steve harmon

What Apple, Google & Microsoft Have To Do In 2010

Two things:

1) mobile

2) acquire

Economically I think 2010 could be a much stronger year than 2009. And 2009 was a fairly strong year if you look at the stock markets worldwide and some companies that paved the way. Let’s take a look.

Glass is half full if NASDAQ is any indicator. That’s how far the stock index is up this year, up 45%. In China the glass is even fuller, with the Shanghai index up 79% year to date. London is up 23%. Hong Kong 49%. Japan, 19%.

nasd

Who’s leading the charge? What’s their outlook for 2010?

Apple – Apple makes stuff people want to use that makes their lives more productive. It’s that simple. I’ve been in tech since 1984 and sold the first Apple computers back when nobody had a computer, or a reason for one. The centerpiece of Apple is the iPhone, essentially a mobile computer in your pocket. The platform and abundance of apps make iPhone a breakthrough product.

applelogo

The weakness in Apple’s approach though is signing exclusive deals with one carrier per country. It leaves an opening for a rival to come in with a wannbe iPhone (like Android) and try and satisfy the wider market.

Imagine if Dell said you could only access the Web using one particular ISP. How many Dell PCs would it sell? Now imagine if Apple allowed any carrier to sell its phone, it would have sold 10 times more iPhones and locked out any competitor.

Apple is leaving a gap that Google will try and fill. Apple needs to make iPhone available to all carriers and lock in the market completely.

—

Google – Google search has become the default for many people. It has become synonymous with search. Every other area Google has tried to become the market leader it has failed so far. It ends up acquiring market leaders such as YouTube (which still isn’t a great business to be in, video streaming is expensive). Google’s strength relies on search and the more it moves away from search the more rivals can come in and compete. Google Docs, etc. are small weapons against the Microsoft Office giant and necessary. As is Gmail for enterprise, another stab at Microsoft email solution Exchange.

But imagine if Google thought more like Wikipedia and became open source for everything. Not open source as in ‘adopt my open standard’ monkey drip.

What Google needs to do in 2010: Buy anything that moves in search, mobile and advertising. The venture firms aren’t investing so Google has a great shelf full of snappy startups to look at.
googlelogo

—

Yahoo – Yahoo was the Google of 2000. Market cap over $150 billion, great name, cool vibe. Fun place to work. The ‘could do no wrong’ company. And then it slowly lost its lead, like putting on body fat by eating one candy bar a day and forgetting how you got fit.

Yahoo’s 10% of what it was then. The user base is still large but the “need to use” factor is low. Yahoo wasted a decade not acquiring anything that moved in Web, mobile and ads. Google even shopped itself to Yahoo very early on as the team didn’t want to build a company vs. a technology.

Yahoo in 2010 needs to buy startups and companies to help it scale and regain footing, especially in mobile, ads and commerce areas. It needs an aggressive deal team to swoop in and buy, buy, buy while things are cheap. Towards the end of 2010 startup valuations and deals will probably be more expensive. Buy early.

—

Microsoft – The challenge for Microsoft is one of bureaucracy. How can a whale move like a shark? Too many people stirring the soup and not enough getting done. The problem is what I call the “residual” one. Once a company becomes a market leader in any area it sits back and thinks sales will continue forever, like an annuity. Upgrades to the installed base. And for 14 years that’s what happened, since Windows 95 and Office 95. That era is over and the new one is network based solutions. Streamlined, essential functions, not bloatware.

Microsoft in 2010: Bing is a good move and I’ve been using it some of the time. It has superior results in some areas vs. rivals. However, the search game is changing and Microsoft needs more of a “game changer” in the field to dislodge Google. Some of that are deals such as Yahoo, Facebook, etc. But, again, Microsoft needs to buy and be in every network area and scale search by a huge factor. Secret weapon: cash. Has to break out and truly go global in opportunity.

bing

Facebook – the key for it in 2010 is going to be how does it shift from being “nice to have” to “need to have?” The firm claims 350 million registered users but how many could live without Facebook if it went away? What is the “utility” factor for Facebook? What is the “must use” factor? Light reading still, nothing to compel the average person to login. Surely it’s not to play raise a pig?

