All posts tagged as "Carriers"

I’m working out a hypothesis here, and would like some help. Does this distinction make sense to you? Would you add more to either list?

Internet thinking is characterized by companies like Yahoo, Skyfire, Opera, and Facebook, and ideas like

• the web browser is the only important environment
• services can be deployed across all users immediately
• most services are free
• no intermediaries are relevant; no third parties control content
• unlimited bandwidth
• one site, maybe with some CSS hacks to handle IE, is fine
• discovery by advertising, search engines, and portals
• customer support might happen over email
• lots of innovation

(Mobile) telco thinking is characterized by any mobile operator, companies like Microsoft, Nokia, and ideas like

• get a great experience for specific devices
• revenue sharing between all parties
• network (carrier) reliability
• service reliability & uptime
• third party oversight of content
• customer support is live and expensive
• interaction via multiple channels (web, SMS, voice, and more)
• walled gardens provide greater control and improved user experience
• silo thinking

You’ll notice I didn’t say that either side is smarter than the other. Both sides have strengths; both sides have blinders. And the blinders sure are interesting.

My thesis? You have to combine thinking from both to succeed in mobile. Google is kind-of there. Lots of startups start as Internet thinking but then get some Telco thinking smashed into their heads.

So, feedback please.

Pay close attention to the Ovi Store announcement. Not the LG application store, not the Samsung store, not the Windows Mobile application store. Ovi.

From their press release:

From this point on, the media you consume is no longer just about “what” you’re buying, but also now about “where,” “when,” “why,” and “who” bought what. Consumers will be able to activate social discovery so that content enjoyed by their social network can be automatically surfaced and made available for download and repeat consumption. Content will also be presented based on location so that consumers will always have the most relevant experience wherever they are in the world. Consumers will be able to choose to pay for content with a credit card or through operator billing. By providing a choice of payment options for consumers, content providers and developers will gain access to consumers in markets where credit cards are not widely available.

Contextual recommendations, based on location and time. Social recommendations, based on friends and “people who bought this.” The strengths of Apple and the strengths of Amazon, plus even more.

And, though not in the press release, the developer revenue split is the same as Apple’s. Caveat: apparently the fine print says “after operator fees,” so that could be really tiny.

With Nokia’s smartphone market share, the disproportionate content use of smartphone users compared to feature phone users, and this massive improvement in user experience, the operators will be seriously hurt if they don’t manage to compete … in 2009, and at least as good as Apple.

There has always been a delay between getting a new technology to market and getting it well-adopted. For many mobile technologies, with their social or communicative nature, you have to get to a useful saturation point before the new technology is really useful to anyone.

My general guideline (when I was able to see such info directly) was that about 20% of users were using devices more than two years old. A surprising number use five year old devices. There are (unless explicitly kicked off the system due to technical incompatibilities) users of ten year old mobiles still hanging around.

This was always just a regular part of the segmentation; after 6 months so many people will have new devices, after 18 months, you can start to expect saturation as long as a majority of devices sold have the feature, so plan your marketing and advertising budgets for the long haul.

But this BBC article on Challenges to a ‘cashless’ world brings up a good point. The lifecycle we have gotten used to for the last decade or so has stalled. Drops in sales are not just mobile manufacturers doing badly, but consumers not buying things. Aside from straight revenue losses, they are not getting the new, exciting stuff into the field.

Although so far everyone is still plenty excited about just getting their websites onto phones and still ranting about touch, what happens when someone tries to implement, say nfc to support a mobile banking initiative? Or what happens to all those wimax towers?

I actually have no idea. I think I’ve reached the end of my ability to understand macroeconomics and business strategy. But maybe I can persuade Barbara to comment on it.

In a post today about application signing, Mike Rowehl said in passing:

I don’t call Comcast when a virus screws up my PC

To which I immediately thought, "I didn't buy my computer from Time Warner Cable, either." And it doesn't have their logo silkscreened on the front.

Operators, especially in the US, like to complain that customers call them too much or about what they perceive as things that are not their problem. They'd like to go to the desktop computer model, which as far as I know is the "you better have a smart friend" model, and in practice drives sales of wintel boxes cause a new computer is easier than than fixing one. To this effect, they even try to make app developers foot the cost, and penalize them for customer care calls to the operator.

The model the operators have propagated of selling devices with their brand, from their store, and doing whatever they can to assure they operate on their own networks only, brought this on. For that matter, the software and internet experience is similarly branded and/or constrained to the operator network.

