The End of Partner Ecosystems

For three decades, the formula for success in software was pretty well understood. Not easy to execute but clear. It was called the ecosystem. You need a channel of resellers and perhaps even distributors around the world to sell your software. You need implementation partners - small, local boutique firms as well as professional services practices at the large system integrators. You need ISVs - partners who build their solutions in a way that complements yours. You need training delivered by your training partners and perhaps also partners to administer the tests and certifications. And you may also need some influencers in your camp - journalists, bloggers, analysts, or marketing agencies. A magazine named after your software platform will do just fine...

If you have a magazine, you have an ecosystem alright!

Microsoft hasn’t invented this formula - that honor goes probably to Novell all the way to the late 80s - but Microsoft perfected it. For decades, Microsoft’s authorized resellers, authorized distributors, certified partners, certified professionals, MVPs, authorized testing centers, ISVs, system integrators, consultants, OEMs and other types of partners were helping Microsoft to attain its dominance. An entire ecosystem of partners participated in the massive software economy created by Microsoft and other vendors. These partners were necessary to scale the business by providing local point of sale, planning and deployment services, training, and complementary software and hardware. The vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle, HP, or IBM provided the platforms that enabled their respective ecosystems. It was a symbiotic relationship - the platform vendors needed the partners and the partners depended on the platform vendor.

Symbiotic relationships can work

Fast forward to 2012 - when a new type of information technology economy is being shaped. The platforms are running in the cloud and the platform vendors are striving to provide the most integrated set of services - from infrastructure software to applications, from servers to mobile devices. Apple and Google are leading the way and vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle are rushing to catch up.  They are building their own cloud offerings and also the hardware - tablets and servers.

The big difference is that the new economy does not require an ecosystem of partners. As the software is sold and delivered via the cloud, it no longer requires a channel of resellers, consultants, and system integrators to implement the solutions. The software is increasingly simple which reduces training needs and the only hardware required is the hardware that runs the cloud. And even that hardware is increasingly custom made - just think about the custom server blades that comprise the famous Google data centers!

Sure, there will probably always be the independent software vendors (ISVs) with apps that leverage the platforms but most of them will be under constant pressure of being squeezed out. As for other types of partners - they are no longer required. The consultants might find work providing advice on the best use of the software and system integrators may find opportunities around migration projects or projects related to hybrid environments. But in the  long term, they are not wanted anymore. Just think about it - what partners do you need when you switch to Gmail? Or to Office 365?

It’s a new world now and the partner ecosystems might no longer have a place in it. Or do they?

The Delicate Subject of User Experience

When talking about any technology product, user experience usually comes up as a key factor. All too often I hear that this particular product has a poor user experience while another product offers an awesome experience. Yet what is user experience? It can’t be measured in bits, bytes, or seconds. Comparing technology is usually easy, a 256-bit encryption is stronger than a 128-bit. 4 GB of memory is more than 2 GB. 8 ms access speed is faster than 12 ms. But user experience? Is it an art or a science?

I believe that it is a bit of both. For sure, there is an indirect relationship between user experience and complexity. People appreciate simplicity. Complex user interface may look cool to someone who appreciates the richness of capabilities but it intimidates most people and hinders adoption. Think of the cockpit of a space shuttle (you know, from back when the US government had a space program) - cool but complex! Or think of Photoshop. There is a reason why more people use Instagram than Photoshop. It’s called simplicity.

AutoCAD has many features and is thus fairly complex

But of course simplicity is hard to achieve when the product is rich on features and options. That’s the reason why professional photographers and artists use Photoshop and why my car was designed in AutoCAD and not SketchUp. There are of course other scientific methods that allow the developers to arrange complex features in a less intimidating way by making certain functionality more prominent or by arranging controls in logical groups. And there is much more to the science of user experience including techniques such as navigation design, interaction design, attention economy, cognitive dimensions, etc. I won’t even pretend that I am an expert here.