Ditto for Twitter. Company has lots of press but what is the “need to use” factor? Media companies love it and the self promotion angle is popular. Twitter’s goal is 1 billion users and it’s about 3% there…Even Google doesn’t have 1 billion users after 11 years and billions of dollars spent. Twitter still feels nebulous, unsure of its genus/species. What does it do for an encore after being on Oprah?
—

Above and beyond any of the above, I think we’re going to see innovation from smaller companies on stage in 2010 and the bigger names in tech will be swooping in to get their edge…!

The $3 Trillion Meeting In Las Vegas

Las Vegas has long played host to high rollers, Elvis impersonators, midnight marriages between complete strangers, and more circus acts than tourists baking in the desert sun. Only the crew rolling into town September 21 actually in many ways is more important than any of them. It may not seem so on first note.

lv1

But if you consider that the group assembling is actually powering much of the world’s economy, to the tune of $3 trillion in annual industry sales. Who is that group? Retail. The top 250 retailers, in fact, generate $3+ trillion in annual sales (source: Deloitte). And when you stop to think about it, your humble little town relies on this global industry from the shops to the jobs.

lv2

The world is a consumer economy, from Soweto to Shanghai, New York to Nairobi. Lots of industries have Summits. Countries do also. Davos, G8. United Nations. Heck, even music has the Grammys and VMAs. But from my perspective it would behoove the world’s leaders to really pay attention to what retailers are doing. As retail goes, so goes economies. As economies go, so go public opinion.

The Shop.org Summit is the retail industry’s annual get together to discuss what’s what, what’s hot and not, how to make customers happy, and basically keep the consumer economy moving in good, bad and Clint Eastwood times (as in ugly). For as ugly as ugly gets, fact is people need (and want) to shop. Yes, budgets are tight. But clothing, food, transport, goods of all kinds are what makes the world go round. It’s not “consumerism”, more like plain old consumer, from green to lean and mean.

Some of the more interesting sessions on tap for Shop.org’s Summit include:

-The kickoff Bootcamp Monday Sept 21 that talks about social media (is social media really paying off?)

lv3

-think consumers are all about saving pennies? consider Gilt and other buying clubs…looks interesting

-no longer bricks and mortar versus clicks…retailers are now multi-channel and I want to hear what thay have to say, if it’s working (or is Amazon eating their lunch?)

lv4

-mobile commerce…there’s about 1 billion mobile phones in the world, new uses for the phone include payments and shopping, comparison pricing (when does it hit primetime?)

-can eBay be a factor in the next wave of commerce? (its CEO will talk about trends, but I’d like to hear how eBay competes in the next decade)

These are just some of many, including an expo floor where retailers and vendors look to sell each other their own goods and services.

$3 trillion is up for grabs and how this group decides will effect consumers everywhere. Viva Las Vegas.

Viral Marketing: Free Hamburgers For Everyone

The Myth Of Viral Marketing: Free Isn't Free, It Needs To Be Monetized 

A hamburger restaurant gives away free hamburgers and fries daily to
over 5 million people. 



A car maker gives away 1 million hybrids per month.

A bank gives out $100 to everyone that walks in the door.

A Web company offers a free widget that's installed by 1 million users.



All of these could be considered "viral" marketing successes --
according to the marketing department.

The problem is that unless these companies can turn these campaigns into
revenue and earnings then it's all for naught.

In other words, it's time to debunk the notion of "viral marketing."

I've seen hundreds of companies in the past 15 years try and build
businesses on this notion. Yet unless the business has an underlying
revenue model then being viral is basically throwing money out the door.

That's why companies such as YouTube have struggled to monetize their
asset. Streaming videos hundreds of millions of times per day simply
costs more than YouTube is able to generate. Anyone doing analysis on
bandwidth costs would find their model challenging. YouTube a consumer
success? Yes. A *commercial* success? No.



The challenge is to balance viral with revenue making services, and
that's where many fail. 

Most opt for some form of "let's plug in Ad Sense" as their revenue
plan. I was an early investor in Ad Sense (before Google acquired it)
and know it well. Ad Sense is great for individuals but not a revenue
strategy for a large-scale business. Why? Click throughs on ads (any
ads) are dismal. Great would be 1% click through. Most likely it's
.001%. The winner in Ad Sense is Google as the bookmaker for ads, not
you.

