (or forget) it, everything will be still readily available.There is no question, “mobile” will change a lot of things.
But, eventually the smartphone will have more power, storage and apps than any desktop.I very much doubt it. The proportion of dark silicon in smartphones is growing, not shrinking. Techniques such as computational sprinting support only limited use cases — those that arise when using a smartphone like a smartphone.
> But, eventually the smartphone will have morepower, storage and apps than any desktop.Sure there can be a lot of apps that are on mobilebut not on desktops, either Linux or Windows. Butnearly any important app that actually can run on adesktop, i.e., doesn’t need GPS, likely will.Otherwise it will be nearly impossible in principleand/or practice for a mobile device to have more’computing power’ than a desktop because a desktopmid-tower case has much more space and there is muchmore electrical power available.For mobile to have more computing power than adesktop would seem to imply that there were someapps unique to mobile that needed more power thannearly any desktop, and that situation is a bit farfetched. If there is to be such a case, then maybethe apps would be games; still, a mobile devicedrawing, say, 500 W stands to warm/burn thelap/hands of the user!> And it’ll be fully backed up in the cloudI don’t know everything about Windows, but from allI have seen so far backup is a serious problem onWindows, especially of the operating system files.Yes, a lot of people don’t backup. I do backup, anincremental nearly everyday, a full backup of mydata (without the operating system) when theincremental gets too big, and a backup making quitecareful use of the Windows program NTBACKUPto backup the operating system files (files on myusual boot disk partition) after a significant change.Still, from what I’ve seen backup and recovery onWindows need work.For the cloud, not with my data. Not a chance.There are issues of computer security, the NSA,lawyers, software flaws, the reliability of the datacenter in the cloud, intellectual property, etc. Nothanks.My protections from unreasonable search and seizurein my home are quite strong but in the cloud quiteweak.To me, my work is quite important, and my computingis central to my work so that cloud storage is notserious enough for me.With all the NSA, man in the middle attacks, etc., alot of people will be highly skeptical of puttingeverything in a cloud except what they have on theirmobile device.
I’ve said it before, and I’m saying it again:Mobile is not a product. Its a channel.Mobile does not define your business. Its simply a place to distribute it.You don’t base your business on where you put it. You base it on the product you’re selling.NBC can hawk its product (entertainment) on any of these channels. AirBnB can sell rooms on any of these channels. Instagram could enable photo sharing on any of these channels.Your channel is not your business. Your product is your business.
Yes and no.How and where you sell is indeed your product to your customer.
Not sure I get this. Can u expand a bit please? I can see how method of distribution contributes to brand…but not sure how it contributes to product.
Do you remember the experience of buying your first suit or car? Or that feeling of shopping for a special bottle of wine to suit the occasion? Or its pouring rain, not a cab anywhere and Uber saves the day to get to the airport and make your flight?Soap from Amazon is part of the Amazon brand of efficiency. A bottle of Cornellissen Munjebel bought at a tasting at Chambers Street wines is part of the enjoyment you feel when you consume it later.And–to your point, whether you thin slice it to distinguish brand and product, its criticalness remains nonetheless.
Thank-you. Yes i understand your point. The entire experience forms the quality of the product.
It was a great question, thanks for asking.
great question and great replies – the joy of avc comments. 🙂
What is the special experience of, say,Google search, Bing search, the pageof the US National Weather Service thatgives me the current weather and forecast,a business class seat on an airplane thatgets me there, a taxi that gets me there,the Brother B&W printer (that replaced mybroken HP from 1995) that does print wellwhen I need to use paper, a bag of frozenMozzarella cheese I combine into a dishwith some ground beef cooked with oliveoil, onions, garlic, and black pepper, withsome canned ravioli, topped with somehard Italian cheese, a case of quite decentChianti with a label in Italian I can’t readand an origin I know next to nothing about,the bottle of olive oil, the bag of peeledgarlic, the bottle of black pepper corns,a gallon of milk, a long breaker bar anda deep socket I use to change a flattire, or any of a long list of products withhigh utility but low on ‘overall buyingexperience’?
Food Truck Vs Restaurant ?
True–but there are some food trucks, in LA especially as I remember, that created a community around them that gathered as they tweeted out their location,
Milk Truck here in NYC. (Disclosure, owned by a friend’s husband.)
The Kogi Truck was my original reason for signing up for twitter. But when you found that truck, it also had the most amazing Korean/Mexican tacos and burritos you’d ever had. They had the right product, and used a novel delivery channel to set themselves apart from the crowd.
Haven’t found one in NY that does it for me. Different culture, huge abundence of choices not on wheels, so easy to get around.
Los Angeles has an abundance of great food as well (though certainly farther apart, or focused in particular ethnic neighborhoods). A lot of the food trucks have just liberated chefs from the cost overhead of brick and mortar. Sort of like having AWS when you were used to owning your own server!Plus, from my time in NYC, you want to stay off the roads as much as possible. Driving a food truck around would be a nightmare!
Yup–Lived 6 years in LA, so agree, great restaurants. Nobody gets salads like they do there.In NY food truck are just added storefronts. In LA they are nomads connected to customers through online.
Agreed – I meant to imply that the delivery channel is integral to the product.
Bottled Water, would you pay for evian tap water?
only were i an eco-minded vc filling my pool
@awaldstein:disqus , aren’t we back to customer behavior?
Never left it. Whenever you do you loose.
Indeed. Marketers parse product, packaging, positioning, price, distribution, etc., to a granular level, while the consumer bundles and evaluates in totality.
