The war between Nokia and Apple

"When two elephants fight, the loser is the jungle." --Ancient proverb

And so it begins.

The Apple-Nokia war finally got underway on August 29, when Nokia announced an array of new music-capable phones and an online music store. The two companies had been eyeing one-another like wrestlers outside the ring for more than a year. Apple entered the mobile phone market, but only in the US, where Nokia is a non-factor. Nokia openly declared that it's a computing company (link), but its non-phone products so far have been different flavors of lame.

But the August 29 announcements put Nokia and Apple on a path to direct confrontation. I haven't seen a lot written online about the importance of this conflict. I think that's probably because many of the people who follow Apple's business closely are based in the US and have trouble taking Nokia seriously because it's a secondary player here. Meanwhile, Nokia's most ardent followers are in Europe, and look at Nokia's actions in light of its regional conflicts with SonyEricsson and the European mobile operators.

But when you stand back and look at what's happening in the industry worldwide, it's clear that Apple and Nokia both want very badly to be the dominant mobile computing company for young adults. That makes a huge, relentless conflict between them inevitable. They're like two armies trying to take the same hill. One's coming from the west, the other from the east, so there's not a lot of fighting at the moment. But as soon as they reach the hill, there's going to be an explosion.

I don't know who will win, but I'm pretty sure that the main losers will be all of the other device companies and mobile operators who happen to be hanging around on the hill.

My advice to them: Run.


What Nokia announced, and why it matters

On the 29th, Nokia announced four phones, two new data services for its phones, and a new brand. Let's start with the services.

The Nokia Music Store is just what the name says, an online music store run by Nokia. It'll be accessible by both PC and selected Nokia phones. The N81 and N95 will be able to talk to the store directly, while for a number of other Nokia phones you'll be able to buy music on your PC and sync it to your phone (Nokia calls this process "sideloading").

Nokia will offer more purchase options than iTunes does. You can either buy and download individual titles (for one euro a song, a euro cent above iTunes), or you can subscribe to the store and stream all the music you want to your PC (but not save it) for ten euros a month.

Nokia positions the streaming service as a way to discover new tunes, after which you're supposed to buy and download the ones you want to keep. I can understand the practical reasons for not streaming from the store directly to phones -- there would be issues with data charges, network capacity, latency, and so on. But I don't know how users will feel about that. If I had a streaming account on my PC, I think I'd expect to have the same service on my Nokia phone. And why wouldn't you want to discover new music while you're on the go?

The bigger problem is that the 120 euros you pay a year for a streaming service is 120 songs you could have bought and kept forever. That's one new song every three days. For comparison, the average iTunes user buys three songs a month. A music subscription service is a great way to get access to a lot of music quickly, but unless you want a colossally large music collection, it's a huge financial drain in the long run (I wrote more on the economics of it here). No wonder the music industry loves the idea of subscriptions (link).

The re- rebirth of nGage. The other new service Nokia announced was a mobile game store. You'll be able to try games for free on your Nokia mobile or PC, and then after purchase you can use them on the PC or sync them to your phone (curiously, Nokia calls this process "installation.") Nokia also promises multiplayer and community features.

Price per game will be six to ten euros, and Nokia says you'll be able to pay by credit card or through your phone bill if the operator enables that. No word on what the revenue split is.

The service sounds pretty interesting to me. The most confusing thing about it is the name. The nGage service won't work with all of Nokia's N-series phones. I know there's no official tie between N-series and nGage (the names were apparently chosen separately), but try explaining that to a typical customer in a store. Nokia has struggled and failed for years to explain to customers the S60 platform that it uses in a lot of its phones; picture adding yet another layer of confusion on top of that (link).

I think the other important challenge to nGage is flash. There's a huge supply of free flash-based games on the web, and a lot of them are the sort of quick-reward, easy to use games that seem to do well on mobile devices. The biggest barrier to using them on mobiles is that Adobe charges for the mobile flash player, and so relatively few mobile phones have it installed. A small installed base of phones means that most developers don't target mobile flash. If Adobe ever drops the charge for the flash player, or if a free flash-equivalent comes along (perhaps a mobile version of Microsoft Silverlight), it might become very difficult to convince people to pay for nGage games.

I know nGage provides a higher-quality gaming experience than flash, but I'm not sure most mobile users will care enough to pay.

Ovi is a new brand that Nokia will use as a wrapper for all of its mobile services, including games, music, maps, photo sharing, and presumably more to come (link). I guess that makes sense from a convenience standpoint -- there will be one website (ovi.com) where you can go to discover all of the Nokia services (Nokia employees say that it will also be a gateway to the services of other companies as well ). Unfortunately, Ovi apparently won't work as a compatibility mark: the phones that can use one Ovi service can't necessarily use another. For example, many of the phones that can run nGage games can't directly connect to the music service. A brand is most effective when it represents a coherent idea or consistent product. I think Ovi creates an expectation of coherence but doesn't deliver it. It just says that Nokia's in the service business, which Nokia cares about but is not something that concerns users

If Nokia doesn't make all the Ovi services work on all its data-capable phones quickly, I think the varied incompatibilities between the Nokia services and devices are going to be a nightmare to explain at retail.

