A new blog post from Forrester‘s Frank Gillett inadvertently illustrates why it makes sense to focus on iOS first when building mobile apps for the enterprise.  Already 1 in 5 (20%) of the global workforce is using Apple products (for work)!

Have you noticed an increased presence of Apple products in public spaces and workspaces in the last few years? Turns out that 21% of information workers are using one or more Apple products for work. Almost half of enterprises (1000 employees or more) are issuing Macs to at least some employees – and they plan a 52% increase in the number of Macs they issue in 2012.

But that’s just Macs.  The numbers are actually more stark for iPads and iPhones. 11% of the workforce using iPhones, 9% using iPads, and 8% using Macs.  The trends are most highly supported by execs and managers – who use Apple products at twice the average rate (over 40%), and with the youngest workers, who also use Apple products at twice the rate.  Great trends for Apple products in the work place.  Think about that – you can reach the most influential members of business – 40% of them and growing – via Apple product-focus.

So the debate of which mobile OS to target first for your mobile app has been an interesting one.  Last year (actually late 2010) Fred Wilson came down on the side of Android first.  But while this might have been a good “by the numbers” recommendation, there are some subtleties that I would have argued made iOS still the place to start for most mobile apps:

• iOS device owners spend more money on apps (and content in general).
• iOS device owner demographics trend toward higher income brackets ( desirable demographics to sell to and advertise to )
• Apple’s iPhone and iPad had healthy halos around them that made them attractive “launch” vehicles for an app.  Wherever you look at ads for an institutions “mobile app” the premier imagery features a prominent iPhone.  Later on these institutions started including Android phones that look… well, they look just like iPhones anyway.

Finally, regardless of which OS you target first, or even if you’re cross-platform from the beginning, you might as well release on each platform one at a time – and get the press release mileage out of it.

Articles like the Forrester article, and of course Apple’s amazing Q4 performance, are reminders that the iOS platform is still the one with cachet, with the halo.

Great interview of Ron Johnson, the new JC Penney CEO, by Seattle Times… In it, Ron pointed out the stores he admires – Whole Foods and Starbucks, and why:

Q. Other than Apple, which stores do you admire?
A. I admire lots of stores. Whole Foods is a great store. I just like their passion for food. It shows up in everything they do. It shows up in their packaging, their presentation and their employees. Starbucks. It truly has created a community. As I travel around the world, I just know that if I go to Starbucks I will have a great experience.

He’s right -Whole Foods is almost the sale of groceries art form.  Starbucks has an incredibly consistent experience.  These are two companies with a very strong process culture.  Ron focuses on the end result (the store experience), but it is deeper than that -  these companies also go deep into their supply chain and understand the origins of everything they’re selling (and then use their buying power to influence the supply chain).  When you motivate that process-focus with a passion for the product (organic food, or coffee), the results seem to be much better than passion without process, or process without passion.  It is almost impossible to tell whether process-focus led to a designed-in passion for food and coffee (to achieve the desired result) or whether passion for the food/coffee drove the focus on process in order to achieve the goal.  But the two together are a powerful tool for a big company to drive excellence.

Another part got my attention:

Q. What ideals have you embraced from Steve Jobs?

A. The importance of doing everything you do to your very best. And that the journey is the reward. If you do things well one at a time, you end up in a really good place. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Control the things you can.

The Apple approach to building a relationship with the customer starts with doing each of the little things really well.  Being a retailer, perhaps “each of the little things” doesn’t start with designing product, but for sure JC Penney has to be looking at design of stores, pricing, brand presentation, and customer service.  I have such a negative opinion of the JC Penney brand, that it is hard for me to imagine shopping there for any reason, for any product.  Literally, it is hard to conceive.

Yet reading this interview, I’m rooting for Ron.  He gets it.  If anyone can turn this around, he can.  But I’d be more inclined to shop there if the name were changed to “Ron Johnson’s” instead of JC Penney.

Getting introspective for a moment – is your organization getting better, one thing at a time?  Are you prioritizing to address the most important things first – but without forgetting about the little things?  Are you distracted by trying to do or change too many things at once? Are you marrying passion and process and following where that leads you in your business?

There are lots of arguments for and against Apple’s integrated approach.  As I recall from economics and watching certain industries, there’s an efficiency to horizontal scaling of an industry. But, we’ve seen the design benefits of the integrated approach with Apple.

But if you’re trying to put products into consumers’ hands, or customers’ hands, there’s a cost to depending on horizontal layers of industry to delivery much needed components into your end-device or product.  The risks are manifest in RIM’s reported results this quarter:

RIM just announced on its earnings call today that it won’t be ready to release new smartphones running the QNX-based BlackBerry 10 OS until late 2012.  [...]

Co-CEO Jim Balsillie said the company is waiting for new chips that will allow RIM to make dual-core phones with LTE. Those chips won’t be ready until late next year.

So… the phones were first late in the upgrade cycle, waiting for the work to get software ready on QNX… then they were later still waiting on dual core chips (as of early this year).  Now they’ll be an additional year late… because they’re still waiting on dual core chips.