Mobile can also make markets more efficent when everything but price is the same. See Shop Savvy and RedLaser App
Agreed but with mobile you can build entirely different (superior) product so mobile is more than your channel. Mobile is your product first. Mobile has dimensions that desktop and TV do not.
This is the kind of faulty thinking that leads young entrepreneurs down the wrong path. They end up saying to themselves, “let’s build something for mobile.” They should be saying, “let’s offer a useful product… and then figure out how to distribute it on mobile.”
When the VC says I’m interested in mobile, I’m building something for mobile.
So you’re in the business of putting VC wants and needs before your own passions and the needs of customers.I hope you wake up tomorrow and realize how ridiculous and awful that sounds.
You are missing several points: 1) great VC’s are great because they recognize trends before the rest of us; 2) 10x+ returns are not a random walk; 3) there are millions of dollars being invested in consumer behavior, don’t confuse survivorship bias with passion and understanding consumer behavior; 4) your points are valid in the arts and sciences.
VCs don’t recognize trends before entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs walk into the office of a VC and **prove** that what they’re doing is **already** valid, or else they don’t get a dime of funding.Don’t think USV invested in Twitter or Etsy or Kickstarter or whatever based on what their crystal ball told them. They may have seen the potential of those businesses before most people, but I assure you the founders of those companies saw it before Fred and gang, and proved it to them in multiple meetings and due diligence processes, and after a long process, finally got them on board.You’re right that 10x returns are not random. You’re right that understanding customer behavior is king. But no one ever got to those places by hanging on every word of a VC. VCs can’t even agree amongst themselves, so why on earth would you take the word of any one of them as truth 100% of the time? Fred wants a 6 page deck selling a vision. Brad Feld wants a 15 page one that checks off specific details. Whose word are you going to chase now?Successful entrepreneurs ended up that way because they knew their product; they knew it inside and out and knew what they were really offering people, and that the channel, be it a phone, TV or whatever, was just a device. And, above all, they knew how to filter feedback and just focus. They knew that even the smartest people would tell them the dumbest things, and they learned how to ignore it and not be a blind idiot who takes every word of a VC as gospel.VCs don’t have crystal balls. And putting them on pedestals is damaging. This is how people end up chasing the wrong things. This is why there are a bunch of useless apps in the app store right now, because people read about everyone saying “go mobile!” and don’t stop to actually think. And then use “VCs know what they’re talking about” as justification for their idiocy.This vicious cycle helps no one, and ultimately hurts everyone.
Ventures are probabilistic not deterministic. VCs aren’t necessarily smarter, but they do have access to more information and earlier information than the rest of us. They also have several orders of magnitude of real time experiences (their dead pools) than the entrepreneur. This makes VCs better at knowing the expected value of a venture (they do a better job at the P in the E(x)).As to Twitter, Etsy etc., you have it backwards. The founders really had no idea where their product would go or how big it would get. Just ask the founders of Twitter. They will be the first to admit it. USV understood the power of “higher engaged groups of users”, Etsy had a trivial idea.Most of your arguments about VCs are about seed stage and early stage investments. You can’t possibly blame the VC community for the hundreds of thousands of useless apps out there? These exist not because of the failure to follow one’s passions, but because of one’s desire to follow the first passion that pops into our heads. IT IS THE PASSIONS THAT ARE MISDIRECTED. Don’t blame that on the VC. See Yale computer science professor Galernter for more on this.But there is a more important point that rarely get mentioned in this type of discussion, DURATION. One of the skills of a VC is making sure the duration of your assets (business model, talent, IP, etc.) matches that of your liabilities (cumulative burn rate) to get you to the next level. Great VCs do this better than anyone.
Now just what the heck am I supposedto get from David Gelernter this time,I mean after his semi, pseudo, quasi-great idea in ‘Mirror Worlds’ about organizing files by dates? Yes, yes,I know, even if Gelernter doesn’t, that,yes, the world is a ‘current of sigmaalgebras’ or a sample path of a stochastic process indexed by time(uh, locally, f’getting about relativity)and taking values in some absurdmeasurable space. Right. That anda dime needs another dollar to covera ten cent cup of coffee.
Not sure entrepreneurs put “VCs on a pedestal;” they certainly shouldn’t with their very low hit/success rate, as illustrated in Fred’s blog post last week. Entrepreneurs initially are enamored with the money trail that VC’s can provide. On truly large, scaleable ideas, most entrepreneurs can’t do it alone financially, or they lack the biz savvy/experience to address their own or company inadequacies. I buy into the mantra that “one should know what they know, and know what they don’t.” A good VC can help one see the light.
Nicely understood and articulated.
such would explain ‘the performance numbers’ said the aware analyst. but just sometimes the vc is right said the 10 bagger who punted.
This really is no different than the argument that some people have against porn. That it ruins real relationships and makes men expect perfection in their own women which simply doesn’t exist.It’s even effecting you. And I’ve see it take a hold on others at AVC who feel they have to get a piece of the bigger action instead of something they can achieve that has a much greater chance of success.
I mostly agree, strongly, with what youare saying, but there is a point: A high end mobile device will have GPS.Then a mobile app that makes importantexploitation of GPS has ‘mobile’ doingsomething a desktop can’t so that the ‘mobile’ part is a crucial part of theutility of the product.
Great point…folks that haven’t built a product–are not building a product–can get all dogmatic.
