Process for the Enterprise » Apple

Targeting iOS First in the Enterprise

Scott Francis — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:19:42 +0000

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.

Passion + Process

Scott Francis — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:00:52 +0000

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?

Who Shall Champion Process Management?

The Not-Integrated Approach

Scott Francis — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 03:43:23 +0000

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)

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Whose Cloud is it?

Scott Francis — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:40:44 +0000

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…

Getting it Done

Scott Francis — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 06:00:56 +0000

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!)

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The End of Flash as we Know It

Scott Francis — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:46:36 +0000

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.

With Competitors Like These…

Scott Francis — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 06:17:12 +0000

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/

A Different Way of Looking at Smartphones

Scott Francis — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:40:07 +0000

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.

A Definitive iPhone 4s Review

Scott Francis — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:14:46 +0000

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.

So Long, Steve

Scott Francis — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 04:03:33 +0000

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.