Hey, Apple and Google: Stop trying to wolf the whole mobile pie
Stick to your slice and we'll ALL get better tech
Posted in Management, 3rd January 2013 10:03 GMT
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Open ... and Shut It's become a truism that the way to win in mobile is with an end-to-end, hardware-to-software-to-cloud strategy. I just wish this were as good for consumers as it seems to be for vendors. If I could get any wish fulfilled for 2013, it would be to have Apple and Google, in particular, go back to doing what they do best - rather than doing "all the things" in an attempt to squeeze out maximum value from a captive consumer.
It's not surprising that there has been a rush to integrate everything in these still early days of mobile computing. As Clayton Christensen called out in The Innovator's Dilemma, integration is essential to winning in a nascent market, because customers gravitate to solutions that bake out unnecessary complexity.
The problem for Apple and others, however, is that we're likely moving beyond the point when we need an end-to-end crutch, particularly given how poor the dominant vendors are at different areas of the mobile "stack".
Apple, for example, does hardware exceptionally well but continues to stumble on cloud services and even its software is not very good, as John Battelle and Nicholas Carson have both pointed out. Apple's terrible Maps app is just one example of style over substance, and an innate inability to put big data to use.
Google? Its cloud services are absolutely magical. If you've used its voice services on Android, or if you've witnessed how effortlessly it seems to pull up the right information at the right time (in maps, search, whatever), you've seen Google at its best. But Google hasn't been content to crunch data behind the scenes, and so keeps releasing the Android operating system that is popular but not nearly as good as Apple's iOS, and its phones/tablets that are not as good as Apple's hardware.
Then there are Facebook and Amazon which, as The Wall Street Journal reports, are also getting into the game, trying to add their own hardware or search to compete with Apple and Google.
If only these companies were as good at being each other as they are at being themselves. But they're not. Apple is a terrible Google, which is a terrible Amazon, which is a terrible Apple.
I wish Apple would go back to its roots, creating beautiful hardware and some entertainment-oriented productivity apps. I wish Google would just fixate on data. I wish Amazon kept selling everything better/faster/cheaper, including compute capacity. And that's all. I wish they'd stop trying to be something they're not.
I know the end-to-end experience is what these big vendors are aiming for. The problem is that none of them are very good at it.
As Christensen highlighted in an interview with Asymco's Horace Dediu, we may be nearing the time when modularity, not integration, will be the winning strategy in mobile, just as it was in desktop computing:
The transition from proprietary architecture to open modular architecture just happens over and over again. It happened in the personal computer. Although it didn’t kill Apple’s computer business, it relegated Apple to the status of a minor player. The iPod is a proprietary integrated product, although that is becoming quite modular. You can download your music from Amazon as easily as you can from iTunes. You also see modularity organized around the Android operating system that is growing much faster than the iPhone. So I worry that modularity will do its work on Apple.
I don't share this worry. I just worry that it won't happen soon. The day that Apple let Google Maps back onto the iPhone as a first-class citizen was a great day for me and many others. It was a day that let me have Apple for my hardware and overall mobile experience, with Google filling in the data services that enrich that experience, and Amazon running the back-end services for many of the apps that I use.
The integration movement in mobile served its purpose. I just hope that instinct to integrate the mobile experience, end-to-end, is dead as we move into 2013. I suspect it's wishful thinking on my part, but one can dream. ®
Matt Asay is vice president of corporate strategy at 10gen, the MongoDB company. Previously he was SVP of business development at Nodeable, which was acquired in October 2012. He was formerly SVP of biz dev at HTML5 start-up Strobe (now part of Facebook) and chief operating officer of Ubuntu commercial operation Canonical. With more than a decade spent in open source, Asay served as Alfresco's general manager for the Americas and vice president of business development, and he helped put Novell on its open source track. Asay is an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). His column, Open...and Shut, appears three times a week on The Register. You can follow him on Twitter @mjasay.
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COMMENTS
Tripe...
"keeps releasing the Android operating system that is popular but not nearly as good as Apple's iOS, and its phones/tablets that are not as good as Apple's hardware."
Go buy a Nexus 4 and a Nexus 7 and you will see how ridiculous your claims are, infact buy two of each, and give out to a relative, and still have change to spare over an iPad Mini and iPhone5.
Re: Tripe...
well put. Let's not forget either than IOS is designed to run on one type of hardware, and this led to limitations for IOS apps on the larger screens of the iPhone5, where apps that weren't recoded for the larger screen simply had black bands either side of them to fill in the gaps. That's hardly better, intuitive etc. Andriod has more comprehensive hardware support, higher adoption, and in the more recent versions has introduced features that leave Apple far behind. In my opinion, Apple have not innovated in a few years, and the iPhone5 is just a Galaxy SIII with a smaller screen and all the cool features turned off. And crap maps.
Re: I lost interest here:
"Yes because iTunes / App Store is so utterly unsuccessful, not a single person uses it and no other provider tries to emulate it." - It's hard to argue software such as iTunes is "successful" when most Apple users are forced into using it regardless of its quality.
I personally found it to be one of the worst bits of software I have ever used. Agree with the App Store though.
Re: Tripe...
Indeed, the voices of Android fragmentation now seem to be very faint, now that people understand it was nothing but Apple FUD.
Android can support as many or as few layouts as you want in a single APK, so you can support every device under the sun with it's own layout if you are so inclined, or you can (more sensibly) add 3 (phone, 7in tablet, 10in tablet) and have them scale to specific aspect ratios. All your business logic can be easily common to all layout fragments.
Having coded iOS and Android, not only is Android more sensibly designed, easily supporting whatever you throw at it, it's easier to code (interpreted Java and native C++), free to develop for (no need to buy a Mac - Android uses Eclipse on Win/Linux/Mac), and a once-only developer fee of $25 (not the £100/year Apple want, that when you stop paying, the apps disappear).
Google got things 100% right (eventually) with Android.
I struggled past
both AC's and Shitpeas' parts and made it as far as
"I wish Amazon kept selling everything better/faster/cheaper, including compute capacity. And that's all. I wish they'd stop trying to be something they're not."
after he'd said everyone should go back to their roots and stop treading on others' toes.
He's basically said "no-one's any good at doing anything any of their competitors do. oh, hold on, Amazon's quite good at cloud. I'll just pretend that's what they've always done"
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