“Mobile is your product first”For sure if it plays directly off a function of the phone- Instagram
Yes and no. If you product is great but your mobile delivery interface is not you have a big problem
If your mobile interface is sexy but the product it’s offering is useless, you have a bigger problem.
Think mobile, design global. But, it’s what’s on the page that counts. If you aren’t thinking how people will use this walking around, you will design features incorrectly
All of this is very well and true.I just get a little worked up over this subject because I hear folks my age trying to start businesses, running around saying stupid shit like “I need to build something mobile because that’s what VCs say on their blogs” without, first, thinking about what is the actual products they’re putting on a mobile device.I’ve spent several years dabbling around, figuring out what kind of business I want to build. A lot of the education I got in that meantime was via VC blogs like this one and many others. And when you’re a noob (as I still am) you can be easily swayed by a post like this. I’m sure some kid is reading this and is already hacking away, building something on a phone but has no clue what. Maybe he’s building yet another photo sharing app the world doesn’t need because, “Well, that works on mobile!”That doesn’t help anyone. Least of all, that poor kid building that millionth app that no one needs, wants, or will pay for.I’d rather point out the discrepancy with the thinking that leads to that place, and save that poor kid the heartache and effort.Yes, its a semantic, but it’s a very important one: put your product before your channel.
I’m with you. Kinda like my trying to explain something that will become a different type of mobile and get back the using current mobile (they don’t understand limitations) and then claim some kid is a genius because he’s working on something meaningless to send to the App Store and get his family members to pay $.99.
Fish in the Blue Ocean
Fantastic book. Your product- what can you invent, what can you increase, what can you reduce, what can you eliminate. Answer those questions, and make sure it works on mobile too!
Well put. Another one that has been driving me nuts is people saying they want to do a start-up. Not I have a burning problem that I think a lot of other people have and I need to solve it. The problem is irrelevant. They just want to do a start-up.
it has become an upper middle class thing to do.
And when you’re a noob (as I still am) you can be easily swayed by a post like this.Brandon – the brainwashing that goes on here at AVC is way way way down on the scale of things.Compared to what happens at HN?Not even close. Like everything Paul Graham says is taken like gospel I can’t even begin to imagine being hatched into that world in terms of what lessons are being learned and followed by younger people and the choices they are making.Not that some of it isn’t correct. Of course it is. The problem is if you’re that young person you don’t necessarily know which part is correct. And to dispute any of it gets immediate kickback from the community. Not here though.At least at AVC Fred will say something and there is a back and forth where people agree or disagree [1] with what he is saying (like you are or like many of us do). And there is a discussion. If the reader of the blog doesn’t put the effort into understanding other points of view and follows down a path he deserves the education that he gets and will quickly grow up.Least of all, that poor kid building that millionth app that no one needs, wants, or will pay for. He’s probably not a “poor” kid of course.Upvoted of course because you are right.[1] I was going to take issue with the chart and had all these comments but then while vetting it I realized that I might be able to sell something to the people that created the data for Blodget so I decided to keep my mouth shut.
Lol.If there’s any brainwashing on AVC, I don’t think Fred is actively at fault. I frequent this blog most because I get the most out of it. I wouldn’t have been able to start a business without it or him.But the fan boys who hang on his every word, even when those words can use an edit (or are flat out wrong, like Fred himself admitted in his “Marketing is for bad products” post), that’s where the problems come from.Taking anyone’s word as gospel 100% of the time is lunacy. And thinking that Fred couldn’t use a nudge to think about something differently from time to time is also lunacy.I should have done like you and kept my mouth shut.
> Not that some of it isn’t correct. Of course it is. The problem is if you’re that young person you don’t necessarily know which part is correct.Good point. Long ago I concluded that the mostdangerous knowledge was not what was true youdidn’t yet know but what was false you believedwas true and acted on.
What do you think of the Yahoo domain auction? Do they really have anything valuable?
Here is the list:https://www.sedo.com/search…This is what is known as “end user pricing”. It’s not priced for anyone to buy and sit on. I’d have to go through each name to see why they have decided a particular name is worth the amount listed. Before I either laughed or agreed with what they came up with. (Like av.com or webserver.com or mym.com …)The thing they have going for them is lots of publicity for the auction. Because it’s yahoo. There is another one coming up at ha.com (click on domain names or ip auctions) in a week.If I was an end user that wanted one of these domains I would simply sit out the auction and then try to buy if after or from the person who bid successfully. Unless it was a must have.I hope of course they get a shit load of money at the auction for some of these names. That way it’s legitimizes things to all the people out there who need to see social proof of value.The only “really valuable” name is the two letter .com. That is a name that even an investor would typically pay 200k for.The other names range from names that everyone owns comparable names to and names that might go for a nice dollar if the right corporation starts to bid against another corporation that wants and fixates on the domain.
Here is the point. Many entrepreneurs think VC’s are the customers, when in truth they are the VC’s customers.Now this certainly is not supported by the usual shopping behavior, i.e. there are hundreds of entrepreneurs chasing VC’s.However! For the truly great deals VC’s (or more usually their associates) call entrepreneurs. If you are even perceived as a good deal, you will get many more calls than you could ever make yourself.So keep this in mind. The VC is NOT your customer. If you are a right fit you are the VC’s customer.So don’t build for the VC. Build for you. That’s right you. If you are not a good fit for the VC who cares?? You built it for you right?Also it is great to read outside perspectives and viewpoints on everything, so so that as well, but do it for you!!
Bingo! VC’s are sources of capital. Not customers.
Then you have nothing.