The four new phones
The N95 8GB adds more memory to Nokia's flagship Swiss army knife phone, which includes a 5 mp camera, improved 3G, WiFi, and GPS. This is the one that online reviewers always compare to the iPhone. It works with both nGage and the music store, and its base price is 580 euros before subsidy.
The N81 is a slider phone with WiFi and 3G, and has dedicated buttons to access both nGage and the music store. It'll sell for 430 euros pre-subsidy.
The 5310 is a slimline candybar phone that can play music synced from the Nokia music store. It cannot access the music store directly. It has dedicated music controls next to the screen, and its base price is 225 euros.
The 5610 is similar to the 5310, but adds a slider and built-in camera. Its base price is 300 euros. A lot of online reviewers have been comparing this and the 5310 to the SonyEricsson Walkman phones, and I think that was probably Nokia's thinking. But hold that thought because it's not necessarily how things will work out.

What's the impact? A huge amount depends on execution. How well will Nokia's new services integrate with the phones? How easy will it be to play songs and games? How many titles will be in the Nokia stores, and how good will they be? Services and mobile devices often live or die on the little details of usability, and we can't judge that for Nokia yet because we can't play with the new products and services.

But Nokia's direction is very clear. It wants to be in the mobile Internet services business, as both a developer and publisher of content and services. It's going to tie those services directly to its phones. And knowing Nokia, it'll keep iterating on both the phones and the services until it gets them right.

That's why Apple and Nokia are now at war. Even if Nokia's current products turn out to be lame, it's going straight into the territory that Apple has been pursuing ever since the first iPod shipped.

Apple's new products. I should add a little context on Apple's recent product announcements. In September, Apple made a lot of changes to the iTunes and iPod lineup. The move that got the most attention was the price cut of the iPhone from $599 to $399. I'll write more about that below. The other changes that stood out to me were:
--iTunes can now be accessed via WiFi on the iPhone and iPod Touch. This corrects a glaring weakness in the original iPhone. It's interesting that Apple apparently hasn't enabled the iPhone to talk to the store over a cellular connection. That may be because the network the iPhone uses in the US is too slow to easily download music, or it may be that AT&T doesn't want a lot of data traffic going over its network when the phone's data plan is flat-rate.
--The video version of the Nano, starting at $199, is a heck of a lot of technology in a very cute little package.
--The iPod Touch is basically an iPhone without the microphone and cellular radio. It makes a really interesting PDA for people who want to buy a basic voice phone and carry their entertainment separately. It's priced at $299.

(As an aside, I have a request: Once the iPod Touch starts selling like gangbusters, would someone please go find the person at Sony who decided the Clie handheld business was a dead end, and kick them in the shins?)


Relative strengths of the competitors

Or, how to piss off both Apple fans and Nokia fans in the same post.

Apple and Nokia are very different companies. Here are their relative strengths:



Resources. No contest. Although Apple is a very successful company, Nokia has vastly more financial resources.

Logistics. Nokia is one of the greatest logistics companies on the planet. It churns out hundreds of millions of phones, changes models frequently, and almost everything works properly. If Nokia were running the US Federal Emergency Management Agency, New Orleans would be 20 feet above sea level by now. Apple, by contrast, does a very competent job of managing contract manufacturers in Asia. Advantage Nokia.

Telephony experience. Another huge Nokia advantage. Designing phones and getting them qualified on networks is really tricky, and Nokia knows how to do it better than anyone else.

System design skill. This is Apple's core competence; it knows how to design hardware and software together to create a beautifully integrated system. Nokia's phones often appear as if their hardware and software were designed by completely different groups and slapped together at the last minute (because, in many cases, that's exactly what happened). This works great in commodity phones, but if the competition is for who can create the most elegant data experience, Nokia is at a huge disadvantage.

Brand power. Wow, this is a tough one. Apple has one of the coolest brands on the planet. Nokia's brand is beloved in Europe, and in most of the world it personifies upward mobility (except in the US and Japan). I call this one a tie.

User interface. Apple knows how to design these. The kindest thing you can say about Nokia's interface designs is that they're better than many other phone manufacturers. But that's like comparing a three-legged dog to a two-legged dog. Nokia's trying to get better -- at the announcement event, it showed video of a forthcoming device with an iPhone-style touchscreen (link). But for now, this one's clearly a strong Apple advantage.

Cleverness. Hey, it's Steve. Nokia's management is extremely smart, but you look to them for great operational execution, not brilliant strategy. After all, this is the company that brought us the original nGage.

