Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: apple

  • A triumph over orthodoxy – Seven years of the iPhone

    A triumph over orthodoxy – Seven years of the iPhone

    “Once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.”

    Those were Steve Jobs’ words when he launched the iPhone seven years ago.

    It was a strong opening that was reinforced by the event’s tag line, “Today Apple reinvents the phone.”

    It wasn’t an idle boast, the iPhone was a leapfrog development – using Jobs’ words – over the existing clunky smartphones and it changed the entire industry and spawned some new ones.

    Smart Company’s Yolanda Redrup asked me for a few comments on her story on the iPhone’s birthday and her questions triggered some thoughts on just how the iPhone changed the mobile phone and telco industries.

    A triumph over orthodoxy

    Apple’s iPhone triumph was born out of the established players’ orthodoxy; companies like Nokia, Blackberry and Palm were wedded to the idea that a tactile QWERTY keyboard was essential for a smartphone.

    Those keyboards took away nearly half the real estate on the phone, Jobs called it “the lower forty”, and it made surfing the net a painful task, let alone watching videos or movies.

    Full featured keyboards made making calls difficult as well. One of the barriers of adopting smartphones was that using the things as phones was quite difficult.

    By having software keyboard and dialling pads that only appeared when needed, Apple solved the problems that faced smartphone users.

    Disrupting the telcos

    The other orthodoxy in the smartphone industry was that the telcos were essential gatekeepers. Nokia and the other incumbents put the needs of telecommunications companies over users of their phones.

    As a consequence email and web browsing capabilities of the existing smartphones were crippled as the telcos tried to lock their customers into their own proprietary networks rather that giving them access to the public internet.

    With the iPhone, Apple broke out of that telco dominance and started to dictate terms to the phone companies. This wouldn’t have been possible if the iPhone hadn’t been a far better, and much more popular, product.

    Building the app store

    Another area where the iPhone disrupted the phone companies’ business was with the App Store. Every smartphone had its own add-on programs but they were expensive with poor functionality and developers had to build versions for every company’s operating system.

    Both the telcos and the phone vendors could see that app stores were a potentially lucrative area but systemically failed to execute on the idea with clunky and expensive software.

    The App Store showed how smartphones should work and coupled with music, another area where the handset vendors dismally failed, Apple is now earning over a billion dollars a month from iTunes.

    Technological change

    Some of the iPhone’s success was due to technologies maturing; earlier smartphones were crippled by slow data connections over 2G or CDMA networks and cloud computing, or software-as-a-service as it was then called, was just beginning to mature as a technology.

    Cloud services and 3G connectivity meant the iPhone could hand off most apps’ processing needs to the service provider, something that the earlier smartphones couldn’t do because the technology wasn’t there.

    That connectivity did come at a cost, the iPhone and its competitors created huge challenges for telcos as they struggled to meet the data demands of their enthusiastic web surfing customers.

    Looking at the future

    While the iPhone came to dominate the smartphone market, that dominance didn’t last as Google Android devices started to flood the marketplace. Now Samsung is as big a player as Apple and a wave of cheap Chinese products are now flooding the industry.

    For Apple and the other smartphone vendors the opportunities now lie in the internet of things (IoT) as connected cars, workplaces and homes require a device to control them. That device is often the smartphone.

    In the next few years the market battleground is going to be creating the applications, platforms and ecosystems around these IoT technologies and its no coincidence that Apple has partnered with BMW on providing software for their smartcar.

    Jobs finished his iPhone presentation with the Wayne Gretzky quote, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been” and committed Apple to always being where the market is going to be.

    Where the market is going to be in the next seven years is anyone’s guess, but it would be dangerous to count Apple out.

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  • Steve Jobs’ golden path

    Steve Jobs’ golden path

    “Today Apple reinvents the smartphone.” Steve Jobs announced at the 2007 Macworld Conference when he showed off the new Apple iPhone.

    As with most of Jobs’ speeches, the iPhone launch was an impressive display combining the man’s talents, vision and technology to rally Apple’s adoring masses.

    Last week the New York Times magazine had an excellent feature on the story behind the landmark launch of the iPhone. It’s worthwhile reading to understand the theatre that goes behind a major tech company’s launch event.

    In the case of the iPhone, a myriad of tricks had to be performed to make sure the still being developed device didn’t fail in Steve Jobs’ hands during the launch – one can be sure the Apple founder wouldn’t have been as relaxed as Bill Gates when a Windows 98 system crashed onstage a decade earlier.

    A key part of Jobs’ presentation was the ‘Golden Path’, a script that would showcase the iPhone’s features while avoiding known problems.

    Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.

    Much to the relief of Jobs’ staff, the demonstration worked flawlessly and Jobs’ polished presentation showed why he was one of the most admired, if flawed, business leaders of his generation.

    While most tech CEOs could never dream of emulating Steve Jobs, almost every one has a ‘golden path’ to show off their product in a new light.

    Something we should remember when watching these demonstrations and the press coverage that follows is that most of them are carefully staged theatre and we should hang onto our wallets until well after these devices are on the shop shelves.