And all these operators are shocked and amazed (and annoyed) when customers call them to complain about service, or don't understand where the device ends and the network starts. Or where the network ends and some application starts.

Years ago, when I started at a non-GSM carrier, I rather liked the closed-ecosystem model from a new-user and support perspective. Without a mobile internet, I certainly didn't care how open it was at first. Sure it has issues now, but the biggest seems to be the operators' misunderstanding of what caused the issue, and therefore how to get out of it.

I keep fussing about details, because no matter how much wow factor your service has, missed details can erode your brand over time. Yesterday at the Mobile Device and User Experience, Scott Weiss (now of Human Factors International) talked about how the great transitions and visual design of the iPhone provided a “halo effect” that delayed users from noticing and becoming frustrated with the inconsistent back button placement, difficult text entry, the fact that the device never does learn anything about text input.

I just tried out the ABBYY Business Card Reader for S60 so I didn’t have to bring all the cards home. I’ll spend the money on the app, but I’m not sure why it consistently puts FIRSTNAME LASTNAME into the first name field, with nothing in last name. It seems a particularly easy bit of code, so what gives?

It’s way too easy to pick on pretty much any device and any service on getting details right. Scott does a great job of pointing out iPhone issues (though my chief irritants have to do with browser behavior), but what about Nokia? Well, here are some issues I found irritating. When I swap out the SIM on my E71 and launch messages and try to view one … nothing happens. I have to reboot it again. And then, there is the lack of keyboard shortcuts, especially on my QWERTY device. Not to mention, I learned that my device had predictive input at an industry conference, not having noticed it in the device.

By the way, XT9 is terrific! It learns words immediately. Love it so far.

Another example of missed details is the latest Gmail client. Two major problems for me:

• I keep getting cognitive dissonance when it announces that I have 6 messages in my Inbox but I can’t find them; I must go Options > Refresh to actually see the new messages


• It doesn’t realize I’m using a QWERTY device and thus my delete “shortcut” is # (two key presses) and there is no shortcut for archive

Why are these details wrong? It depends.

1. Not considering target audience and their goals, activities, needs, desires. The G1 is so developer-focused that small hands will actually cramp while typing.





2. Insufficient development & testing resources, and after all something had to give (think about the abrupt transition from Flash to Windows Mobile on many devices especially HTC)


3. Legacy code (I’m looking at you, Motorola and Nokia)


4. Insufficient knowledge of the domain (it’s shocking how many companies approach us and do not have an approach for dealing with device diversity


5. Piecemeal design, like a rambling home added onto by many owners in many architectural styles, without a consistency of purpose (like parts of the iPhone UI and also like the location of my very first job, the Winchester Mystery House


6. Product management processes that rate bugs on a scale of 1 to 5, then get all of the severity 1 and 2 bugs and some of the severity 3 bugs done before launch. Oh, and typically the worst UI bug can be is a 3.

How do you fix it? It’s hard. If you’re designing a platform, try to make the presentation layer flexible, including screen and even functionality. This will allow a bit more time before things start getting clunky. Rethink your paradigms every once in a while; don’t assume that a great user experience 8 years ago remains great. Features have been added, content has scaled, device capabilities have shifted, input mechanisms changed, and user expectations have evolved.

Set standards for user experience testing. Usability must score a certain level, perhaps benchmarked by the competition, before the product can launch; a bad task score must be launch gating. Don’t just test high-frequency things. And don’t just test usability: test learnability, speed to expert use, satisfaction by expert users. And definitely test the things that drive revenue and costs. Measure how well the experience matches with your brand goals. You do have brand goals, don’t you? A story about what you provide?

Get a second opinion. Even if you can’t invest in a lot of testing, get knowledgeable but outside resources to play with

This is slightly outside my area of expertise, but if I understand correctly many of our clients will be affected.

Verizon is about to start charging content providers 3 cents per text message. Do look at the comments on this entry: you’ll get a much better understanding of the move.

Verizon mostly doesn’t support WAP Push, so SMS is the only way for a content provider to push information to a customer. Expect huge numbers of content providers to drop services to Verizon. Any full free service will either have to stop supporting Verizon customers, or go to an uncontrolled (and lower quality of service) SMS gateway.

Don’t forget, Twitter had to drop SMS updates in the UK due to costs. The Verizon fees are much higher.

All this is on top of the problem that most Verizon devices won’t support clickable URLs in SMS anyhow. What I fail to understand is that our WinMob Smartphone on AT&T wouldn’t let me click on a URL either. Perhaps it was a technical glitch: there was no http:// in the URL. At least, that’s what I hope.