A good example of a company that has figured out viral and revenue is
Craigslist. Now I'm not a big fan of Craigslist's look and feel but he
has figured out a way to offer up free classifieds and charge for a few
things such as job postings and apartment listings. Craig also has been
smart in keeping staffing to under 30 people. Had he tried to "go viral"
and plug in Ad Sense or any advertising years ago it may have tanked his
service. He kept it free and charged where he could, generating more
than $1 million per month. He could get a lot more without compromising
the service also. But that's for Craig to figure out, my business
development ideas aren't free.

Casual observers will also see something widespread in usage and call it
viral. Not so.

For example, eBay was moving along at a slow pace until it landed a deal
with AOL in 1998 to be the auctions on AOL. That one deal propelled eBay into
the mainstream consumer space online.

Google is often hailed as a huge viral success. Yet it actually was
built by business development (not viral marketing). Google struck deals
with AOL and Yahoo in the late 1990s that made Google the search provider on those sites.
Not viral. It took Google's biz dev guy 1 year to get Yahoo to say yes.
1 year! that's the kind of persistence it takes to win.

Going back to the beginning of the viral notion. In my book it's
Netscape. Over 1 million software downloads in a month back when it
first launched (1995). And Mosaic before that was also a viral success.
That's why Kleiner Perkins invested in Netscape. Download rate. And, for
awhile, Netscape became a business selling software (server and client).
It also sold links on its homepage to Yahoo and other search engines
that also bought exposure to consumers (again, not viral). 



Hotmail is cited as one of the first viral successes. I remember its
founder sharing the growth rate with me when it first began.  It was
incredible. Microsoft soon acquired Hotmail for $400 million in a bid to
jump start its own consumer Internet services such as MSN. So there was
a value in reach for Microsoft as opposed to a revenue/earnings
acquisition.

At the end of the day (beginning, too) it's not how viral something is
as much as how do you build a business with a clear way to monetize
customers. There needs to be a balance between viral, business
development and ways to monetize the customer base if you want to build
a scalable and long-lasting business.

The Brewing Battle Between Apple, Google And Microsoft

In the world of famous threesomes there’s Larry, Moe and Curly; The Three Musketeers; Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Madonna. But the battle for media will be fought by these three: Apple, Google and Microsoft.

paris

All three companies are engaged in multiple battlefront wars with each other: search, software, hardware, services.

Apple’s banning of the Google Voice app from the iTunes store is just the opening shot in a lengthy decade battle ahead for control of the world’s communication and media flow.

What kind of battle will it be? Understanding where each company is at will help understand what’s at stake and who is winning so far.

I ran some numbers on what each of the company has in terms of users for its various offerings, from music to phones to Web, and it showed some interesting results: the battle royale that I see coming is between Apple and Google over which controls the user across multiple digital avenues. Why Apple and Google? Apple has the lead if we look at each platform. Google has the edge in search, a huge onramp to multiple end user services that it doesn’t yet provide as it steers users to other sites.

aapkl msft goog

in millions	Music	Phones	Desktop	Browser	Web users
Apple	iPods	iPhone	Mac	Safari	Apple sites
	200	25	40	70	57
Google	None	Android	None	Chrome	Google sites
	0	1.5	0	31	157
Microsoft	Zune	Mobile	Windows	IE	Microsoft sites
	2	50	780	503	127

Microsoft clearly dominates in operating systems with a global share that Apple and Google don’t seem likely to touch anytime soon. However, given the government restrictions on Windows it clearly has hampered its growth into new markets such as search, music, and other new areas. That said, Windows Mobile had impressive numbers but looks like it’s losing ground as Apple’s iPhone gains.

Apple’s hardware “ecosystem” of iPods, iPhones is the biggest threat to Google. These devices feed Apple growth and network services (iTunes, Safari, MobileMe, etc.). This is the main reason Google is trying to get a foothold with its own mobile software effort, Android. Reports say Android-powered phones have sold 1.5 million units. Not big in the iPhone sales gauge. But somewhat notable. The biggest threat to Google, however, is that Apple is probably the only company in the world perceived as “cooler” than Google. Apple’s game changing moves in music and phones are not easy to duplicate. Just ask Palm Pre or Microsoft Zune. Cool is elusive.