Looks like a post comparing stories of those that are Great Product, No Mobile vs. Sinking Ship, Didn’t Get Mobile Right would be good.
hailo and uber and in fact that entire category are 100% mobile. If you are 100% reliant upon what you call the channel – i’d say you are a mobile product.
I might change “mobile delivery interface” to “mobile delivery mindset”. Desktop mindset = creation. Mobile mindset = GIGIGO (get in, get/give information, get out).
Desktop = Productivity, Mobile = Transactional.
> big problemGee, guess I’ll have to short Amazon becauseof their “big problem”!And have to short Google and Bing if only because,whatever UI or “delivery interface” they have, nearlyall the search results need a big screen, and, for me,my keyboard and main collection of files, so that theyhave a “big problem”.Yes, mobile is terrific for getting a taxi in Manhattanor for girls to gossip or use SnapChat and more.Mobile payments? Gee, I thought that we could still usecash or credit cards — I still do. Mobile payments withsoftware access into my bank account with the threatsof malware, hackers, computer viruses, poor computersecurity planning, etc.? No thanks.
I agree with the gentleman Brandon. Mobile as a platform is a channel. Loehmans doesn’t sell inventory/product through the web or mobile (at least the not the last time I checked).
and if you are enterprise (ish)
This is very evident on the content production side of the media business. Talent is now multichannel. Two sets of CDN on air sports talent have recently moved to the US. Both of the hiring production companies lauded the talents ‘multiplatform’ capabiltities. In short, they do traditional TV work, a podcast & they do effective social.I agree – you do not need to be a sloely mobile business but your business had better have a mobile plan ( a bit semantic admittedly ).
Not semantic at all. That slight change of wording = a huge (necessary) change in thinking and execution.
Nicely put, James.
Mobile can be a product, when “but for” the mobile experience the product would not exist, Instagram, Waze etc.
Also, I don’t understand what “Mobile” is here. I watch TV on my mobile device (I don’t even own a TV device), I am online on my mobile *all the time*, and I even listen to radio on my mobile. If we’re talking about devices, then, yes I spent a lot more time on the mobile/digital devices than anything print/analog.
Not sure Fred or this chart suggests or even intimates that “mobile is a product.” It’s a chart about media consumption trends. Period. Yes, all successful products start first and foremost with the goal of being needs based, but channel distribution is equally important. I do take exception with Fred’s comment that TV is “hanging in there admirably.” Cable TV share has been thriving at the expense of broadcast, although financially all TV is doing well cause it’s still a mass reach vehicle, despite declining ratings, particularly in prime time.
Correct, but if your product isn’t optimized for mobile access, and your customer segments are on mobile, then you are missing out on a big part of market access.That said, the mobile product is a) the website, and/or b) the app, or something that goes inside one of them.
NEWS FLASH Shoes still outselling SlippersMobility = timeless pivotal human survival strategyThe popularity of the wheel still growing !Mobility has always been integral to the production and delivery of all goods and services.Even toaster sales still depend on a strategy to mobilize mindshare along with physical or digital shelf space.Virtual mobility now in ascendancy due to the low cost and connivence of cyberspace.Trend expected to continue !IN OTHER NEWS . . . . . .
Retailers who integrate mobile correctly for Christmas will flourish those who don’t ,won’t.Case in point. Yesterday I had a guest (customer) come through my line with $400 worth of Christmas toys The guest told me if we would match she would buy with with us. She was using the Red Laser App. She was saving $20-$30 a clip. 3 other guests overheard this and immediately downloaded the app. Later on I figured out these 4 guests accounted for 1% of our sales yesterday. That’s a lot to let walk out the door.Retailers can follow approved price matching policy or try to cherry pick competition but you will loose. .
Wow. That’s an interesting story.
wow. you’re right. slow to react to that = death
So you would need for the person operating the POS terminal to have a wide range of price flexibility? Could you build this into a negotiation protocol of some type, communicating with the RedLaser app in the customers hand, taking the “offer” it is producing and either matching it or countering based on something? (That something I guess would be the meat of the proposal).
That’s a great idea Timothy!
I had to do quick stop by the new Acadamy Sports yesterday to get fishing line for my FTC robotics team. Had to wait too long at check out with a gal who was trying to handle cash plus explain the rules regarding “Price Matching” and to someone else the reason what they saw in the flyer was not actually in the back of the store.On the price matching, your idea is on the money!!!
That “something” is walking out with your goods now vs waiting for the delivery van. Worth a premium. How much depends on the customer’s lifestyle.
Mobile products also have the advantages over desktop product. They can be more easily built to be* More viral* Location aware* Context aware* More custom (ie incorporate interest graph)The big Tsunami is the ubiquity of smart phones in developing countries. A friend commented yesterday that now they are offering unlimited data at 10 cents a day.
“should be terrifying to anyone who has a business based anywhere but mobile. That includes me.”Huh? This…here, isn’t mobile?
We have plenty of portfolio companies whose mobile offerings are sub par
You lookin’ at me? YOU lookin’ at me???
Lol! Thank goodness you have a sense of humor, Jim!
🙂 Gotta roll with the punches.
Are you funny like a clown?
Do I amoooze you?
Best part was the guy he shot grows up and has a leading role on the Sopranos. Best line from that guy (I use this sometimes) “two towns over and I want a taste”.
I am not looking at any single company. I am looking at almost every single one that started on the web
I know. And I think you know I was just trying to be funny. And everyone of the regulars here knows we’re iterating on mobile solutions.
am i the only one seeing something slightly different with Disqus on mobile? Clicking on the up and down arrows makes them bigger, and as if the text entry box has changed a bit. It’s a subtle change, but interesting.