Industrial design. I'm going to get flamed by the Nokia fans for this, but Apple has a clear advantage in design. The comparison: Nokia sometimes creates a great design. Apple rarely creates anything less than a great design.

Music solution. You'd think this would be an overwhelming advantage for Apple, but its arrogant handling of the music companies has made them even more desperate to tear Steve Jobs' throat out. They're anxious to work with someone like Nokia. Apple still has an advantage, but it has opened the door to competitors more than it had to.

Breadth. Nokia can fight on more fronts, and might be able to outflank Apple. For instance, Nokia's revived nGage game service gives it a second interesting offering for young people, whereas Apple is limited to just music and video. This is why I think Apple's decision not to open the iPhone to third party app developers is a huge mistake. If Apple had the help of third party developers, it could more easily fill out its software portfolio.


How they'll fight

Nokia wants a war of attrition. It will try to force Apple to compete on more fronts than it can afford to cover. I think we should expect to see a broad array of services added to Ovi quickly, aimed at enticing young adults in all sorts of different ways. Nokia will probably also launch a blizzard of media and entertainment phones with varied features, in the hope that a couple of them will hit sweet spots in the market.

Apple's game is to keep Nokia off balance and grab the most important opportunities. Think of a fencing expert: dodge, feint, and then stab the other guy in the heart. Apple currently has a product advantage -- its music service is already working. So it will try to capture as many customers as it can before Nokia gets its act together.

Apple can also use Nokia's size against it. Nokia has a huge product line and has to position each product carefully within it. Apple has only one phone, so it doesn't have much to protect. That's where the iPhone price cut comes in. The iPhone had been positioned against the n95, at the top of Nokia's product line. With the price cut, the iPhone is now looks much closer to the middle of Nokia's line, the phones that were supposed to be aimed at SonyEricsson.* Nokia can't slash the pricing of the n95 without screwing up the prices of its entire line, so with one price action Apple accomplished two things -- it can reach a lot more customers, and it forced Nokia to go back and rethink its competitiveness.

We should expect more surprise moves from Apple. It's more important for them to keep Nokia off balance than it is to please every customer. I think that's why Apple was willing to piss off the iPhone loyalists with a sudden, large price cut.

*Because of varying subsidies, it's hard to tell what the actual street price comparison between the new n95 and iPhone will be. The current n95 sometimes gets subsidized down by several hundred dollars if you buy a multiyear service contract. Maybe the new n95 will be subsidized down below iPhone prices. Maybe the iPhone will be subsidized too. Or maybe now that Nokia's offering its own services the operators will refuse to keep subsidizing the n95. We need to wait until the iPhone and Nokia's new services premiere in Europe this fall.


Impacts of the war: Alas, the innocent bystanders

The common denominator between Apple and Nokia is the imperative to move quickly. Nokia wants to broaden the competition fast, Apple wants to keep surprising Nokia with new features, products, and other changes. That's going to accelerate the pace of change in the mobile industry. And the accelerating pace of change, rather than anything in particular that Apple or Nokia have done today, is the biggest challenge to the rest of the industry. The other players have been struggling to keep up with the current rate of change; what will they do when Apple and Nokia step on the gas?

I've seen these situations before. You think you're just about keeping up with a competitor, and suddenly they disappear in a cloud of dust. I believe that's about to happen in mobile phones.

A shift from hardware design to systems design. Let's look at which companies have been most successful in smartphones: RIM creates e-mail phone systems that combine hardware, software, and services. DoCoMo and the other Japanese operators drive systems designs that combine hardware, software, and services. The iPhone does the same. Previously, those competitors were confined to particular countries or relatively small vertical markets, but now the world's biggest phone company is trying to do the same thing. That raises the competitive bar for everyone else in the industry.

What are companies like Samsung and Motorola supposed to do? They don't know how to create their own services, let alone integrate one well with a phone. In the music market, there are a lot of third party services out there, but none of them have been effective so far at challenging iTunes. I think they're not strong enough to change the competitive situation. Same thing for the operator services.

So the music phone market looks ugly. What's worse, if Nokia and the systems companies extend their new design approach to other data markets, the traditional mobile phone companies might be cut out of most of the big growth opportunities. They need to learn a new set of skills instantly, and they're far behind the curve.

The interesting potential exception to this situation is SonyEricsson, the leading vendor of music-enabled phones in Europe. Their hardware's nice, and they have a clean user interface that looks inspired by the iPod. Because I'm in the US, I don't have a good read on how smoothly the SonyEricsson phones integrate with operator and third party music stores. Is the experience as easy as using iTunes?

The Register says that Omnifone's Music Station is a promising possibility (link), but it's a subscription service costing 3 euros ($4.11) per week. For that same price you could buy 216 songs on iTunes per year, and at the end of the year you'd actually own something.