Google is simple - it does just one thing

I have this nagging feeling, though, that user experience is also to a large extent an art. Design elements such as color palette, symbols, fonts, or image style are subject to fashion trends that change from year to year. Today, there is no algorithm that predicts which fashion collection will succeed next spring, which pop star will score a hit or which video game will become a blockbuster. For the same reasons, we can’t really tell about which user experience will be more successful with users.

Just think about some of the famous examples of successful user experience. When Microsoft SharePoint first took the market by storm, a lot of the success has been attributed to the compelling user experience. “It is just like Office”, we kept hearing. Today, the SharePoint UI is being considered rather outdated and Microsoft invested heavily into introducing new a UI in SharePoint 2013. We’ll see how that’s going to be received.

Or think of Apple, the ultimate pinnacle or coolness, hipness, and user experience. Do you really think that the original models of iMac and iPod look that awesome today? Probably not. But you did when they first came out. We all did! In fact, as successful as Apple’s products are, iTunes offers a very poor user experience. We use it anyway because we like the devices and we have no alternative to iTunes. But we didn’t select iTunes because of its user experience.

The original iMac does not look as cool today as it did in 1998

Look at today’s popular software - take social networking. You can hardly argue that the user experience offered by Jive or by Yammer is any better than what eRoom provided 10 years ago. Sure, eRoom was perhaps ahead of its time. But maybe, the fashion finally caught up with the user experience of online collaboration.

The perception of user experience evolves not only as a result of fashion trends but also as function of innovation and technical advances. 20 years ago, the term GUI (graphical user interface) was the state of art in user experience. 10-15 years ago, a web-like UI was all the rage - in fact, Microsoft even shipped a version of Windows that used a browser to navigate folders. Remember the wave of Flash-based user interfaces? Or the excessive use of Ajax-based components? Widgets? Gestures? As a new technology allows us do new things, the user experience expectations evolve. Predicting what’s coming next might be difficult. Predicting what will succeed is both, art and science.

Microsoft Windows 8 introduces the Metro-style UI: is it art or science?

Right now, every ISV is trying to figure out how much to invest into the new Microsoft Metro-style user experience. Is that a real emerging trend? We’ll see!

App Store Comparison - iPhone vs Android vs BlackBerry vs Windows Phone

Recently, I wrote about my take on the smartphone market. My conclusion was that the key factor to success is the availability of apps, noting that iPhone is way ahead of the game with Android following closely behind while Microsoft and BlackBerry are nowhere. But as soon as I published my blog post, Microsoft announced that they now have 100,000 apps in their app store. And I started doubting myself...

100,000 apps sounds like a pretty good number. I only use about 100 apps on my iPhone and so 100,000 is a lot to choose from. But there was this nagging feeling that the number of apps available is actually a pretty meaningless number. What I really care about is my apps. The apps that satisfy my needs. But which apps are those?

Well, I recently published a post about my favorite apps on the iPhone. I have distinguished between the coolest and the most useful apps. That’s a good list to start. In the article, I have mentioned a few solid alternatives and so let’s add them to the list too. I should also add a couple of service apps for services I use a lot like Marriott and Air Canada. They didn’t make the list but let’s see. And for a good measure, let’s add some of the event specific apps to the list. What could be more important right now than Wimbledon, Tour de France and the Olympics?

That results is a pretty good basket of meaningful, useful apps. There are 30 of them in total and I have all of them on my iPhone. No basket is perfect or entirely rational but a sample basket is useful. Just ask the Dow-Jones. So let’s take a look at how the other smartphones scored. I have checked the app stores for Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone. Here are the results:

The results? As expected, Android scored relatively high and by far the best. With 23 out of 30 apps available on Android, Google is not on the same level as Apple but certainly in contention. Microsoft Windows scored 16 out of 30 apps which was disappointing. That said, most of the big providers such as Netflix, Audible, Shazam or Evernote have made it as far as supporting Windows by now which is encouraging. But if you are looking for any more specialized apps for your Windows Phone, forget it.

BlackBerry, as expected, is far behind and considering that they are in the process of switching operating systems to QNX, the apps shortage is not going to improve anytime soon.