Iterating….yes.
It was ironic reading this post while simultaneously seeing a link to this article pop up in my Twitter feed (I think Brad Feld tweeted it):http://www.zdnet.com/why-iv…Microsoft is falling farther and farther behind in this new world. Hitching themselves to their own OS and taking so long to get partners capable of building quality handsets has really put them behind the 8-ball in relation to iOS and Android. It’ll be interesting to see what direction they go in as a company if Windows Phone can’t make up ground (and fast!) as people continue to abandon their traditional Windows desktop experiences.
They’re going after education via Surface, pushing Office/Bing
Maybe they should port the legacy Office codebase to TypeScript and target it to both JavaScript in the browser and CLR, then support embedding both in Metro apps.They should also look at Metro on Surface as more than a tablet OS and ‘back-port’ the Windows interaction into it. (Meaning if you want you can resize the full-size windows, drag them around. ChromeOS supports this, I could resize this window and show multiple on the screen on an external screen but the default is maximised.) They can’t assume that every user will want to use touch.Market share for iOS is stagnating and Apple will be forced with the same conundrum shortly, trying to merge the desktop and tablet/mobile experiences, keeping the mobile-style monitisation in their Mac App Store, but supporting a more casual user on their laptop form factor. They may look at having true productivity apps, or resolve the current iWork regression debacle by making the apps “progressively enhance” depending on the input device available.
Agreed. On the “touch” subject, isn’t that part of their marketing message vs. iPad?
Well, their marketing message for Surface seems to be…Actually I have no idea, bigger is better? Click? The cool kids are doing it (which is social bullshit, not proof, as anyone can look around and see that they are not.)They proved it wasn’t for business by putting a broken Outlook on the device (I will give them the rest of Office as they quickly pushed a patch for that.) Same thing BlackBerry did with their tablet, leaving off the core feature.I thought about Surface and ended up going with the Chromebook, equally panned by many in the tech press and commentators, but perfect adequate for my users, and eminently portable. The reason I stayed away from Surface was the locked down Win32, it was infuriating to think I was running Windows but could not run open source Windows apps, which could have been easily ported to ARM.
Yup. A year back, my local school was pushing the Surface for our 1:1 that is starting in January. At that time, I gently was arguing timeline forward and Micro really didn’t have track record. I used comparison to Google and in the end won (we won’t have Surface). It will be interesting to see if Micro will ever get it. I originally was just referring to their latest marketing message.
Mobile is a tough word as a category. Like natural in food as it has no context and very hard to layer it in.A filmmaker friend told me recently that images of guns and nudity are the same, impossible to change the preconception in the viewers mind and challenging to add subtlety to.
It’s difficult to read a lot into this graph. Facebook is haemorrhaging teens to mobile apps and also redefining itself as a mobile company. Add a few other explosive mobile apps (WhatsApp or Instagram) and you have enough to give the strong mobile growth given it’s low starting point. A graph of revenue generated by channel would be interesting.Mobile is a great place to be once you have market fit and some stability in your development but for rapid iteration the web is still better (well for us @Flooting anyway).
What if we thought of mobile through the lens of Operations? There are 24 hours in a day. Sleeping takes up 8 of them, so you are down to 16. Other incidental actions take hours(like work, bathing, getting around), so maybe your max hours available is 10. Of that ten hours a day, different media and platforms compete.Conversely, as governments continue to raise taxes on cable, more and more people are cutting the cord (especially younger people on iPads)How often can I touch my customer in those 10 hours? Mobile lets me touch them more, in more places and in unique ways. Obvious B2C angle, but what about B2B? No constraints either-I can hit them on mobile when they are watching TV—and it might even be more powerful. (so I should design my radio and television ads to force people into my mobile channel)
Conversely, as governments continue to raise taxes on cable, more and more people are cutting the cord (especially younger people on iPads)That’s also an attention span thing as well.You only have so much entertainment you care about or need. If you are able to get it from something in your hand you don’t need it on cable at any price (although if cheap enough you might have it stick around like a spare toaster).At night I always have a laptop out before going to sleep.I might watch netflix, 60 minutes, pbs or youtube with music videos. But sometimes I start to read or follow links on HN or similar and not watch anything. Just read on the laptop. To many choices and each is not as important as it used to be.Now several years ago the choices would have been a) a book or b) the tv. In other words before wifi because the computer (even with broadband) was not in the bed.Can’t even remember the last time I read a book in bed although I have a bunch of them laying around.Now if I wake up in the middle of the night what I do is reach for my iphone and read on that. In the past I would have reached for and read a book. So part of my point is one thing replaces another and makes it less valuable at any price.
Attention span is severely diminished. If you can’t do it in 90 seconds forget it. Guess it gives males an advantage. (Last line was a joke). I still like to read books better than Kindle’s.
Google’s newest search feature will provide intra-app content. Search will be changing.