Of course, one wonders why they can’t release these phones with 3G and dual-core chips.  Seems to work okay for Apple.  Maybe it is just a smoke screen.

But if it isn’t, it is a cautionary tale against building product plans against moving targets.  Don’t assume another vendor’s components will be there for you unless they already exist or can be produced in volume today.  Apple’s approach to getting deeply involved in the supply chain pays dividends by helping avoid these kinds of public delays.

(So does not announcing a product release until you are, you know, actually releasing a product)

Interesting review from John Reynolds, of the Kindle Fire.  He’s underwhelmed mainly by the form factor, and the lack of access to non-Amazon content.

People often criticize Apple as having a “walled garden” – but if you read the following from John, and you use Apple products, the difference is obvious:

The Kindle Fire experience doesn’t feel like you’re connecting to the web – it feels like you’re looking through a keyhole into one little room of the web… or perhaps you’re trapped in a hallway with many doors and many keyholes.  Many of the keyholes are blocked.

That’s when it hit me… Amazon isn’t giving me access to ‘The Cloud’, they’re giving me access to ‘Their Cloud’.  Everything that I purchase from them resides in ‘Their Cloud’.  The same is true for Apple. The stuff I buy from Apple ends up in the ‘Apple Cloud’…  Flash forward in time and I see myself carrying both an iPad and a Kindle, juggling them from one hand to another in order to access ‘My Content’ in ‘Their Clouds’.

Actually, the same isn’t true for Apple, though I can see why he said that. Apple’s iTunes content seems to be locked to iTunes… but it isn’t.  As much of Apple’s content that they can make DRM-free has been made so – only the studio labels stand in the way of DRM-free content.  From my iPhone and iPad I can access gmail, google docs, netflix, amazon’s store, Kindle content, etc. (In fact, I don’t own a Kindle, but read Kindle books on my iPhone and iPad all the time).  The addition of “iCloud” added features and functionality to my use of Apple’s devices, but didn’t remove any.  My iPhone config can now be backed up to the cloud.  Contacts, email, calendar invites now synchronize better between devices. But I also still synch those items with Google Apps. Having said that, I like John’s vision for “MyCloud” even better than what Apple, Google, Amazon, or anyone else is yet producing:

If the Universe was fair, which it isn’t, whenever I created any content it would be stored in ‘My Cloud’.  Whenever I purchased anything it would be stored in ‘My Cloud’.  Facebook, Google+, Apple, and Amazon would have to pull that content from ‘My Cloud’ to use it in their apps, and I would set the policies regarding access to ‘My Content’.

From what John is observing, it sounds to me like Amazon has produced an “Amazon tablet” not a general purpose tablet.  There’s nothing wrong with that, per se… but I don’t think that that’s what people were expecting when they pre-ordered.

It isn’t hard to think about the analogies applicable to cloud BPM offerings…

I love the Graphing Calculator Story.  It is an oldie but a goodie.

When I hear people (you know who you are!) lament a lack of corporate sponsorship as dooming a project to failure, I want to send them this blog post.  Ron Avitzur didn’t even have a *job* and he got his project done and shipped.  He lists out a litany of roadblocks in front of them – and yet he managed to cajole others into helping him.  To get others excited about his vision for the graphing calculator.

It is a classic example of leadership from below, or leadership from outside.  No one reports to him, so he can’t command a change.  He has no official status.  And yet he is able to mobilize resources by creating a buzz, by being honest, by having passion about his work.

I’ve often been a proponent of leading from below.  If you’re successful, the executive sponsorship will come.  Typically it doesn’t happen the other way around.  So quit making excuses and be the change you want to see in your organization.  Read Ron’s story for inspiration.  No excuses now – we’re getting paid after all! (Unlike Ron!)

Usually when someone says “the end of” some technology, we can all snicker, knowing that this meme comes up every so often and is usually way off base.  In this case, with Adobe’s recent announcement of the end of Flash on mobile devices, we can reasonably say it is the beginning of the end of Flash as we know it – because, increasingly, sites will be designed without it.  Flash won’t go away in a day or a week, but it is in decline.

It seems like a reasonable strategic move for Adobe.  Their engineering team has had more than enough time to figure out how to make it perform for mobile devices – and it hasn’t.  Moreover, iOS was unlikely to support Flash even if it started to perform well.

Still, it was a moment full of rich claim chowder.  No surprise, Daring Fireball has the best collection of such links:

• Everybody Wins – as John points out, it isn’t some competing Apple tech that won, it was HTML5, which is an open specification.
• And clearly, Steve was Right.
• Opponents: in this piece, John reminds us that Apple didn’t win this argument from a position of market dominance, they were starting from a position of zero marketshare in 2007.  And one could argue that keeping Flash off the phone improved the experience – and therefore the sales – of the devices.
• Why Apple is Completely Wrong – one of the more amusing “claim chowder” posts.  JR Raphael’s response is even more amusing, in that he completely ducks the argument he picked in the first place. And of course the first tip-off that he’s lost the argument is that he opens his blog by belittling Daring Fireball and John Gruber, rather than just responding to the points made.
• Did you know Flash 10.1 was going to kill HTML5?