In a perfect world for Microsoft it would be allowed to bundle anything into Windows and both Apple and Google would have a much more difficult job of gaining market share. However, as software becomes more “service” than a installed item, this advantage would likely have faded over time anyway. It’s ironic that much of Google’s employees came from Netscape, which Microsoft soundly defeated in the software market. This time around, though, there is no software, it’s all Web services, server farms, networked information distributed. Controlled by the end user.

There are other threats to the above three, the biggest is facebook with over 200 million global users. But it remains a long shot to unseat any of the above for multiple reasons.

About 5 years ago I said Apple was the new Sony and Pixar was the new Disney (both ran by Steve Jobs). Today Pixar is owned by Disney and Apple is the undisputed king of consumer electronic media from music, TV, movies, apps and more it delivers. Why else did Amazon launch its own ebook reader, the kindle? Because Apple’s iPods in a few moves could become the leader in ereaders overnight — same as music.

box

Who wins the battle above? I think Apple currently has the edge with its 32 years of being in business, making mistakes (some big like helping Microsoft early on), and its ups and downs with products and CEOs. Experience and making cool new products keeps consumers buying (look at Apple’s latest balance sheet).

Microsoft will have to accelerate its growth into consumer-facing services and acquire many new services to make this happen. Not Yahoo but Twitter, Facebook.

Google will have to hire people from Apple to help it figure out better consumer experiences. Look at Orkut, still has problems and server hiccups all these years later. Google Base didn’t beat Craigslist. Google Docs isn’t dethroning Office. Even Android sounds more like a tech solution than a consumer one.

Billionaires Summer Camp: Google, Facebook, Microsoft Get Together & Roast Marshmallows

Summer Camp for billionaires happened this week in the middle of Idaho. For the ‘geographically challenged’, Idaho is somewhere due east from San Francisco. But what happens when you get over a dozen billionaires such as Bill Gates, Google’s Eric Schmidt, DELL’s Michael Dell and others in the Idaho wilds? The odd thing is not much it seems. That’s what happened this year at an exclusive retreat for the media moguls and tech titans who spent a week in Sun Valley, Idaho, trying to figure out just what everyone else in the room was doing.

sv1

Sun Valley is a town in Idaho where every year for the past 27 years the investment bank Allen & Company has invited media and technology CEOs and founders to get together to socialize and network with each other. The idea is this can lead to deals. Sometimes it does.

The event this year was like Texas Hold ‘Em poker game with a lot of poker faces sitting around the table, few hands shown and chips not put on the table. In past years this annual event spawned a slate of mergers and acquisitions, speculation and buzz. This year seemed to be more of a “wait and see” and “you go first” environment from what I can tell.

texas-holdem
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg was there. As was Twitter co-founder Evan Williams who may have been looking for a buyer for the company (unofficially of course). New AOL honcho Tim Armstrong (formerly of Google) popped up. Sony CEO Howard Stringer put things in perspective when he said Twitter was a company he didn’t want to acquire. A company with little or no revenue? “not a club I want to join.”

google_facebook1
From my perspective the larger observation is that the U.S. financial market isn’t where it needs to be in helping new companies grow and be successful. Events like Sun Valley are the epitome of the availability of capital and debt to accommodate mergers and acquisitions. The market for initial public offerings in the U.S. has been hampered by over-regulation. Ironically, some of the only companies to go public in the U.S. this year have been from China.

On the debt side, private equity overtapped the debt markets for several years to acquire assets they had no right buying, from retail to manufacturing. Combined with housing, mortgage and other debt weakness, the debt markets are not as able as they should be to finance the kind of mega-merger that a conference like Sun Valley should announce.

In lieu of that, here’s the announcements I would have liked to have seen come out of Sun Valley this year:

Google buys Facebook. There was no Google-Facebook deal. Although Facebook is much more valuable than YouTube to Google in my strategic long-term observation. With Facebook, Google gets the real-time user opinion of over 200 million users + billions of user photos uploaded monthly + profiles full of personal data + a social network winner. My prediction: Google could make an offer for Facebook for $15 billion cash and stock within 12 months. We’ll see.