Yes. Big time. See this:”How in-app search is going to keep Android awesome — and Google in control”http://gigaom.com/2013/11/1…
The pieces for this have always been in Android in the form of Data Providers, they just haven’t had a good story for the exposing it to third-party applications.It’s got to be in three pieces though, local RPC on the device (to activities launched just for the purpose), persisted and indexed data from providers that don’t have to remain resident, and out-of-band connections to web-based services running on remote computers, that still involves a call to a Google service, keeping Google in the loop and making it almost useless on AOSP.I guess Google has figured out that the “world’s information” no longer lies on HTTP servers that anybody can crawl, and has been moved into private values hosted by companies like Facebook, Twitter and Disqus, at least where the world’s information refers to the stuff relevant to individual users, which is the stuff of mobile search.There are no good standards for how to make things searchable, even where this would be valuable for discovery and incoming traffic generation, do good ways to represent structured data (or even full-text searchable data) that can be presented on mobile devices. It all feels like OpenDoc all over again, with some lesser form of OLE slowly getting introduced, but with the same fragmentation that cemented Office as the core of business applications.I applaud what you were doing with Engagio, and what Google seems to be doing with Google Now, though the idea of a searchable voice application ecosystem, as well as information truely at your fingertips have still eluded them. Case in point: searching TWTR from Google Now last week didn’t cement it in my Google Now feed as a stock card.For all the glory of a a CSS3 powered HTML5 the ability to actually use information in a structured manner is no better than Gopher, or the early web, and every plan from on high to fix that has failed.Computer, just answer my damned question.
Interesting. Do you think this in-app search pass-thru is going to be a game changer, and an advantage over Samsung?
Hmm, I’m not sure what you mean by “pass-through” in this sense?I do believe that in-app search (or search of your apps on your mobile device, where those apps represent the collection of accounts you have on various services) will be huge when it is done correctly.Samsung had a form of this on their devices and were shut down presumably be an ITC action from Apple, though the same technology existed on both Palm and BlackBerry ( know this from API docs on both platforms) implemented pretty much the same way, a startup code or intent is sent to every app on the devices to search for a string and results are provided to the OS via a callback.What I’m talking about is something else, it’s essentially saying “I’m an app on your device but the content you really want is on a server with hostname x.y.z and here is the protocol you should use to full-text context search it.” Then you would take the results and format them in a way that makes the content immediately useful. Let’s say the question is “when did Sam last instagram?” or more specifically, “has Joe gotten back to me on WhatsApp yet?” The real clue is that it’s not something you really want a notification (push channel) about, as there’s no history of you wanting to know everything that Joe has said on Twitter, for instance. This would be hard to put in a useful content feed as you haven’t expressed interest and would just end up as notification spam. Alternatively, you could have missed the notification, and just remembered that you were waiting for a response.To your second question, Samsung is trying to build their own device economy, though I can’t see what exactly the plan is with confusion like Family Story and Fitness on my Samsung TV. I don’t think any manufacturer using Android can beat the Google ecosystem. The killer app is really Gmail, which is the funnel all the user’s intent comes from, every ticket reservation and financial notice can be harvested an displayed on Google Now. Apple comes close by controlling Mail, but that only works if the message comes to your iPhone. Google intercepts it before that point, whether your Android device is on or not.I think Google’s plan is something like this: Chrome apps and Android apps will be two different interfaces to the same thing, Google will be the backend provider and hold things together, and the Android app-based services will be encouraged to open up to Google through some kind of endpoint, allowing them to notify users via Google Now, but only if it’s Google’s best interest to allow this, meaning they can find some way to display contextually relevant ads with it.
If I stream from my phone to a TV, I wonder if that’s TV or mobile?
Is the delendent variable time spent? If so, is this the right metric? We need new metrics.
true. relates to my comment; there is a distinction between spending time vs. doing something.you might argue it’s the same for desktop.
What do you think this means for entrepreneurs with good web dev skills & not great mobile dev skills. Should they produce a haft baked mobile product or produce an excellent web product, but have mobile pretty early in the pipeline?
Get good at mobile
Good answer! What about if there is web version almost ready to go. Start from scratch with mobile or go with the web you have & start going mobile asap?What I mean is how do you think this effects companies just launched or ready to launch on web? Have the tides turned enough to mobile that those companies come out with an immediate disadvantage?
never get married. be prepared to toss out stuff when it isn’t sustainable for the future.
Line from “Heat” with Deniro and Pacino comes to mind. Something like “never get so attached to someone that you can’t leave them if the heat is around the corner” (why Deniro got caught in the end he didn’t follow his advice).
What do you think this means for entrepreneurs will better web dev skills than mobile when building an initial product. Should it be a mediocre mobile product to start or a great web product with mobile a priority in the roadmap?
Mobile measurement is tricky because there are 2 components: a) time spent on mobile vs. b) conducting a transaction on mobile. Sometimes a) leads to b) in a non-mobile setting, so that is changing too.Mobile Commerce and Mobile Advertising are emerging segments that are brewing and about to take off. I’m willing to bet that’s where Twitter will play next.There’s a really good post written by a Twitter product manager, “Why Mobile ROI is Really Hard”. It’s a must read https://medium.com/mobile-c…”Although consumers are spending 32% of their digital time on mobile, only 10% of digital commerce is occurring there.”
Yep, Time != Attention
Fred’s graph from Blodget is unusually goodfor Blodget but, still, is misleading.The guy running a Web site doesn’t muchcare if the user is on desktop or mobile.Even for someone who spends a lot of timeon mobile, that does not mean that theydon’t still need a desktop as their maincomputing.People who have always needed a desktopvery much still do and want a still better one.Yes, a lot of light users of desktop could getall they needed on mobile, but only a tiny fraction of serious computer users can.
Just get the chip implant already
Looks like the drop in online shifted straight over to mobile. I look at my kids and all the screens we have. They don’t understand or care the source of the media. They just grab a screen and start tapping. It’s what’s next to you right now — immediate gratification. And that’s mobile.