What’s surprising (to me) is how many people really thought Flash support was a problem, or a marketing gimmick that real people would care about.

At least there is one commentator who had the courage to poke fun at his own writing: Dan Frommer, now writing for his own spot, SplatF:

But it was so impractical! Not just the idea of Palm and Adobe banding together — they actually did try to work together on Flash for WebOS devices, and it still failed. But the idea of Flash working well on a mobile/touch device was so far-fetched in 2007, and is still pretty looney today. And that’s a big reason why Adobe is now winding down mobile Flash development. (Though it will continue to try to be a part of the mobile app ecosystem, which is sort of what I was getting at.)

Anyway, I think that was the first time John Gruber linked to me from Daring Fireball. I guess I deserved his sarcasm that day:

Sure, and maybe they can wave the same magic wand and make chips run faster and cooler and have batteries that last for weeks without recharging.

At least Dan owns it.  I’d love to see something similar from Fred Wilson’s blog – a re-examining of the basic truths as he saw them in 2007-8.

So John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame picks up on Seth Weintraub’s report that two-thirds of Google’s mobile search revenue comes from iOS devices.  John’s analysis echoes our own thoughts on the subject:

I’ve speculated for years that by making Apple into an enemy, Google could wind up losing money with Android, long-term, compared to a hypothetical world where they’d kept Android as a BlackBerry-ish OS rather than an iPhone-ish one. iPhone users are the cream of the crop, demographically.

It isn’t at all clear that Android is a net-positive for Google’s bottom line given the relative marketshare of Android devices vs. iOS devices, and the relative search share (which is where Google’s revenue comes from), and the costs of supporting and defending Android (not to mention, buying a manufacturer).

It just feels like Google hasn’t been editing itself enough.  And prematurely it is taking on more fights than any company would rightly be interested in taking on.

To put it in perspective, right now Google is likely making twice the revenue from search on iOS than it is for search on Android.  I would have guessed at (and have always assumed) rough parity between Android and iOS devices, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.  With competitors like these, who needs friends?

http://www.bp-3.com/blogs/2011/08/its-also-about-what-you-dont-do/

Steve Blank’s two-part series on the iPhone is definitely “a different perspective”:

The concept of yearly “improvements”, whether styling or incremental technology improvements, every model year gave GM an unbeatable edge in the market. (Henry Ford hated the idea. He had built Ford on economies of scale – the Ford Model T lasted for 19 years.) Smaller car makers could not afford the constant engineering and styling changes they had to make to keep competitive. GM would shut down all their manufacturing plants for a few months and literally rip out the tooling, jigs and dies in every plant and replace them with the equipment needed to make the next year’s model.

The title of the series is “How the iPhone Got Tail Fins”, using GM and Ford as foils for the smart phone businesses competitors.  A fascinating way of understanding the market, and how business processes can affect strategy, or vice versa.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball gives, to my mind, the definitive review of the iPhone 4S.  What I love about his reviews is that he seems to peel away a bit of the culture behind the product design process, because of his long-term connections with Apple and its products and employees.   He even includes a different take on Siri, the new voice assistant:

It’s also sort of the antithesis of everything prior in iOS. iOS is explicit and visual. Everything you can do in iOS is something you can see and touch on screen. The limits are visible and obvious. Siri, on the other hand, feels limitless. It’s fuzzy, and fuzzy on purpose. There’s no way to tell what will work and what won’t. You must explore. I found it extremely fun to explore Siri — primarily because so many of the things I tried actually worked. It’s a completely different interface for interacting with your iPhone. You’re not driving or commanding the existing iPhone interface with commands. There is no syntax to memorize. You’re just, well, talking to your iPhone.

He has a point- the difference between explicit and fuzzy is really interesting… And who isn’t going to be tempted to ask Siri to jump in a lake?  Or to close the pod bay doors?

To me – the iPhone 4s looks like a continuation of Apple’s general product strategy.  They just keep iterating the fit-and-finish.  And the specs.  And if those options lose their luster, then Apple will invest more in physical design changes. But for now, there is plenty of bang-for-the-buck in hardware improvements and software updates… and perhaps surprisingly, in cloud services.

And, by the way, the numbers are in – 4 million iPhone 4S devices were sold over the Friday-Sunday period.

Sad news today.  Not too much to say today that we haven’t said before.  Better writers, with stronger ties to Steve, and better stories to tell, have written and spoken about Steve more eloquently:

Walt Mossberg: The Steve Jobs I knew

AppleInsider recaps Bill Gates, Bob Iger, Barack Obama, Eric Schmidt, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Carol Bartz, Jerry Brown.

GigaOm covers a similar list of celebrity reactions.

Steve on Steve, at the Stanford Commencement Address in 2005 (yes, I’m very jealous about that one).

And that, as they say, is just the tip of the iceberg. Thanks, Steve.