I really have trouble seeing the long-term economic benefit of a music subscription service for a user. If you subscribe to one, please post a comment and educate me.

SonyEricsson's management hinted to Time Magazine that it may create its own music service (link). If so, it had better hurry up. I have a lot of respect for SonyEricsson's hardware designs, but if it's limited to music stores with weird business models and ones that don't integrate seamlessly with its phones, it's going to have a very hard time outcompeting an accelerating Apple and a Nokia that's learning to integrate solutions.

Microsoft: Reverse course, again. This is the situation in which Microsoft could have stepped in to offer a music service to the phone companies challenged by Nokia. But in an exquisitely ironic move, Microsoft basically shot its licensed music store initiative last year in order to support the proprietary Zune. Now it can't step up to the opportunity.

Oops.

Microsoft is probably too late to recover in music, but as Nokia adds new services there should be a lot of opportunities to license equivalents of them to Nokia's competitors. Microsoft should focus less on selling its own OS, which scares the phone companies, and more on delivering services they can build into their phones.

And oh by the way, it's time to bury Zune. The iPod Touch just lapped it. If Microsoft wants to lose money on proprietary hardware, it should focus on Xbox. At least there it's buying market share for its money.

The operators lose control. They were struggling to establish their own services suites back when things were moving slowly. Now that Apple and Nokia are shifting into high gear, I don't see how the operators can keep up.

You can find very different scenarios online for where this will lead. Andrew at the Register predicts that the operators may strangle Ovi by refusing to sell any phones that support it (link). He has a good quote from someone who knows both Nokia and the operators:

The operators own the relationship with the customer. They're not going to allow Nokia to own it.

On the other hand, Richard Windsor, the excellent telecom analyst working for Nomura Securities in London, said in an e-mail brief that the operators are doomed:

Through their inaction, mobile operators have squandered the opportunity to be the service integrator for mobile and are left with the prospect of offering nothing to users except commodity data packets.

Who will be right? It depends on Nokia's ability to generate user demand for its services. If the users want the services, the operators will have to go along with it. I assume Nokia understands this and is prepared to do a big marketing push. Unlike Nokia's previous efforts to set up content portals, this time it has to succeed or it surrenders the future to Apple. So the conflict with Apple also locks Nokia into a war with the operators.

Isn't this fun?

If I were running a mobile operator, I'd stop trying to create my own services bundle, and focus on enabling as many Internet companies as possible to deliver services on my network, in exchange for a small cut of their revenue. An operator with the innovation of the open Internet behind it might be able to keep up with Nokia and Apple. But an operator working alone will be very lonely indeed.

What does it mean for users? You'd think that all this new competition would be good for users, and in many ways I'm sure it will be. But Apple and Nokia are both showing a disturbing tendency to keep everything proprietary. The iPhone is not open to third party developers, and at this point Ovi appears to be about marketing Nokia services, not opening up the richness of the Internet. (To be fair, Nokia employees say that will change, but I'm not sure if they mean that they'll offer access to any Internet service, or just to some selected ones that they cut a deal with. I suspect it'll be the latter.)

Welcome our new Apple and Nokia overlords. There's a disturbing possibility that we may end up exchanging one set of walled gardens for another. They'll be lavish, beautiful gardens, far better than the operators' truck farms for data. But we may not get the open data marketplaces that a lot of people have been hoping for.

If you want to read other perspectives on Nokia vs. Apple, check these out:
-A confident view from Finland (link)
-A cautious view from Jupiter Research (link)
-An outstanding article by Mark Halper at Time, with quotes from Nokia and SonyEricsson (link).

This is what happens in technology price cuts

I want to write some more about all the recent mobile product announcements when I get more time, but tonight I have a chance for only a brief comment on Apple. I can't speak for Apple's motivations, and I know they pride themselves on thinking different, but no one I know in the tech industry -- and I mean no one -- cuts the price of a consumer tech product two months after launch unless they're seriously worried about demand. It's just not done, because it pisses off your early buyers, trains customers to wait a few months before they buy, upsets the channel, produces a lot of returned products, and distracts people from your other announcements.

If current iPhone sales are okay, the only other reason I can think of to cut prices this soon would be if you're worried about a competitive situation. Let's see, what competitive announcement could have possibly spooked Apple? Could it be Nokia's announcement last week of a music phone priced at 225 euros ($306)? (Link)

Foleo, we hardly knew ye

A quick note on Palm's decision to cancel the Foleo. To me, the most surprising part of the announcement was Palm's explanation that it couldn't afford to create two different software platforms (link).

To translate that from Silicon Valley speak, Palm was building two substantially different versions of Linux, one for future Treos and one for the Foleo. That was a huge surprise to me -- I had assumed the company was doing a single version of Linux for both product lines. The overhead cost associated with maintaining multiple platforms is enormous. Even huge companies struggle with it, so in my opinion there's no way in the universe that Palm was going to be able to afford it.