Microsoft buys Twitter. There was no Microsoft-Twitter deal (not yet anyway. My bet is Microsoft could acquire Twitter within 6 months for about $750 million. Why? Twitter has no revenue but does have a user base that Microsoft needs to differentiate its search from Google). Twitter is the new PR platform and usenet groups for today’s thumb-happy crowd (mobile users).

Time Warner spins out AOL. AOL is trying to rejigger after a disastrous 10 years under Time Warner in a failed merger. Coincidentally, in 1996 I said AOL wanted to be Yahoo when AOL grew up. Well, AOL is finally web-based but still looking for a grown-up self. The cable companies and telcos are the new on-ramps, where does that leave AOL? Destination? AOL’s instant messenger service AIM is the jewel, along with Advertising.com. AIM is the largest “real-time Web” conversation.

Remember in the movie when Forrest Gump opened a box of chocolates and said he never knew what he was gonna get inside. Well, one of the biggest missing ingredients at Sun Valley this year was not only action but mobile industry mavens.

For all the talk about media, the real platform that most media and tech titans ought to be focused on is mobile. Mobile is bigger than PC, TV, print, broadcast. Mobile is the new Holy Grail of media. Ask any 10-year old what they’d rather do: watch TV, read a book, listen to radio or play their Nintendo DS or PSP. Increasingly, another game option is iPhone. What do they want for birthday? an iPhone or iPod Touch, or Nintendo DSi.

The real story about media this year is that Apple with its mobile-centric product line looks more like the future than anyone talked about at Sun Valley. And Steve Jobs wasn’t even there. Roasted marshmallows anyone?

roast

The Law of Digital Abundance

Welcome to the law of digital abundance, is your business prepared? Probably not.
Most businesses are set up according to 18th and 19th century work ideas.
We’ve all heard of Moore’s Law about computing power doubling every 18
months; of Metcalfe’s Law of the power of network growing exponentially
with every new user.

Welcome to The Law of Digital Abundance. Most of what we do in life is
based on scarcity. Limited land, water, resources. Look at the cost of
oil. Finite capacity. Or controlled markets, prices set by cartels,
whether oil or diamonds.

Companies price products based on supply and demand. Homes, cars,
services.

Everything about what we do, in fact, is based on scarcity.

Except when we operate in the digital environ. Digital environs are
based on abundance. Not scarcity. The problem is most businesses, even
in the digital world of the Web and mobile, price things according to scarcity.

Very, very few companies know how to address digital abundance. And just
when they do, they either sell to a larger company, putting abundance
under check, or they stop considering how deep the abundance is. Like
looking at a solar system and not seeing a galaxy potential.

Digital goods expand, not contract. In the old TV series Star Trek Captain Kirk
comes across the Tribbles which multiply amazingly fast.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, here’s a screen shot from the TV show:

Someday You'll Be Called Furbies And Make Billions $$$

Digital goods are like that, just think of a viral video or email your friends sent you.

Susan Boyle of the UK talent show comes to mind, she became a YouTube star overnight.

Susan Boyle's Swan Song

In offline goods, pricing and value is fundamentally derived as a result of scarcity.

Ask the owner of the beachfront home on Hawaii or Bora Bora. Airline seats are priced
according to number available. Unlike airline snacks which are priced on
how how salty sweet cardboard-like and how much BHT they can squeeze in. Potato chip, anyone?

Airline snacks aren't this good

But in a digital environ with basically unlimited storage, bandwidth,
information and access value is created as a result of the abundance but
not because of it.
In a digital environ abundance by itself is value-less.

Digital value is instead based on convenience. How quick, meaningful,
easy something is. Users downloaded 1 billion iPhone apps from Apple in just 9 months.

Often free or cheap, these apps are redefining digital values.

It's The Apps That Made Apple's iPhone A Hit

Companies hoping to compete in a digital era need to understand Digital
Abundance and how it changes their business.

Each digital copy is an original (not a copy). Pricing digital goods needs to be based
on taking advantage of the opportunity of scaling and distribution.

Instead of having one central source like Amazon.com you end up with 100,000 Amazon.coms,
100,000 Apple iTunes stores, 100,000 Alibabas, 100,000 Google Ad Senses and more. Ready to multiply?

What if these digital goods expanded unfettered?

Best Movers Beat First Movers, No Kool-Aid Allowed

cro-magnon

One of the biggest myths running around the web and tech industries today is the idea of ‘first mover advantage.’

