2009 October 29 | Alec Saunders

I’ve spent a little over a day at eComm meeting people, listening to the conversations and presentations happening and reflecting on what I’ve heard.

During the panel yesterday afternoon, I noted that I spend less on voice, data, and text messaging each month than I ever have, but more money on communications over all. What has made up the difference? Music, and applications. The carrier’s share of wallet is in decline, although I spend as much or more money than before. When I asked whether the panelists were worried by this trend, there was no good answer.

It’s time to start a new dialog in the emerging communications community. It’s time to abandon conversations about whether carriers will or won’t survive. They will. Yes, margins are under pressure, but networks need to be managed and operated. Better the carrier manage the network than, perhaps, a government entity.

Perhaps carriers will be the pipes companies, and as many people observed yesterday at eComm, that’s a great business. Perhaps they will be applications developers, although I think that’s highly unlikely. The vertically integrated model this implies necessarily constrains innovation. Perhaps they will be aggregators of third party applications; several carriers I spoke with yesterday expressed support for this viewpoint.

It is, however, time to stop talking about the death of the incumbent. Let’s instead change the conversation – acknowledge that the carrier network is a platform, and that the carrier has a need for an application community, and begin the dialog between network partners and developers about the ability for those operators to help us get to market.

While we’re at it, let’s also change the channel, dial away from the conversation about “mash-ups”, and focus instead on user needs, the user experience of communications, and the economics associated with that user experience. By focusing on the business value of the services being developed instead of the technology platform, we can all become better able to reach the customer with game changing new communications services.

Make sense? It’s an idea who’s time has come.

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Toktumi’s Peter Sisson asks Is the BlackBerry Doomed? and goes on to compare his recent experience of developing for BlackBerry with his experience as an iPhone developer. Many of his complaints – non-standard hardware and OS versions in particular – are the same issues we ran into two years ago when we developed and delivered iotum’s Talk-Now presence application for BlackBerry. Ultimately we gave up on the BlackBerry, believing the return on investment of developing for the web would be higher. And, in fact, Calliflower on iPhone is a hybrid web / native application, proving that hypothesis. The bet that we’ve made is that web development will be as powerful on handheld devices as it is on computers.

RIM is addressing some of the issues that Peter raises already. In particular, an upgraded web browser is in the works, which will make hybrid development strategies like ours much more appealing. Moreover, the business terms for selling applications through BlackBerry AppWorld are more attractive than Apple’s iPhone App Store. However, there are still holes in RIMs strategy which need to be addressed.

In particular, the user experience associated with getting an application onto a BlackBerry is a pale shadow of the iPhone user experience.

Installing an application on iPhone is a process of searching the App Store, clicking a download link, paying if necessary, and then a short wait.
Installing an application on BlackBerry is a process of determining where to get the application – AppWorld, another store, or direct from the developer – downloading the application, accepting a bunch of scary but mostly incomprehensible security questions, and frequently accepting an often lengthy license agreement.

Why? When RIM announced the AppWorld, their strategy was to be:

Carrier friendly, allowing multiple stores, including carrier specific stores.
Developer friendly, sharing 80% of of the revenue with the developer of an application, and permitting applications to be delivered directly by the developer to the customer, without RIM’s approval.

As a strategy, RIM was attempting to find a position that would allow them to counter the complaints about Apple’s high-handed process. In courting carriers and developers with these concessions, however, RIM has created barriers to adoption of those applications by the customer, which may ultimately cause more harm than benefit.

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