Fine for children. Good. Mobile is good forchildren! Not for me! I want better computingthan my desktop, not worse, and for me anymobile device so far would be much worse.
This seems more about the trend to personal consumption – what you want and when you want it. We have always wanted that and the technology is here to support it. No surprise here. Mobile is all about personal consumption by its very nature. TV is can be with the advent of on-demand and DVR services.
The lines are too blurred for the mobile/online distinction. Radio was never categorized by where you listened to it: home/work/car. Online content should be the same.
This distinction between online and mobile as put forward by this blog post is pretty much irrelevant, outside of the recognition that your content / application may be consumed from different devices with different screen ratios.I am writing this comment from my laptop, but if my laptop didn’t have any juice in it, i would have written this from my phone.. No big difference.I expect better on this blog than ill-advised cheerleading…
Couldn’t agree more . . . and not just in consumer businesses.Mobile’s impact on enterprise apps is just starting to be felt. Before salespeople had laptops, there was no SFA. Before decent dial-up speeds, there was no salesforce.We raised our Series A (announced today!) to help leverage mobile to make both salespeople and sales teams more effective. With sales reps filling in only the most basic forecast data 75 percent of the time, there’s a huge opportunity to build apps that help salespeople sell . . . and capture more data for the enterprise along the way.http://blogs.wsj.com/ventur…http://blog.selligy.comCheers —-Chris.
My issue with these types of slides is that ‘mobile’ isn’t really being defined properly. Just because I use a tablet doesn’t mean I’m mobile- it’s just a more convenient form-factor at the time. Mobile needs to be defined by it’s location (ie at home/work vs. on the move) since that tells the real story of mobile’s effects on media consumption.
I understand this fully although this talk about “Mobile Eating” the world is beyond obvious and ridiculous. I’ve seen many articles and chats about this lately with people on both sides. It’s almost like News Anchors last year reporting and asking is ” Twitter & Social Media here to stay, is it forreal?”–Year 2012.
That said, its good to be reminded of the trend and to acknowledge the peripheral data.. In fact I was somewhat surprised at TV’s resiliency.
I don’t understand the chart. Isn’t virtually all mobile online? Thus, there’s a multicollinearity problem in whatever it is that he’s trying to say.
mobile…, but who bought the Francis Bacon triplet at Christies NYC last night via their smartphone?
Telecom, media and tech have fully converged. We should not rush to conclusion and state adamantly that old media is dead. Old media is present in new media. If old media could snap out of its persistent inertia, they could buy their way into new media. After all, they control most of the infrastructure that new media uses…
Powerful chart but the way it is presented glosses over two important and underlying trends:1) Total media consumption continues to increase – the average minutes consumed per day increased 12% between 2010 and 2013 to 725 total minutes. Mobile drove most of that growth.2) Channel losers have digital analogies – people are performing offline activities on their mobile devices which speaks to the distribution channel perspective. People are consuming less radio and print but they’re listening to more music and reading more content on mobile (http://pewinternet.org/Comm….
Gaming drives the category. Advertise to the gamers and sell your wares. Social Gaming Networks rule.
Since mobile is eating the world, which are the most successful or up and coming Mobile companies? (maybe Hackpad it?)Criteria: either 100% mobile or they wouldn’t be what they without mobile.- Square- Uber, Hailo- Lyft- Instagram- Vine, Snapchat- The messaging apps- Kik, WA, Viber, WeChat, Nimbuzz, etc…- The music apps- Foursquare- HotelTonight- YieldMo (mobile ads)others? i’m running out
Verizon Wireless, Sprint, t-mobile, and at&t to whom we owe everything ;)The thing I think fits most closely with what you are looking for would be Instapaper. On the game side what about Letterpress and Dots, along with Words with Friends. Also twitter might be accessible on all platforms but I tend to view it as a mobile company.
i posted about that this week and there is a spreadsheet we can look at https://docs.google.com/a/u…
true, and these were via the app view. do we define mobile just by the Apps?
Does data reveal difference in 3G/4G vs wifi (offload) access?
Not that it changes from the macro trend, but interesting how no one notices that none of the share figures add up to 100% until the current year. Everyone is in such a rush to make their point that they fail to even look at a simple chart. Do we know where mobile is taking share? Pretty colors though . . .
Where is the chart which includes desktop?
It ate me.
Re TV viewership, this other article from January– also from Business Insider– seems to paint a much bleaker picture:http://www.businessinsider….
An article title makes the reader curious by what can be made gradually eats a natural part of the life of man.
I feel like a bigger drop in TV is getting saved here by the facts that it’s both passive & a habit. My girlfriend insists on keeping the TV on every night even though our actual attention, most nights, is in consuming information from our mobile devices.
Here’s an issue: productivity tends to increase with available screen size. There are definitely tasks that lend themselves wonderfully to mobile: taking pictures, small games, social media feeds, etc.But there are a lot of tasks that don’t lend themselves well to mobile. Video production, spreadsheet work, etc. I don’t care how good software gets, screen size is valuable. And not just 4″ vs 5″. 4″ versus 30″.I think that the right framework is beginning with the right screen for the task. For written word, that order is probably tablet, phone, desktop. For intelligent work, it’s probably desktop, tablet, phone. Gaming operates at split ends of mobile (time-filling) versus console (immersive).