John Gruber on Daring Fireball refers to this as “The New Apple Advantage“:

But now that Apple’s products are more popular, we’re beginning to see another benefit to Apple’s lesser degree of configurability: greater scalability. Apple needs larger quantities of fewer different components to manufacture the same number of computers as other companies. It’s not just the economies of scale that all companies get when they sell 3 or 4 million laptops in a quarter — it’s greater, because Apple’s 3 or 4 million laptops sold share a larger number of the exact same components.

In other words, the old advantage was the “it just works” advantage… but the new advantage is the scale gained by having fewer products and configurations and still having high volume.

But it isn’t new.*  It just sneaked up on industry analysts, Apple watchers, and Apple skeptics alike.  When Tim Cook pointed out that all of Apple’s products would fit on a single table, that was an allusion to this advantage.  Last year I wrote about this in response to an article by Allan Breillatt:

Second, what struck me most is that Apple’s design process doesn’t consider these throw-away prototypes as waste – it considers these prototypes as a valuable part of the creative process – and that the TRUE waste is producing less than the best product design.  Or worse, producing multiple products that are inadequate.  Imagine if Apple had released 4 iPhones instead of 1 in the first run.  That would have been the real waste – because each of those products would require significant production costs, engineering costs, support costs, and marketing costs on into the future. So Apple is making a trade-off of design-cost against production-waste, from this point of view…

Allan characterized 9 of 10 prototypes being discarded as waste – but from the point of view of production, waste would be producing products that don’t increase sales, or disproportionately increase costs.  The benefit of this focus was apparent in the MP3 market – and it was apparent as Apple entered the smart phone market by introducing the iPhone.  Apple was already (if I recall correctly) the largest buyer of NAND flash memory chips.  Apple already had a pricing advantage on this critical component over every other handset manufacturer in the world (except perhaps Samsung).  And it showed.  The iPhone shipped with more flash memory than the other phones (and still seems to ship with more storage). John writes:

This realization sort of snuck up on me. I’ve always been interested in Apple’s products because of their superior design; the business side of the company was never of as much interest. But at this point, it seems clear to me that however superior Apple’s design is, it’s their business and operations strength — the Cook side of the equation — that is furthest ahead of their competition, and the more sustainable advantage. It cannot be copied without going through the same sort of decade-long process that Apple went through.

One thing I’d point out – the supply chain advantages Apple currently enjoys are much like the supply chain advantages that Dell once enjoyed.  These advantages can be copied, but it takes time, and it takes a different organization and mindset.  Dell had a successful model and Lenovo and HP were eventually successful in equaling Dell’s supply chain efficiencies.  But they all gave up much of their design prowess in the process…

Apple’s approach retains design prowess, and embeds that prowess deep into the component and supply chain.  So John’s right – it takes years (maybe a decade) to adapt.  And the reason that these firms will have trouble adapting isn’t so much a supply chain management problem as a cultural problem.  It is like a blind spot for these firms, and until they demonstrate that they’re aware of the blind spot and are addressing it, I don’t expect them to find the right adaptations to compete effectively.  If I had to guess, Samsung is closer to adopting (copying) the right model than the other firms, and this is part of the contentiousness between the two firms.

* I think you could argue that the advantage was less apparent in the notebook lineup because the volumes were smaller – but there was still a benefit to the focus that Apple already had – and a cost to the lack of focus that the other vendors already had.

Jacob Ukelson recently said:

There was an interesting discussion on ebizQ around the question “What does enterprise tech have to learn from Steve Jobs’ success?” What made it even more interesting for me is that even though the question was asked of the process community, not one person answered “better process management” and certainly not “leveraging a BPMS”. So does that mean that even the process community doesn’t see any way to link outsize success to better process management? – or is this just a quirk related to Apple?

Two thoughts:  first, I think it is a good thing that BPM/BPMS advocates weren’t attempting to take credit for success we didn’t cause.  This doesn’t mean Apple doesn’t have good processes or differentiating process, but with all modesty, I think we have more to learn from Apple than vice versa when it comes to how to run a business process.  It isn’t enough to point at Apple’s success and declare victory for our (or someone else’s) interpretation of how they run their business – we have to tease out the correlated or causal elements and then show that they can be applied intentionally elsewhere.  Instead we should be pointing to those who are succeeding as an example to emulate, not a proof point of our approach – they’re only a proof point if they’re following our lead, rather than the other way around.

Second, I’ve actually made a connection between Apple and BPM several times over the years. I linked to the thread of articles in my ebizQ comment but I don’t blame anyone for not reading them all!

In particular, this one gets the most page views: http://www.bp-3.com/blogs/2009/01/apple-and-business-process-management/

Jacob is wrong in saying that process isn’t what makes Apple great, but he may have a point that process is “table stakes” in the areas we usually think of it (supply chain management, manufacturing, etc.).  Apple’s differentiated processes are their processes for product design and user interface, not to mention their go-to-market decisioning process.  All the great designs in the world wouldn’t be enough if they didn’t have the supply chain process prowess to back them up. But, similarly, all the process prowess in the world isn’t enough if you don’t have the ability to design (see Dell, HP).