So it turns out the Foleo was almost doomed from the start. Unless it was a raging success from day one, it wasn't going to be sustainable economically. When the Foleo announcement failed to set the world on fire, the end was probably inevitable.

The (partial) state of the mobile data market

Despite all the hype and excitement about the mobile data market, it is very difficult to get reliable data on how it's actually developing. The mobile operators don't like to release full details of their sales, and surveys of users cost a lot of money to conduct and therefore are usually available only to people who pay.

We're left to chew on anecdotes, partial information released by companies that are trying to push a point of view, and unscientific "polls" of online enthusiasts.

So I'm always on the lookout for more rigorous information. Recently I came across several fairly good sources of data, and they give some interesting perspectives on what's happening with mobile data. It is by no means a complete view, and most of it is US only. But I think it's worth sharing.


Steady, unspectacular growth

The overall picture of mobile data is one of steady but unspectacular growth. It's a bit like watching a tree grow -- you can't see anything changing day to day, but if you walk away and come back in six months you'll notice the difference. SMS continues to be the dominant service, especially in Europe, and there's no sign of some other service surpassing it.

Is the growth rate good or bad? It all depends on how much growth you were expecting, and how fast you wanted it to happen. The one thing I think is very clear is that each country market is different, and you can't classify any of them as leaders and laggards. They're just unique.

Here are the details:


Capabilities of mobile phones in the US

The Pew Internet organization has been surveying Americans on their Internet usage for years. A couple of the questions in their survey ask about the data capabilities of their mobile phones. In the most recent results, from early 2006, 75% of mobile phone users in the US said their phones are capable of texting. 63% said they can play games, and 39% said they have cameraphones. Here's the full chart:



Nothing there stands out as shocking, although I expected the penetration of cameraphones to be higher. My guess is it has gone up in the last year.

(Note that some people could have capabilities in their phones and not realize it. So the question tells us as much about awareness of features as it does about the phones themselves.)


What people do with their phones: Nothing else rivals SMS

The chart below examines the percent of mobile phone users in the US and several European countries who have ever performed various tasks with their mobile phones. The source is M:Metrics, Q4 2006, and the numbers were quoted in a presentation by Orange / France Telecom.

The figures show that there's no other mobile data service with near the penetration of short messaging service (texting). That's not really news, but it's striking to see the hard numbers. About 80-85% of people in most of the big European countries have ever sent a text message, with France lagging slightly (at about 75%). In the US, almost 40% of mobile phone users report that they have sent a text message.

The next closest service is picture messaging, with 20-30% of mobile users in the big European countries saying they have received photo messages at least once. In the US, the figure is 15%. It's ironic that photo messaging is in second place, since it's generally considered a major disappointment. What does that say about the other services? Well, none of them generally crack 10% usage.



Is the US really a laggard? The other thing in the chart that really stood out to me was that the adoption "lag" of US mobile users varies depending on service. The US is far behind in SMS, MMS, and playing music on the phone (the last one is, I'm sure, due to the strength of the iPod in the US). But in the other categories, the US is in the middle of the pack, or even ahead (somebody explain the ringtone result to me, please).

It's always fun to stereotype the US market as primitive in all areas of wireless, but the adoption numbers don't support that. It just looks different.

What does it all mean? Orange's spin was that it means we're just getting started in mobile data, and everyone should wait patiently for the good services to take off. They showed the following growth projection from Ericsson as evidence:



No offense to Orange, but that is basically a statement of faith rather than analysis. If you're a cynic, you'll point out that the chart assumes compound growth will continue uninterrupted for a decade, something that is often true for technology specs but is rarely true for technology markets.

What we really need is time-series data, so we can see what's growing and what isn't. Unfortunately, Orange didn't present any numbers like that, but the research firm Telephia did, in a separate presentation. Unfortunately, their numbers were US only, and they didn't cut the usage categories in the same way as France Telecom. But they still show some interesting trends...


Mobile data growth in the US

Telephia measures mobile data usage by analyzing the monthly bills of mobile phone users. This should give very accurate information on revenue and number of users, but it doesn't track physical usage. Because some services are billed per-use and some have monthly subscription fees, it's hard to tell how heavily people are using the services listed below.

Telephia reports that billings are growing steadily for a wide range of mobile data services. The chart below shows total US operator revenue for mobile data from Q3 2006 to Q1 2007. (These figures include anything that passes through the user's phone bill. Applications and services paid for separately by the user are not included.)



The chart is in billions of dollars, so it shows that in Q1 2007, total on-deck US data revenue was about $4.6 billion. Is that a big number or a small one? Well, total service revenue for the US mobile operators is about $32.5 billion per quarter, according to the CTIA. So mobile data is about 14% of mobile billings.