3 things about mobile:1) it is with you continuously and instantly on as compared to almost every other screen which has 2-3 “barriers” before you can interact (if you even can in the truest sense; linear TV is far from interactive). mobile is the “preferred” access device.2) it (the smartphone or radio hub) can control and interact with an infinite number of connected devices and apps and sensors via bluetooth and wifi.3) the law of wireless gravity, which holds that a wireless bit will seek out fiber as quickly and cheaply as possible. wireless should be viewed as an extension of wireless and any online app/site should satisfy “state” across all contexts and screens. thank goodness for Steve Jobs resurrecting equal access to open wifi; otherwise the current boom wouldn’t have happened.unfortunately overall growth is retarded by high 4G pricing due to the inefficiency of vertical integration of service providers.
There are exceptions, but the path to a unicorn is not a “random walk”.
My reaction as well, Charlie.Identify the problem; determine a solution; develop the solution with the input from those for whom you’re solving the problem; understand your market and how it will interact with your product (i.e. distribution channels best suited to reach your market); iterate… iterate… ; invite VC to participate if needed.
Work with a VC who is also part of your market.
This is exactly the problem that I have with short thoughts. Hard to get the nuance into a sentence or two w/o further explanation.I think what he means is that you will have a higher probability of getting funding from a VC if you come to them with something that is on their mind that they are primed for and think is hot.All the other stuff that people are saying to retort him is of course correct and obvious. Duh.I mean if you were a band in the 60’s and saw that the Beatles were taking over the country and that music execs were looking for more “Beatles” would you go on a different path or would you try to get a piece of the brass ring by latching onto that ship?It might not be what you would do or what I would do but it’s not a totally ridiculous idea otoh.Right now Fred is hot on mobile.Separately Mark Cuban totally skewered some guy on Shark Tank because he hadn’t even thought of using social media to get customers. To Mark just that fact made the guy an idiot and was a non starter. Mark also has a special place for sensors in the world. So if you are pitching him that’s going to go over very well assuming the idea makes sense and all the other facts check out.The bottom line is part of the “market” here is the money guy. And if the money guy has a sweet spot for a particular sector come in with a product for that sector. (Or of course just develop a product for another sector and find the appropriate money guy for that.)Some people might find this hard to believe but there are people out there that just want to make money. And they do so by figuring out something that is hot and go from there. No right or wrong way to make money.
AM radio;)Someone pitched me the other week about radio through cellular, pushing channels into cell phones as most have unlimited minutes. Doing it already for immigrant populations wanting to listen to news from home.
Great point. I listen to all my radio via a phone, live and podcast.
One of radio’s big problems is they spent the 80s-2000s trying to commoditize the product business and make all their money on the channel business. It’s much cheaper to pay Rush millions a year than 1000 hosts (and their producers and staffs) 40K a year. There are a large number of local radio stations both talk and music that are basically entirely automated and centrally programmed with no local product at all.Now that they no longer have a channel monopoly some of them are scrambling to get back into the content business (with mixed results).
Yes we did this at Foneshow back in 2006. The problem is that the audience who wants this is largely one who sucks it up and gets a smart phone.I did hear one company is trying to resurrect the old CLEC business model on voice channel radio. They will surely get sued out of business (as before).
Thnx.I decided not to get involved.
I remember when Howard Stern first came to Philly in the 80’s.At the time you had these local morning men who knew the area who everyone liked. I didn’t think it would work with Stern (otoh I hadn’t heard him until he started to broadcast) but obviously it did (was Stern’s first market outside of NY iirc). Really well.So the product of comedy was more important to people than what was provided by the local guy who was also trying to be funny and could relate to the area as well (which Stern didn’t know). In the end Stern was good enough that non of that other local stuff mattered.In the end the automation (you are talking about) allowed the stations (this is a guess I’m not up on this business) to sell advertising cheaper.By selling ads cheaper they worked better so overall it was a good thing. As an extreme example what you could place a 60 second ad on 1010 wins in NY and only pay $50? What a bargain that would be.I wonder what would have happened with newspapers if they weren’t so high in their pricing for print ads? Perhaps the critical mass of advertisers and readers would have provided a product that still would make sense to a segment of the population.(For examples those circulars that feature only ads still work for local advertisers at the price that you have to pay for the ads. At a higher price it would be a complete failure as a medium to reach customers.)
re: lulitonix.com – Article in WSJ you might be interested in:What’s Behind the Green Juice Fad?http://online.wsj.com/news/…(I didn’t read yet saw in the print edition this am).
Thnx, saw it already. Touches lightly on HPP lawsuit which is a big under the radar controversy brewing.
They mostly sold ads for the same price just a higher margin, so the ads efficacy was not really impacted.The local stuff doesn’t matter until it does. There are stories of towns getting hit by tornadoes and the local radio station just keeps rolling through the playlist.
Your comments were a proxy and practice in fending off a potential threat. Rich needed defending and I decided to try to support his point of view with a few words. If you had said “I agree you are right Rich” it would have been less fun.
In the old days, terrestrial listeners were dependent upon radio DJ’s for introducing new music and new artists. They did the heavy lifting for you. The record labels and A&R teams also served as a filter insuring that a limited number of artists got signed, although I would argue there was a higher level of quality product on a % basis back then vs. what’s avail today. The death knell for terrestrial began with Napster, pro tools, etc., and has continued with sub services like Pandora, Spotify, etc. All that aside, my real beef is that open source has made it increasingly more challenging to find/locate good, quality music, and has led to an excess of crap.
Using DRM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…There’s a huge amount of bandwidth there if we give up analog AM broadcasting.Also, there’s another block of spectrum that the government could repurchase (basically through a paid consumer recall) and auction that has been mostly ignored for the last decade.