Moreover, Apple doesn’t just excel at process where it is obvious.  They’ve innovated with manufacturing process (aluminum casings, glass casings, etc.) that have also differentiated their profit margins and product designs.  These are process improvements – but they’re also process improvements where it really matters.

Jacob goes on to say:

It is clear that companies need to manage processes well, but that isn’t what makes a company great. I am sure Apple had some really good processes, but today those are table stakes. The real battlefield is in the realm of knowledge workers – design, user experience, innovation, customer understanding – and most of today’s process thinking and tools don’t help much there.  That is why I don’t think ignoring process as a success factor is a quirk related to Apple, it reflects what is really important for a company to be successful in today’s world. Process won’t make your company great – design, user experience, customer understanding and innovation will.

Design, by the way, is a process… So is developing a good user experience. The companies that are good at this have process around it – just ask Genentech or Frog Design, to name two. It isn’t “automation” the way most people think when you say “process” but it is a process nonetheless.  But if your focus on process doesn’t include user experience (voice of the customer) – you may find yourself non-differentiated on measures other than price.

I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions from the ebizQ crowd being momentarily focused on product design, etc.  I’m sure that there’s good process behind those efforts at Apple, and it looks to me like we just take it for granted.

Steve Jobs has resigned the CEO post at Apple.  And Twitter is alive with eulogies.  A little premature, perhaps.  But maybe not.  Either way, as Tim Cook takes the CEO helm and Steve moves to the board room, it is a good moment to take a step back and reflect on what Steve Jobs – and by implication, Apple – have meant for us.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball:

Reading around the web an hour ago, looking for confirmation of the then-minutes-old news that Steve Jobs had resigned as CEO, I repeatedly encountered and bridled each time at use of the adjective “shocking” to describe the announcement. But my initial resentment was unwarranted. This is not out of nowhere, it’s not even unexpected. We could all see this was coming — but it is a shock.

Om Malik posted a very personal take on the day’s news, more specifically troubled by Jobs’ health:

It is incredibly hard for me to write right now. To me, like many of you, it is an incredibly emotional moment. I cannot look at Twitter, and through the mist in my eyes, I am having a tough time focusing on the screen of this computer. I cannot hear the sounds of the street or the ring of my phone. The second hand on my watch moves slowly, ever so slowly. I want to wake up and find it was all a nightmare.

I don’t know Steve Jobs personally, but reading Om’s piece caused me to reflect a bit myself on the impact on my life.  Incidentally, Steve had a big impact on my course.  I was an avid PC user when I arrived at Stanford in the 90′s.  But Apple was the preferred platform, and I promptly bought one for writing papers and doing programming assignments.  But what really got my attention where the NeXT workstations in each residential computer cluster.  When I saw a class called “CS193d – programming on the NeXT”, I had to sign up.  It didn’t exactly jive with my “introduction to AI” course that required writing pages of prolog (fun).  The first assignment, to my recollection, was to build a graphical calculator application on the NeXT.  We had approximately 5 days to do it, and it took less than one.  I was hooked.

I didn’t realize it – but I had just set myself on a path.  A path of being interested in User Interface design, despite my lack of formal training.  A path that would take me to a computer science degree – partly because I really enjoyed writing applications on the NeXT.  And a path that would lead to a job in Austin, Texas.  I landed an internship thanks to my NeXT class and my determination to land the job.  And that internship gave me the object oriented design experience and work experience that I could talk about in job interviews, and actually landed me the job offers I received.  After I had accepted an offer with a little 50-person company in Austin, I got an email from someone at NeXT about interviewing there (I had submitted my resume many months earlier).  I politely declined, having already accepted a job – who knows how life would have turned out if I had taken the interview!

Fast forward and here I’m typing today on my MacBook Pro, oft-accused of being an Apple fan boy.  Well I’m guilty, because the Apple products I use have really improved my life.  And when you see your 2 year old swiping through photo albums on your iPad or iPhone, there are only two thoughts that go through your head:

1. “That is amazing” – because there was no hope of this same child using your BlackBerry or Windows Mobile Phone (pre7) the same way.
2. “Hm. I’m really going to have to clean that screen when he’s done” – because two-year-olds are messy.

I saw the stock was down quite a bit after-hours today.  But I think John Gruber said it well:

“Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.”

So no sooner had I written about Google’s unnecessary surfeit of enemies than Google goes out and acquires Moto, likely creating a few more difficulties in the marketplace.  On the surface it seems to:

1. confirm how weak Android’s patent position really was
2. validate what Apple’s execs and fans have been saying about the value of integrated over fragmented (“open”) at least in the mobile space.
3. calls into question the whole android venture.

Maybe #1 and #2 are obvious and don’t need further explanation.  But for #3, Horace Dediu of Asymco asks the question I’ve been asking: “Is Android profitable? The debit column just increased by $12 billion. Good luck with those ads.”