Where is e-mail? I can't find e-mail anywhere on the chart. I'm very surprised they didn't break it out separately.

Strangely consistent growth rates. The weirdest thing about the chart is that everything's growing at the same rate. In the real world, that sort of thing doesn't often happen. I wonder if a lot of the growth might be driven by people buying service bundles, where they pay a flat extra rate per month to activate a bunch of different services, and then the revenue gets allocated across the services by the operator. That would cause everything to grow in lockstep.

If that's what's going on, then these numbers really might not say much about usage -- what they'd be tracking is the ability of the operators to sell services bundles.

Anyway, the numbers show that the US operators are making pretty good revenue from mobile data. I didn't make a chart of this, but in general, the growth in mobile data billings is large enough to make up for the ongoing decline in mobile voice revenue. So the operators aren't getting rich, but data is helping to keep them from getting poor.

More details. Telephia lumps a lot of different things in the "Downloads" category. For Q1 2007, they gave more details on that category. So I can't give you a time series, but here's a more fine-cut look at how mobile data revenue looked in the US at the start of 2007:



Premium SMS is mostly ringtones paid for via SMS, plus voting for things like American Idol. Audio is downloading and streaming of songs. The other categories are self-explanatory. I feel bad about the tiny size of the applications category, but keep in mind that most smartphone apps are sold through the web and then synced onto the device, and so don't show up in operator billings.

Number of users per service. Telephia also reported the total number of users for each service. As we saw in the Orange chart, SMS has the most users in the US (although the gap between it and the other services isn't as large as in Europe).



Revenue per user. Combining the user and revenue data, we can estimate monthly billings per user for each service:



You can see why the operators like premium SMS. And look at WAP! It never lived up to the original hype that it would become the mobile version of the Web, but as a tool for getting things like sports scores and weather reports, it's not doing too bad. (Whether it's paying for all the money that was invested in it is another story.) Video's generating the most revenue per user, but with a very tiny user base. Audio revenue (which is revenue from listening to songs, not ringtones) is fairly close to what Apple gets from iTunes users (the average iTunes user downloads about 3.3 songs per month, or about $3.30) (link).

Usage doesn't follow capability. And now for the "big" mashup. We can combine Pew Internet's figures on phone capabilities with Telephia's numbers on service usage to figure out roughly what percent of US mobile customers who know they have a given feature on the phone ever actually use it. The results are interesting:



For communication-related services, the percentage of users is quite high (although remember that we don't know how heavily the features are being used). But most mobile users are not adopting the entertainment features in their phones. That's exactly what you'd expect if only a limited percentage of the population were interested in using their phones for entertainment, which is what a lot of user studies have shown (link).

The lesson: If you're an operator or handset vendor, be careful about pushing phones that are a kitchen-sink collection of expensive features. The odds are very good that you'll spend a lot of subsidy money on people who won't ever adopt the underlying services that were supposed to justify the subsidy. It's much better to offer a variety of phones specialized for different types of user, and let them pick the ones they want.

=====

As I said at the start, it's an interesting collection of tidbits, but far too US-centric. If you live outside the US and have information to add on your market, please post a comment.

Sources:
Total revenue of the operators: link
Orange's presentation at the Global Mobility Roundtable: link
Telephia's presentation at the GMR: link
Pew Internet: link

A new way to measure the popularity of the iPhone

True story: Back when I was working at Apple, we received a report that there had been a burglary at a company that had a lot of Macintosh computers. The thieves took every one of the Macs -- and left behind all the Windows PCs.

We were delighted. Not about the burglary, mind you. I'm afraid we were pretty callous about that, and besides we figured the company was insured. But we loved the idea that even criminal lowlifes knew which was the better computer.

In fact, we loved that idea so much that we made a commercial about it. It was cool -- deep blue lighting, lots of shadows, and two silhouettes moving silently through the office. One of them starts to pick up a PC, and his companion hisses, "not those, just take these." And he points at a Mac.

The Computer for the Rest of Us, indeed.

At the last minute, somebody in the company realized that the commercial might just possibly be viewed as an endorsement of crime, besides which it made us look like complete mercenaries. So I don't think the commercial was ever aired. We just watched it a lot at communication meetings.

I thought of that old commercial today when I was in an AT&T (formerly Cingular) mobile phone store. There was a big video display for the iPhone, but no phones on the counter. "Did they sell out?" I asked the clerk.

"Nope. Someone broke in and stole them," he said. "We saw it on the surveillance video. They were in and out in 30 seconds. They ran over to the iPhones, cut the cables, and left."

"Did they take anything else?" I asked, thinking I saw a new commercial in the making.

"Oh yeah, they took the Treos too."

Sorry, Apple. No commercial.

And sorry, RIM. They left the Blackberries. Personally, I would have grabbed a Pearl on the way out.