So there you have it. The next time any of these vendors start throwing around numbers like hundreds of thousands of available apps in their apps store, remember that such numbers matter little. What matters is - do they have the apps I need?

Can Machines Replace Humans?

I have recently read a great book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee called Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Professor McAfee is of course the one and the same who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 a couple of years ago and who worked with us at AIIM on the business-use cases for social software last year. I was thrilled to be a part of that project.

Andrew McAfee and I during the AIIM project last year.

In the book, the authors argue that we have now reached the point where technology is getting so advanced today that it is possible to automate tasks and jobs previously thought only humans could do. The chess-playing supercomputers beating Gary Kasparov were just the beginning. Now, we have computers driving cars and winning on Jeopardy, and we are only starting. The speed of innovation is growing exponentially and we are into the large growth numbers!

The repercussions of this hypothesis are far reaching. We are at the beginning of an incredible technology cycle. Do you think SoLoMo is cool? Do you get excited by the Cloud and Big Data? Consumarization? Gamification? Just buckle up! Another wave of incredible innovation is bearing upon us - innovations that will be able to replace, improve and automate many of our daily life activities. Tasks previously thought of as forever relegated to only humans will be taken over by machines. Is the Babelfish finally going to be released by Apple?

I can think of many incredible possibilities: image and video recognition, automated decision making, adaptive process flows, contextual experience, home automation, continuous authentication, and yes, real-time translation... there are so many things we could do! They are all possible in theory today but are just too impractical given the technology constraints. However, the technology - hardware and software - is improving at an exponential pace and constraints such as performance limitations or the overwhelming data volume will soon be no longer considered obstacles.

The consequences will likely be profound. Just like the bank tellers and stock brokers of the past, many jobs will be eliminated as a result of innovation. Brynjolfsson and McAfee went as far in their book as to suggest a blueprint for transforming society in order to accommodate for the massive shifts in the workforce. I really wish our politicians read the book.

With all the changes, I believe that technology ultimately creates opportunities. The sudden shifts may feel disruptive to the established order but we all know that only the most adaptive species survive in the long term, We need to embrace the technology. We need to harness its power. And, we need to adapt.

Alan Turing - Faster than Lance

This blog post is my tribute to Alan Turing who was born on this day, exactly 100 years ago. As as computer engineer, I have learned about Turing in some of my first courses back at the university. In the 1930s, Dr. Turing introduced ground-breaking concepts such as the Turing Machine and the Turing Test. The Turing Machine is regarded as the grandfather of all computers while seeing the IBM Watson compete on Jeopardy last year has shown that we are not far away from passing the Turing Test. And let’s not forget Turing’s legendary contributions to cryptology in his role at the Bletchley Park while breaking the German Enigma codes during WW II.

Alan Turing, the runner

One less known fact are Turing’s accomplishments as an athlete. He was a competitive runner, starting for the Walton Athletic Club in Walton, Surrey. In 1947, he competed in the Amateur Athletic Association Championships marathon finishing in 4th place in 2 hours 46 minutes and 3 seconds. Folks, 2:46:03 is an amazing time for a non-professional runner even today. Back then, he was within some 11 minutes off Olympic gold medal pace. In fact, that pace is even faster than the marathon time Lance Armstrong posted in the 2007 New York City Marathon which he completed in 2:46:42.

Clearly, Alan Turing was a remarkable person and we should celebrate his life and accomplishments - not just today.

My Favorite iPhone Apps

It’s Father’s Day afternoon and I am allowed to watch a soccer match on TV while writing a blog post. As a cable cord-cutter, I am streaming the the game on my iMac which is connected to the TV set via a long HDMI cable. By the way, I can’t wait for the Mountain Lion release of MacOS which will include support for AirPlay - allowing wi-fi streaming to my AppleTV. But that might be a topic for another post. Today calls for some lighter reading (and strangely, such posts tend to attract a lot of views).