Seriously.  Google has been saying Android is profitable.  But I think you have to measure the credit part of the ledger as revenues accrued by Android that would not have otherwise been accrued:

• Ads on Android that arguably would not have otherwise been sold on another platform
• Licensing fees (I don’t think there are any)
• Etc.

Horace Dediu goes on to give a better explanation than I did as to the perils Google has entertained:

The lesson (and warning) was that a licensor that is also a licensee makes other licensees uncomfortable. The supplier is also a competitor. This is classic channel conflict and never ends well.

Apple and Microsoft have to be pleased that their patent strategy just caused Google to spend $12B.  Android is certainly no longer free to Google – whether it is free to handset OEMs or not.

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball really digs into all the details, and if we’re wondering whether there was a real cost to Google for taking the path of aggressively pursuing Android:

Look at Google’s financial results. They reported $8.5 billion in net income this year, and $6.5 billion last year. That’s for all of Google. They’re offering $12.5 billion for Motorola. So Google just spent almost two years of its profits to buy a second-rate phone maker that itself is unprofitable,1 almost went bankrupt, and is arguably only the third-best maker of Android devices, behind HTC and Samsung.

That definitely puts $12B into perspective.  Nearly 2 years of profit.  I’m not sure that Google wouldn’t have been better off, financially, just partnering with Apple and other OEMs and taking a more passive approach to Android.  Still, acquiring Moto may be the right thing to do given where Google finds itself today – the best path forward may be to double down on the Android investment.  But an alternate path would be to make Android more open – by opening up the development process and assets and scaling back Google’s own financial commitment to it while letting the community drive (making Android a bit more like Linux in the process).

This article in TechCrunch hit a chord with me – because I have picked up on some of the same issues with Google:

But why? Why is Google now a villain to many in the industry? I don’t believe it’s because they’re evil, I believe it simply relates to the Plainview quote. Increasingly, Google is trying to do everything. And they have the arrogance to think that they can. And it’s pissing people off.

Actually, it doesn’t piss me off, personally.  But, I want to put the Steve Jobs question to Google:  what are you going to say “No” to?  And how do you know that you’re doing the right thing when you say No?

Right now it feels like Google says “yes” to a lot of projects.  But they say “no” to very few markets.  I’ll take Android as an example.  Google had a strong ally in Apple (and vice versa).  They had common market interests, common competitors (e.g. Microsoft).  If Apple spurred on a new generation of phones that consumed more Google ads, that’s good for Google (and doesn’t require Google to launch its own phone OS).  If Google’s great apps (maps, gmail, search) worked well on iPhones, Apple sells more phones.

But by betting the farm on Android, Google lost a great partner and ally.  Not that any of these relationships is guaranteed forever, but I certainly expected the alliance to last longer than a year or two.  And I’m not convinced that Google gets more revenue per device from Android than it does from iPhones – I’ve yet to see someone break those #’s out so that we can understand if their Android investment *actually* makes sense.

The TechCrunch article covers lots of other areas where Google is competing with major industry titans or at least category killers in the niche areas.  My takeaway from this is that perhaps Google hasn’t learned the power of “No”.

At BP3, we’re all about BPM.  That’s it.  When we get asked to build a custom app, if it isn’t BPM, we politely decline.  If it is a big integration project – politely decline.  Saying no has power.  Our branding is focused on what we actually do, and do well.  It doesn’t get diluted by a less-than-stellar performance on something outside our core competency.  It also allows us to partner effectively with companies that can really help our business – they know what we do, what we do well, and what we don’t do.  And therefore they can shape their partnering strategy accordingly without worrying about whether we’ll be interested in the food on their plate and not just happy with what is on our BPM plate.

Maybe it is too late for Google to put the genie back in the bottle – but we can look back and think about how things might be different.  They could have taken a bit more “hands-off” approach to Android  – sponsoring the project but not getting too invested in pushing it to vendors and carriers – let those vendors do more of the heavy lifting, and not getting involved in positioning against Apple or any other specific phone vendors.  A bit more hands-off approach might have preserved their relationship to Apple without undermining their goal of having the lowest common denominator phones capable of browsing the web or running a Google Search (and seeing a Google ad).  Would the value of good partnerships with firms like Apple outweigh the benefits of an Android?

When you’re looking at your own business, what is it you don’t do?  What would you say no to?

The phrase “It just works” didn’t first come into use during Apple’s WWDC 2011 keynote in June.  I first heard the phrase with respect to software when I was taking a NeXT programming class (cs193e) at Stanford – Julie Zelenksi, our lecturer, had three phrases that stuck with me for life:

• “Right?!” – affirmation, agreement, eliciting agreement, filler, etc.
• “That’s a feature” – when confronted with a bug or lack of a feature… obviously meant in jest.
• “It just works” – describing the magic of many of the object oriented techniques we used in class – reflection that just worked, prototypes, messages, Interface Builder and AppKit.

(I wouldn’t even claim to be there near the beginning – these phrases had the well-worn comfort of years of personal use even the very first time I heard them.)