By the way, if you're thinking of buying an iPhone on eBay, keep in mind -- the other thing the AT&T guy told me is that the iPhones are all serialized, and Apple can permanently turn off the ones that were stolen.

Impact of Amazon Flexible Payments Service: Computing as a utility

The announcement of Amazon FPS made my whole week, on a lot of different levels. I'm excited about the service itself, I'm excited about what it means for the development of web applications, and I'm excited about what it'll eventually do for the mobile data world.

Okay, I'm just excited.

About FPS. Before I talk about what it means, I should give a quick overview of what it is. FPS is a web service, meaning it's a set of online APIs that the creator of a website or web application can use to perform tasks. What FPS does for you is billing -- you can use it to accept payments for something you sell online. Basically, you transmit the customer's info to Amazon, and they take care of the credit check, credit card processing, billing, and so on. They send you the money, less a percentage cut that they take.

That's not at all revolutionary. PayPal and Google Checkout offer the same thing already. Amazon's cut is about the same as PayPal -- about 2% to 3% of your revenue, depending on the amount of business you do, plus 30 cents per transaction. Google is a tad cheaper, plus you get AdSense credits for using it.

(For more information on FPS, there are good articles here and here).

What impressed me about FPS is its flexibility. Amazon says you can set different payment terms for every customer, set up subscriptions and multiple payment schedules, manage a store in which you pass payments from a customer to your suppliers, set up either pre- or post-payment systems, and most importantly you can manage micropayments down to a couple of pennies per transactions (link).

The competing systems either don't offer this at all, or do it badly. I think FPS is a really important change to the competitive situation in payment services. And, because the payment services are all available to any website, that means it's an important change to the whole web platform.

New forms of online business. So far, e-commerce online has been limited mostly to selling things that we could already get through regular stores -- books, clothing, software, etc. One of the main culprits for this was payments. The current credit card system, with its strong discouragement of small transactions, makes it very hard to sell anything priced below a few dollars online. I think the most interesting use of online commerce will be the creation of markets for things that we can't buy through stores today. Most of those things are intellectual property of various sorts, and the natural market for them is a buck or less a copy. So the payment system is a big barrier.

I won't recap my whole argument for minipayments; I wrote about it recently, and you can read it here. Minipayments have already changed the world in music, where Apple's proprietary minipayment system in iTunes has revived the market for music singles, something that was virtually dead in stores. Another example: iStockPhoto has created a market for low-cost stock photography. By creating an easy system of practical minipayments, Amazon FPS will help to enable the creation of lots of iTunes and iStockPhoto equivalents for other products and forms of intellectual property. Think short stories, art, games, and probably a lot of other things we haven't even thought of yet.

I know FPS isn't perfect -- for example, small payments have to be aggregated and then billed in a single larger transaction. But it advances the state of the art dramatically, and more importantly it challenges Google and PayPal to improve their own minipayment handling. That competitive dynamic should eventually result in a truly great minipayment mechanism online, no matter who makes it.

Amazon vs. Google: A contrast in strategies. I think Amazon's approach to web services makes Google look bad. Both companies are taking on PayPal, but Google's approach so far has been pure blunt force -- duplicate PayPal's features, underprice them a bit, and tie it to another Google product (you get AdSense credits for using Google Checkout). Let's see...you compete by duplicating someone else's features, underpricing, and tying back to your dominant product. Does that remind you of a certain company in Redmond?

In contrast, Amazon has been trying to find holes in the infrastructure that nobody has filled yet. Its storage and compute services provided very important infrastructure that helped accelerate the growth of Web 2.0 companies. Although its payment system is not as unique, the emphasis on minipayments is, and I think it too will play an important part in the online ecosystem.

Bottom line: Google is often copying, Amazon innovating. I'd say that I'm disappointed in Google, but actually given their size they would crush everyone else if they were also innovative. So maybe we should be grateful.

What will Amazon do next? Their pattern is clear -- they're picking out things that they know how to do well (because of their retail operation) and turning them into services for other developers. A logical next step would be if they offered developers the infrastructure needed to set up an online store -- order tracking, support request tracking, inventory, displaying merchandise, etc. That would work with their other services, and would put them in a position to start draining business from eBay.

I'd also love to see them offer some sort of unified product and content discovery system. One of the things missing from the online ecosystem is an easy way to find goods and services that are for sale online, and comparison shop between them. You can use search for it, but it's not very well organized, and comparisons are difficult. eBay kind of does that, but you have to be registered as one of their sellers, and eBay does the billing. I'd love to see a looser directory than eBay that doesn't take the payments directly, but just points you to things you can buy.

That's what I thought Google Base would evolve into, but Google hasn't made the move yet, so there's still time for Amazon to seize that territory.