I wrote about my favorite iPad apps a year ago and since I have now been using the iPhone for well over a year, it is time to write about my favorite apps for iPhone. Just like with my article last year, I will divide the list between the top 10 most useful and top 10 coolest apps, remembering that the coolest are rarely the most useful apps.

My Top 10 Coolest iPhone apps:

10. Starbucks
The Starbucks app is very useful for an addict like me and could have easily made it to the Useful List. The cool part is the single-click locator of the nearest Starbucks cafe - a feature I use frequently while travelling. Particularly when driving on a freeway, locating the nearest cup of caffe latte really comes in handy. Of course apps such as Yelp and Around Me serve a similar purpose as the Starbucks app, helping to locate many other useful things such as ATMs, restaurants, gas stations, theaters, etc.

9. Photosynth
Surprisingly, a Microsoft app made it onto my list. While I am not a big fan of the iPhone camera due to its pathetically slow shutter speed, Photosync makes panoramic pictures out of a series of photographs that the app guides you to take. It is easy and the results are cool. And given that everyone needs a decent Facebook banner, the app might even be a little useful.

8. SayHi
This is a relatively new app that translates the spoken word between about three dozen languages. The recording is sent to an online service that relatively quickly sends you back the translation and plays it aloud. Asking some stranger you can’t understand to speak into your iPhone might have a limited practical use and if you use it abroad where you are most likely to encounter foreign speaking strangers, the data roaming charges will bankrupt you. But the app is very cool.

7. ShopSavvy
ShopSavvy is an app that reads the barcode tag on any item in a store and tells you where else you can get this item cheaper. While that is very cool, I don’t really bother to compare the price of milk at a grocery store and I do most other purchases online anyway.  

6. Netflix
There is a plethora of other video streaming apps available from NBC to the new Amazon Cloud Player but Netflix deserves the credit for its largest library and best recommendation service. Still, watching movies on an iPhone makes little sense when I have the iPad.

5. Flipboard
Flipboard is basically a very well designed RSS reader which is cool because it uses pictures to navigate the stories. I find myself using my Feeddler more than the Flipboard but Flipboard certainly wins in the coolness category.

4. StarWalk
StarWalk is one of the coolest augmented reality apps. You point it at the sky and it tells you what stars, constellations, and planets you are looking at. The visual experience is simply... wow! I suppose that the app might even be useful for an astronomer which I am not. But since I am certified in celestial navigation, I have to also mention Planets which is a similar app helping to locate the key planets and stars used for navigation.

3. LogMeIn
Controlling your computer remotely from an iPhone makes pretty much no sense whatsoever as the screen size is too small. But the fact that you can is just awesome.

2. Endomondo
There are many GPS based apps for running and other sports. Endomondo stands out because of its combination of run statistics and social interactions. I switched to using a Garmin watch a while ago but I still like importing the data into Endomondo because of the social stuff.

1. Soundhound
Shazam was the first app to blow me away with the ability to identify a song I happen to be hearing on the radio or at a bar. Soundhound appears a little more tolerant to ambient noise but either of these apps are incredibly cool. I have purchased many songs and albums based on what I heard and recognized using Soundhound. I hope they get a cut somehow ;-)


Here are my Top 10 Most Useful iPhone apps:

10. Clock
I know, this is not that exciting but when travelling, I use the alarm clock every morning. I despise the alarm clocks in hotel rooms that take 10 minutes to set only to wake me up with a squelch. Besides, the iPhone clock adjusts itself automatically for time zones which is very useful.

9. Remote
Being a cord-cutter, I am depending a lot on my AppleTV which is an awesome device. The only problem is the tiny little remote control that is just too easy to misplace. Clearly, Steve Jobs figured out a way to keep it away from his kids but I failed to do that so far. The iPhone app Remote helps as it allows me to control AppleTV instead of the lost remote.

8. GPS Nav 2
There are many GPS navigation apps available for the iPhone and I often use this one when travelling. It doesn’t replace my Garmin GPS in the car because the Garmin comes with a holder and it doesn’t require any data roaming but still, it is a GPS I always have on me.