At WWDC, Steve Jobs trotted out the phrase again, as a worthy successor to recent superlatives like “magical” and “amazing”, and it caught the attention of journalists (Philip Elmer-DeWitt has a great collection of quotes from some of the best articles covering the WWDC). But as MG Siegler notes, it isn’t an accident when Jobs picks a catchphrase like this.  It is intentional choosing and repetition to enforce a message.  I don’t doubt for a second that the *internal* messaging behind the scenes at Apple was similar, with Steve Jobs demanding that iCloud services “just work” without requiring explanation as to why or how.  Its a perfect kind of demand – no, don’t tell me the 15 reasons something doesn’t quite work the way I want – just make it work.

This contrasts harshly with the Android ecosystem, as noted by John Gruber, and fully expounded upon by Harry McCracken in Time (John captured the money quote perfectly):

But there’s never been a time when so much of the new stuff I look at is so very far from being ready for mass consumption. Sometimes it’s a tad quirky; sometimes I can’t get it to work at all. And when I call the manufacturers for help, they’re often well aware of the problems I encountered.

The pressure Apple is putting on other handset and computing manufacturers is causing them to release buggy, beta product.  And their primary software partner this time around is a company that mostly ships products in Beta status (Google):

One notable example was Motorola’s Xoom tablet, which arrived back in February with rain checks for three of its notable features: 4G support, Flash, and support for its MicroSD slot. Today, some owners have the update that enables MicroSD, others don’t, and everyone’s still waiting for the overdue 4G upgrade. Sounds like a beta product to me.

Contrast to what Apple is attempting to do – “it just works.”  As MG put it with respect to iCloud:

With iCloud, Apple is transforming the cloud from an almost tangible place that you visit to find your stuff, to a place that only exists in the background. It’s never seen. You never interact with it, your apps do — and you never realize it. It’s magic.

Exactly.  The cloud is in the background rather than front-and-center.  And while Google provides for a good cloud experience for technophiles like myself, the cloud *is* the experience, via the browser.  Apple wants the cloud to be invisibly supporting what you do with your devices – devices Apple sells.

This focus on simplicity has benefits.  iTunes may not be the prettiest software from a firm known for good design, but “it just works” – and it appears to be the first platform approaching 1 billion users in a logarithmic way even as it passes the 220 million mark. iOS’ growth curve is following an even steeper trajectory.  The market seems to be saying that “it just works” matters.

MG Siegler follows up with:

And the truth is that this is the point where we may really start to see some truly fundamental differences between Google and Apple after the past few years going head-to-head with feature matching. Apple is going after consumers who have absolutely no idea what the cloud is, and don’t care. Apple is saying they shouldn’t care. It all just works.

Actually, it isn’t just targeting consumers who have no idea what the cloud is.  It is also targeting technophiles who just frankly are tired of dealing with everyone else’s beta software.  At some point we want tools that “just work” so we can get our own, more interesting, technical work done.  If anything, the most advanced technical people I know are even *more* appreciative of the magic behind the black box.

But lest you think that Apple has given off the feature-matching in favor of the iCloud, Marco Arment reminds us that actually, the feature completeness efforts of Apple are like a steamroller:

Every time iOS or the iPhone is updated, Apple picks away at that list. They started with the big ones: purchase price, 3G, GPS, copy and paste, advanced security features, Exchange, multitasking. More recently, they added Verizon support, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see them quietly hit Sprint and T-Mobile in the future, picking away at that list even further.

With iOS 5, they’ve hit tons of relatively minor shortcomings. Notifications. Quick camera access and a hardware shutter button. Wireless sync and backup. They’ve even added a preference to have the camera-flash LED blink on new notifications, supposedly as an accessibility feature, but also conveniently to appeal to BlackBerry owners addicted to that blinking LED.

Apple has steamrolled over almost every meaningful advantage that competitors have. And they’re not stopping.

I think Marco is right.  Apple started with the differentiating NEW features (integrated iPod functionality, and touch screen interface) and then rapidly added to its arsenal (3rd party apps, cut-copy-paste, multi-tasking, etc.).

This is just further evidence, if that was required, that Simplicity is a great design principle.  If calling it “it just works” helps drive the point home and make it an easier rallying point, I’m all for it.  BPM and enterprise software vendors take heed-  we all need a bit more “it just works” in our software experiences.   This logic also needs to inform consulting firms – we need to treat usability and user design as a first class citizen – but failing that, we consultants need to ensure that our processes “just work” for our audiences…

The Economist, a venerable institution in its own right, posts a fascinating article about IBM’s 100 years:

IT IS not, by any means, the world’s oldest company. There are Japanese hotels dating back to the 8th century, German breweries that hail from the 11th and an Italian bank with roots in the 15th. What is unusual about IBM, which celebrates its 100th birthday next week, is that it has been so successful for so long in the fast-moving field of technology. How has it done it?

So really.  What is the secret?  I think the Economist has a good handle on the answer:

IBM’s secret is that it is built around an idea that transcends any particular product or technology. Its strategy is to package technology for use by businesses.