Take a walk with me down memory lane:

Booklink. First book store on the web. Early 1990s.
AOL acquired in 1994 and it got lost in the mix of the online service.

=> Amazon crushed it.
GNN. First web directory. Early 1990s. GNN?
Global Network Navigator, launched by book publisher O’Reilly (hello to Dale Daugherty over there) and sold to AOL for $11 million, a then unheard of price for a ‘home
page.’

gnn

=> Yahoo came along later and beat it.

HotBot. First meta search engine. Mid 1990s. Run by Wired’s HotWired. One box front end as it is today pretty much.

hotbot

=> Alta Vista, Lycos, Infoseek and finally today Google beat it. Compuserve. First online service. 1969. Owned by H&R Block. Yep, the tax people.

=> Compuserve had millions of subscribers when AOL was still called ‘Quantum Computer Services’ and had a few thousand subscribers to a DOS-based system based on a BBS (bulletin board service, these are what geeks did to network before the web).
Mosaic. First commercial browser 1994. Became Netscape Navigator.

netscape

Deluge of browsers sprouted including Spyglass Mosaic, SPRY Mosaic, Netcom NetCOMPLETE, Quarterdeck, Netmanage Chameleon.

=> Microsoft licensed Spyglass’s browser and launched Internet Explorer 1995. 1999 it had dominant marketshare.

Delphi. First online service to offer Internet mail access.

=> Acquired by News Corp.

Real Audio. First audio software player for the web. Mid 1990s. Progressive Networks (now called Realnetworks) launched this. Later came out with Real Video, then Real Player.

=> Microsoft licensed the code and created Windows Media Player, now the dominant player for audio/video, bundled with Windows.
IBM PC. 1981. First IBM-based PC.

=> by the late 1980s and in the 1990s Compaq, HP and others beat it. By late 1990s and 2000s, DELL crushed all of them with a better supply chain and relationship direct with customer.

Lessons: Time and time again first does not guarantee winning. The real strategy is to be something I call “best mover advantage”. Best mover can be first, middle or last — doesn’t matter what the placement is.

jordan

You want another example? Apple lost the PC war decades ago due to pricing its PC too high and limiting its licensing. Fast forward two decades and Napster launched the online music business, peaked and died and got resurrected.

Meanwhile, Apple finally figured out its “real” business is making cool gadgets for any platform (not just PCs) and launched iPod and iTunes. iTunes becomes the #1 online music store in weeks. And the iPhone has become the most-popular smartphone in the world, with a new 3G S coming out in the U.S. this week (already sold out).

Companies that talk about their strategy and business need to think about being the “best mover” not the “first.”

Being best mover is why Google even exists, long after a truckload of search engines had come along, gone public to the tune of hundreds of millions, and fizzled while drinking their own Kool Aid.

kool-aid

Whosoever Hath The Most & Best Apps, Wins

A lot of hype around Palm and Pre mobile phone this week. Hmmmm, what’s the reality check? I was one of the earliest Apple evangelists when the company came out with the Apple II and the Mac. Back in the day I sold personal computers to help pay my way through college and based on the graphic interface and more “human” approach to interacting with a machine I became an Apple fan.

mac

In my first job after college, in fact, I dragged my Mac to work and plugged it in, refusing to learn MS-DOS. But eventually in the business world Microsoft won. Applications for business were based on MS-DOS. Not Apple. MS-DOS was a platform. Third-party software developers made it into a global empire valued at hundreds of billions of $.

By the time 1995 rolled around and Microsoft came out with Windows 95 the eye candy advantage that Apple had was gone. Third party apps built on it and propelled Microsoft to the fore. I stopped being an Apple fan and started liking Windows and the plethora of apps available for a fraction of the price for a Windows PC.

windows-95-screen-shot

Apple withered and fizzled like an open can of Pepsi.

I don’t know if you read Bill Gate’s book ‘The Road Ahead’ (way back in 1990s) but he talked about “virtuous cycles” that build companies. Positive swirls around a product. I guess the hippies in Cupertino at Apple must have read it since by the early 2000s the iPod popped out like Angelie Jolie emerging from Phyllis Diller. Somehow the gene pool that gave the world the Performa now had it right, again.

bill_gates_-_the_road_ahead

Maybe it was the return of Steve Jobs after his monk-like wanderings into NEXTville, which ended with Apple buying NeXT, his new PC company.

iPod gave Apple back a platform weapon, iTunes. Distribution. Ubiquity. The step from iPod to iPhone was short as who wanted to own a clamshell cell phone when a touch screen music and web player was available?