What it means for mobile. You can probably guess what I'm going to say here. The operators consistently charge up to about 50% of revenue for any songs, games, or other content sold through their networks. The mobile software stores like Motricity and Handango charge about the same. Amazon, Google, and PayPal each take about 2-3% of revenue, and that cost is likely to decline due to competition. As the wireless Internet takes hold, how many users will be willing to pay 50% extra just for the pleasure of having a game appear on their Sprint or Verizon bill rather than their Amazon bill?

If an operator bit the bullet now and priced competitively, they might be able to hold onto about 10% of revenue in exchange for the greater convenience of running content purchases through the mobile bill. But a 50% cut is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. There's no way Amazon and friends will be able to resist the temptation to target the mobile web. The question is not if, it's when.

The name of the game is infrastructure. In an open, decentralized computing environment like the Web, the best way for a software company to succeed is to create a control point -- to offer a piece of critical infrastructure that others need, and build a franchise around it.

Google understood that concept with search + advertising, and did well with maps, but has been remarkably inept at creating other strong points. I think that's because, to be blunt, engineering PhDs don't necessarily make the best business strategists. Google, if you want to go to the next level, ya got to hire business people who are as smart as your technical people. And you have to give them some authority.

Microsoft seems to get it, but is still trying to retrofit its applications into services rather than really thinking through what's needed in an online ecosystem. Apple seems to understand, but so far hasn't been interested in opening up its services to others (it could easily have turned iTunes into a content discovery and billing service, long before either Google or Amazon hit the market). Some other big Internet companies, like Yahoo, don't seem to really understand yet that this is the competitive battleground of their future.

Amazon is the one major web company that seems to both understand the situation, and be able to consistently come up with good new services. They already have two strong points (computing services and storage), and payments looks to be the third. If some of the other players don't wake up soon, Amazon's going to end up in an extremely powerful position online.

Why I work in the tech industry

Because of the cool toys, of course. But for me, there's also something else: Making a difference in peoples' lives.

I'm sure that sounds corny, and not everyone feels the way I do, but for me there's something very compelling about the ability of technology done right to improve the lives of lots of people, in ways you don't expect and can't plan for. I got my first taste of that years ago, when I was a Mac software developer in the early days of desktop publishing. I was mostly creating PostScript fonts, which is a thoroughly commoditized process today but was difficult back then, before third party font-creation products were available.

There was a lot of demand for fonts, so I would go to Mac trade shows and sell the fonts from a booth, $30 or so a pop. I didn't get rich, but it was fun and I learned a lot. One of the things I learned was that you have to take the work really seriously, even on something as trivial as fonts. A man walked up to me at one of the shows. He didn't look like one of the technophiles there, just a normal guy in his 30s, someone you might run into at the gas station. He spoke with a slight southern accent.

"I like your fonts," he said, and smiled.

"Thanks!" I said. One of the coolest things about those shows was that you got to talk to customers.

"Especially that one." He pointed to a font that imitated calligraphy, lots of curves and soft angles. "When my niece died, we used it to make the engraving for the tombstone."

I thanked him and expressed my condolences, as politely and gently as I could. But I was in shock the whole time. I thought my fonts were for throwaways, things like flyers or newsletters that people glanced at and then tossed. It was fun to make them, and a good learning experience, but I wasn't expecting anyone to use them for anything serious. Certainly not as serious as saying goodbye to a loved one who died young.

What it taught me was that making a new enabling technology is a trust. You don't know what people might do with it in their lives, and so you should always take it very seriously and make sure it really works the way you promise it will. Because chances are, in a world this big, someone will depend on it an awful lot.

That lesson came back to me a few weeks ago, when I saw a photo essay in the New York Times showing real-life people with the avatars they use to represent themselves in computer games (link; you can read about the underlying book and exhibition here). There were the examples I expected -- the chunky geek guy who shows himself as a red-haired ninja girl, etc. But most of the avatars looked a lot like the people who made them -- thinner maybe, or with better hair or bigger, uh, appendages. But quite recognizable.

And then there was the photo of Jason Rowe, a young man in his 30s who has muscular dystrophy (link). He's in a wheelchair, with a breathing mask on, and a report by NPR said he can move his hands just enough to control a character in Star Wars Galaxies, which he plays about 80 hours a week (link).

His avatar is a huge husky guy in armor, waving politely at the viewer -- something that you imagine might be difficult for the real-life Mr. Rowe. In all of the other pictures, you get the impression that the real person is saying to you, "here I am in real life, the avatar is my mask." But Rowe's avatar seems to say, "this is the real me over here where I can move around, don't judge me by my physical shell."

I've never met Jason, and I may be reading way too much into his picture. But if he's not thinking that, I know there are a lot of other people on the Internet who are. I doubt the folks who wrote Galaxies or Warcraft or Second Life were expecting to have this sort of impact on peoples' lives, but that's what happens when you work in tech.

And Jason, thanks for posing for that picture. You reminded me what this industry is really about.