7. Amazon Kindle
I love reading books on my iPad and I actually don’t mind reading them on the iPhone either. Sure, the screen size is small but the app handles it well. The huge benefit is the fact that the phone fits easily into one hand - I can read laying on my back in the hammock with one arm outstretched in front of my face. That’s not possible with the iPad, the Kindle or with a paper book. Thanks to Amazon’s cloud, I always have all of my books with me and the app even remembers where I’ve stopped reading the last time, no matter which device I use.

6. Facebook
Yeah, I use Facebook on iPhone. Makes sense, duh...

5. Evernote
Evernote is an awesome app with a cloud-based syncing of notes between devices. I use it the most on my laptop but having all the notes always with me on my smartphone is particularly useful.

4. Twitter
Twitter on the iPhone is my trusted companion when on the move. There is always something new to learn about when I have an idle minute and it is a great way to share with others what I’m up to - when I choose to share it, that is.

3. Email/Calendar/Contacts/Browser
Yep, nothing shocking here - I use the basic apps that Apple included in the iOS all the time. I wish the browser was better and the calendar could use a bunch of improvements too but I use these apps several times each day.

2. FeeddlerPro
Reading my favorite blogs and news sites is part of my daily routine and an RSS reader makes that very easy. I’ve picked the Feeddler for my iPhone as it syncs up with my Google Reader. That way, I always know which stories I’ve already checked out - no matter on which device.

1. Audible/Player
This may be surprising but the one app I use the most is the built-in music player to listen to books from Audible. I have been an Audible subscriber for over 10 years and I am absolutely addicted to listening to books while running, walking the dog, driving or traveling. It is a great way to keep up with my book reading and I love it.

Yes, these are my favorite apps for the iPhone right now. By the way, six of the 20 apps above appeared on my favorite apps for iPad list last year although I counted e-mail, calendar and browser separately back then. That suggests perhaps that the use cases for iPhone are quite different than those for iPad. Or perhaps my taste has evolved since. Anyway, which iPhone apps do you like? Please do share your comments!

Will Mobile Devices Ever Replace PCs?

In his famous post titled Dawn of a New Day, the departing Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie has outlined his vision of the ‘post-PC world’. Those were bold words from the executive of a company that has made a fortune selling software for PCs. Many have since latched onto the idea of a post PC world, an idea that got a huge boost when Apple launched the iPad. Many people quickly concluded that mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets will eventually replace the PCs - the desktops and laptops.

Photo: Lubor Ptacek

Today, however, the prevailing notion is different. There is an understanding that computer use-cases vary widely between content creation and content consumption and most people argue that they prefer creating content on a PC while the mobile devices are well suited for content consumption. People usually say that the keyboard is too small to type longer passages, there is no mouse and the screen real-estate is too limiting. As a result, most of us use both PCs and mobile devices today.

So what is the future going to look like? A post PC world as Ray Ozzie predicted or a world in which we will continue carrying around multiple devices including a laptop?

Well, I’d argue that all the technical limitations of mobile devices today are just temporary. Most iPad users already use a keyboard for extensive typing and it is just a question of time before Apple adds a mouse or a mouse-like pointing device. The screen size limitation is rapidly going away with the ability to add an external monitor which is also possible today. Alternatively, a pico projector provides another way to get a big-size screen for mobile devices.

The software for content creation is increasingly becoming available on mobile devices. Apple’s office applications such as Pages, Numbers, or Keynote are well adapted for mobile content creation. Even Microsoft is now rumored to be releasing Microsoft Office for iPad later this year. Similarly, Adobe now offers Photoshop Touch and Autodesk provides AutoCAD WS for mobile devices. Content creation software for mobile devices had to be adjusted to the different operating systems and different way of interaction but there is no reason why content creation wouldn’t be possible.