Mobile is not a desktop metaphor. It is what’s known in Latin as “tabula rasa,” or clean slate. What’s important on mobile isn’t the same as a desktop PC. Mobile is based on new apps, social and mobile by design (not afterthought). The mobile experience is staccato, Morse code-like bursts of communication. Texting. Gaming. Sharing. Listening. Watching. (And soon, Buying).

Today, iPhone is the world’s largest mobile computing platform with over 1 billion app downloads. Some 50,000 apps are reportedly available on the iPhone platform. Rivals are way behind: Information on Blackberry apps and its downloads are not readily available. Palm’s new Pre has about a dozen apps available and news reported about 150,000 downloads its first day (phone came out June 8, 2009).

iphone_home

Google is also getting into the mobile hardware effort by pushing out its Android mobile software to over a dozen handset makers.

The real battle is in third-party apps and who has the biggest ecosystem for developers to build on. Other contenders will emerge: Google, Facebook, Twitter. But they are all hopelessly late to the battle. Palm Pre may make it easier by using Web programming to hasten dev for its app store, but if a tree falls in the forest and no termite sees it…

The war will be fought by developers and won by developers — they are the ones that will make or break the computing platforms (Web, mobile, desktop). Whoever makes more money off of any platform will create the virtuous circle that wins. So far it’s Apple. By a 1 billion download margin. But, as mobile becomes the main computing/web/commerce/communication platform, the next 10 years will be more telling than the last 10.

The 8 Traits Of Highly Successful Entrepreneurs

Since the early 1990s I have been building companies and know many of the others foolish enough to build companies. Some of the better known fools built Yahoo, TiVo, eBay among others. I was a lead investor in Ad Sense which Google acquired and today generates about 30% of Google’s revenue.

The name for those that build new things is “entrepreneur” which is basically French for “dreaming against the odds.”

The dreamers against the odds include Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard to tweak an Altair, and ended up reselling DOS to IBM under the Microsoft name.

Paul Allen & Bill Gates 1977

Then there’s Steven Jobs, phone phreak (free phone call hacker) who turned his hippy Zen on the PC with uber geek Steve Wozniak.

steve-jobs-1977

Jerry Yang, co-fiddler of Yahoo, who was set to be an electrical engineer but got sidetracked on a web directory thingie.

Wall Street quant deserter Jeff Bezos who left a good job with a major banking firm, loaded up his Honda Accord and headed to coffeeville, Seattle, to make an online bookstore.

honda accord 1994

There are hundred more in my Rolodex (I mean my Contacts! since nobody uses Rolodex any more).

Steve Harmon’s 8 traits of successful entrepreneurs (first here’s my napkin scribble with the traits, followed by more detailed examples):

Steve Harmon 8 traits napkin scribble

1] Vision. Seeing what others don’t see. Inventing the future rather than reacting to it.

2] Instinct. Words cannot describe it. Gut feelings mixed with heavy doses of doubt from your brain.

3] Drive. It takes 5x the energy to start something vs. doing something that’s been done. And at least 4x the caffeine.

4] Alert. A certain awareness of opportunity. Quick thinking and reacting to very dynamic environments, changing landscapes of business and technology.

5] Calm. While storms erupt and brew inside as struggles increase, it reaffirms an inner sense of peace. Pruning makes the garden.

6] Persistent. Brothers Walt and Roy Disney started three or four animation studios all of which went bankrupt before creating Mickey Mouse. Pixar nearly went broke until Steve Jobs rescued it and invested when nobody else believed in computer animation.

Walt & Roy Disney 1928

7] Grounding. Sense of value in people, things, agreements. Belief in what they do for purposes other than “making money.”

8] Balance. Setbacks provide launching points to move ahead. Moving ahead can mean giving up opportunities. Understand the yin and yang of the situation and don’t lose sight of the balance. Build value based on the best whole advantage.

Yin and Yang

steveharmon.com

Spam