This partly explains why IBM and Caterpillar have had an 80-year partnership. But the Economist takes it a step further and asks the question – who else has an elegant organizing principle and products that are meeting success in the marketplace?

No surprise as to the first answer:

The most obvious example is Apple (founded in 1976). Like IBM, it had a near-death experience in the 1990s, and it is dangerously dependent on its founder, Steve Jobs. But it has a powerful organising idea: take the latest technology, package it in a simple, elegant form and sell it at a premium price. Apple has done this with personal computers, music players, smartphones and tablet computers, and is now moving into cloud-based services (see article). Each time it has grabbed an existing technology and produced an easier-to-use and prettier version than anyone else. This approach can be applied to whatever technology is flavour of the month: Apple has already shifted from PCs to mobile devices.

It also doesn’t hurt that Apple is nearly halfway to the 100-year mark already… But the Economist posits that Amazon and Facebook have similar organizing principles (make it easy to buy stuff, and make it easy to share stuff).  This theory also helps explain why a company like Dell can be so dominant during a long phase of the IT cycle, but has trouble adapting when its business model innovations finally get adopted by the market in general.

So… what is your firm’s organizing principle?

For my money, this is (so far) the best quick-highlights view of iOS5:

Many of the new features in iOS 5 are things we’ve been sitting, waiting, and wishing for since the iPhone first launched. Complete with a more robust notification scheme and a brand new messaging protocol, Apple has filled in many of the gaps that have left it behind other OSs like Android and webOS.

In particular, I think the notifications changes are interesting.  The first take on notifications was visually nice but just didn’t scale – as though designed for people who would get the occasional push notification or SMS text.  But the reality is that some people get too many push notifications to count in a day.  A new approach was needed for a world where all the apps leverage the notification system as well.

With messaging – and Apple made note of this during the keynote – there was an oddity in that iPads and iPod Touches were left out of the messaging game.  And it probably rankled that BlackBerry had their own messenger product that would soon also work on iPhones, and would also bypass the SMS toll booth.

Business Insider has a good series of screenshots of the new features, but without much commentary or analysis to go with it.

Change can sneak up on you… Or sometimes, it comes accompanied by more press and blog coverage than one can imagine, as with the iPad and its implied impact on PCs.

Very few people thought the iPad would impact consumer PC growth in an obviously measurable fashion.  But this chart from the Business Insider seems to say otherwise.  It isn’t enough to call it cause-and-effect, but it sure looks like correlation.  As the underdog in the PC market, Apple doesn’t have to worry about undercutting its own “PC” business.  Apple can be content to disrupt others’ businesses (although I don’t believe this is how Apple looks at it – they’d likely look at the disruption as a side effect, rather than the purpose of the iPad).

So today Apples WWDC 2011 kicked off with an interesting keynote address.  From the updates to iOS5 and MacOSX10 (Lion), it looks like quite a few startups just discovered they have a new competitor in their backyard – one that sells shiny baubles and great software.  It is going to take a while to digest the impact of these changes, but I’m looking forward to reading more in-depth analysis post-WWDC.

In an apparent bid to become tomorrow’s ERP system, Appian makes an appeal to “stop application sprawl“.

But they perked up when talk started shifting to how Appian could wrap or replace existing point solutions in addition to automating currently unstructured processes.  A few minutes later, full of excitement, they said the following before the whole group, “After we adopt Appian, we will need to be convinced why any point solution would be better than what we could create for our own needs in BPM.”

(their emphasis)

It is a little counter-intuitive for a BPM services guy like me to complain about pushing more BPM.  But I’d just say this: your BPM platform is not your application replacement platform.  It is your process -aka BPM- platform.  Your firm won’t be better off having all of its systems inside Appian (or another BPMS) if there isn’t any process improvement and rationalization happening along the way.

Rather than seeing someone say that they would adopt the BPM solution over any point solution that can’t prove it is better, the framing should be in terms of process:  before buying a point solution, we need to understand how it will fit within the overall fabric of our processes, and whether that “fitting” effort will outweigh the benefits of buying a point-solution application (presumably best-of-breed).

We’re not doing anyone favors if we just hand them the BPM hammer and let them think that all their issues are nails.

But if you do find yourself doing a “rip and replace” project, keep this in mind:

When building a BPM solution, we are often integrating with and replacing parts of legacy systems.  Often one of the first requirements from the business will be that the new system does everything the old system did in order to be accepted.  This is generally a bad false start to a project.

However, one of the best tactics is to figure out what the 2-3 key NEW capabilities your solution will bring to the business that are so compelling that some minor discomfort over less important details will not derail the project.  You can call this marketing, but it is truly understanding where the real value opportunities are in your project.  Sometimes these capabilities are things the users will clamor for, sometimes things that the management team will clamor for, and rarely, things that IT will clamor for.  Make sure that at least one of your major stakeholder groups is squarely behind a few of the wow features of your BPM project.  If you don’t have that excitement in one area, my experience is that you’ll find uncomfortable scrutiny on an exact comparison of the new solution versus the old solution.