    As it turned out, the iPhone was a spectacular success and did re-invent the smartphone industry. Along with being able to deliver a killer presentation, Steve Jobs was also good at driving teams to deliver his vision.

    Steve Jobs image courtesy of Wikimedia.

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  • Building a business culture

    Building a business culture

    “How can you create a great organisation of people and be that mean a person?” Asks funds manager Julian Robertson about Apple founder Steve Jobs.

    Robertson, who based the decision to sell his Apple shares on the details in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, was largely ridiculed for his decision but the veteran investor has a very good point.

    A company’s culture develops from the top – if the senior management are paranoid, rogues or thieves then those attributes will eventually percolate through the company.

    The Tyco Lesson

    During the 1990s I had the unfortunate experience of working for Tyco International at the time it was led by Dennis Kozlowski, a man listed by Time Magazine as one of the ten most crooked CEOs of all time, senior management’s attitude of treating the company’s funds as their own piggy bank was copied throughout the organisation.

    Tyco suffered badly during that period and subsequent management has had to work hard to undo the influence of Kozlowski and his cronies’ poor leadership.

    One organisation I’ve watched closely over the last few years has been Australia’s NBNCo, the state owned company set up to build the nation’s National Broadband Network.

    In under four years of operation the company has developed a dysfunctional management culture that saw the project miss its targets by over 70%.

    For the NBN, a hands off attitude by senior management allowed bureaucratic silos to develop in a relatively small and young organisation. Those silos then started perpetuating bad habits as managers hired their friends and ignored good management processes. A lack of process and management accountability have been the main reasons the company has failed to meet its targets.

    Apple’s challenge

    In Apple’s case, Jobs created a culture of fear and secrecy with the company going as far as creating its own secret police designed to intimidate staff. The entire company was beholden to, and evolved around, one man’s vision, ego and quirks.

    While Jobs was ahead of the game, all was good for Apple shareholders but the risk was always that Jobs would make a major mistake or leave the company. It turned out to be the latter when Jobs passed away.

    As with any company built in the image of its founder, Apple now struggles to adapting to life without Steve Jobs and his successors have to reinvent the company’s culture around a more collegiate management structure than an often not-so-benign dictatorship.

    Microsoft are facing a similar transition as Steve Ballmer leaves the company. Like Apple, Microsoft is an immensely profitable facing a changing market at the very time they are transitioning to a new generation of leaders.

    Leaders such as Steve Cook at Apple and Ballmer’s successors at Microsoft have a massive task in changing their company’s culture as they try to undo a generation of management habits and this is why Robertson’s reasoning about selling his stake makes sense.

    Culture matters in an organisation. While a positive culture doesn’t guarantee success, it does make it more likely a company will survive its founders.

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  • Who will win the race for wearable computers?

    Who will win the race for wearable computers?

    The news that wearable technology company Recon has secured funding from Intel and shipped fifty thousand devices reminds us that it’s not just Google who are in the market developing glasses that work as computers.

    Other companies competing with Google include Glass Up, an Italian startup that’s teamed with Australian company Nubis to provide a wearable device that’s controlled by a smart phone app.

    It’s tempting to think that the battle for wearable technology will be won by Google as they are biggest and best funded company, but history shows us size and incumbency don’t always guarantee success.

    Google themselves have failed many times when they’ve tried to enter new markets, regardless of the money and resources they’ve thrown at the market.

    The best recent example of this is Microsoft’s forays into smartphones and tablet computers during the Windows XP period – A decade ago it was obvious to everyone that Windows based phones and tablets would dominate those markets.

    As it turned out the clunky and awkward to use devices scared customers away and it was Apple and Steve Jobs who ended up being the dominant players.

    So it may well be that a company we’ve written off – maybe Microsoft – who might end up being the leader in wearable computers, although it’s more likely an upstart like Recon or Glass Up will eventually be the leader.

    It may even be that glasses don’t work out as wearable computers at all.

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  • Microsoft’s continued evolution

    Microsoft’s continued evolution

    Today’s investor briefing by software giant Microsoft shows the company’s evolution as their markets shift.

    Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner broke out the key numbers for the company’s revenues which illustrate just how the company’s business model is changing.

    Over half of Microsoft’s revenues are coming  from enterprise customers and of the product lines, Office unit makes up just under a third, Server and Tools slightly more than a quarter while Windows has fallen to 25 percent.

    Despite the decline in Widows’ revenues, there’s no doubt about Microsoft’s determination to drive the PC upgrade cycle through the retirement of Windows XP as Turner explained.

    We have a giant XP install base. But guess what? We’ve made so much progress on that XP install base. It’s down to 21 percent worldwide, and we have plans to get that number to 13 percent by April when the end-of-life of XP happens.

    A big part of the change is the shift to the cloud with Turner claiming two hundred percent growth in Microsoft’s Azure services.

    Despite the change in Microsoft’s focus, the threats remain with Apple releasing both iOS7 and their new range of iPhones along with Google making their QuickOffice mobile app free to iOS and Android users.

    While Microsoft are steering their ship around, the incumbents in other sectors are protecting their positions. In an evolving world, survival is not guaranteed.

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