Yet even more innovation is coming that will make the distinction between PCs and mobile devices irrelevant. The data input is becoming less textual and more, well, human. Voice recognition and verbal controls are becoming useful. Apple’s Siri and Nuance’s Dragon Naturally Speaking are only the beginning. The gesture technology is also becoming more sophisticated. Innovations such as Microsoft Kinect are showing the way of interacting with computers via full-body gestures. Either way, it doesn’t matter whether the computer is a desktop, notebook, game console, or mobile device.

Our habits and skills will also become a factor. We have all been conditioned to use the QWERTY keyboard and learning a new way of interacting with computers may feel difficult. It is quite likely, that a new generation of users will emerge who will be trained in new skills which will make some of today’s constraints obsolete.

Ultimately, I am confident that mobile devices will replace PCs. But those mobile devices may not look quite the same as the ones we use today. The software and hardware will be more powerful and user friendly. And we will see a plethora of add-ons which will expand the content creation capabilities - I wrote about some of the amazing accessories back in December, 2011.

Today, when I arrive in my office, I don’t work on my laptop. Well, I do but I plug it into a docking station which adds a full-sized keyboard, a mouse, a monitor, a camera, and a set of speakers. Why should I not be able to do the same with my smartphone? I am convinced that the day is coming when we will have docking stations for our tablets and smartphones and we will use them as our primary content creation devices.

Mobile devices will replace the PCs

...and our carry-on bags will be a few pounds lighter!

Why Has The Internet Failed Us Here?

Back in the 90s, we were promised that the Internet would change everything. It did. Many articles have been written about what our children will never encounter because of the Internet: CD players, copiers, modems, diskettes, plane tickets, encyclopedias, classified ads etc. Yet there are things that should have been made obsolete by now and they are not. Here is where the Internet has failed us:

Checks
In North America, checks (or cheques) are still used everywhere. To pay bills, to pay in a store, or to pay money to a friend. While most banks allow online payments, there are still plenty of utility companies, county tax collectors, and newspapers that only accept checks. And while we all think that European banking is about to go back to the Neanderthal era any day now, most Europeans have not written a check in a decade as online payments and even mobile payments are quite common.

Back in my German days in the 90s, when you needed to send me money, I’d give you my account number and the bank routing number and you’d just do it online via a free instant transfer. That was possible long before the Web by using services such as the French Minitel or the German BTX. Don’t believe that the expensive wire transfers that require a 2 page form with a $35 fee are the same thing. They might be when the Buffetts transfer money to the Gates but most American bank customers have never used a wire transfer. They write checks. Frankly, I am shocked that the banks have left the door wide open for services such as Paypal and Square.

Signatures
“We need the signed original mailed back to us...” - how many more times will I hear this request? Signatures are still required for many transactions, including many credit card purchases. As if the “wet” signature made the transaction somehow magically secure.

While a fax is generally regarded as a legally binding transaction, sending the same signed document via email is usually not acceptable. Why a fax is more legal than an email attachment, I don’t understand. Why a wet signature is considered more secure than any form of electronic authentication is completely beyond me. Any transaction conducted online should be faster, more secure and convenient and yet the Internet has failed to eradicate the paper-based, wet signature dependant transactions used today.

Car dealers
I get it why we need a showroom where I can test drive a car I want to check out. I also know why we - unfortunately - still need a car service center (to replace the tail light bulbs once every 4 years, right?). But why do I need to negotiate with a car salesman who knows that I know the exact invoice price of the car? And please, don’t try that “I have to talk to my manager” routine on me. I want to select, configure and buy my car online and have it delivered to my house. Delivering a washing machine costs $50 which covers the removal of the old one. The $500 you are charging for a vehicle delivery should easily cover your parking the car in my garage and registering it on the way.

Cable TV
Cable and satellite based TV entertainment with preset programming uses a completely obsolete model in the era of on-demand entertainment. Yet, they continue to exist, making viewers pay twice - once for a monthly subscription fee and then again through endlessly annoying commercials. This has to change and I am confident it will. Entertainment delivered on-demand over the Internet is becoming a more and more viable alternative and the ranks of cordcutters are on the rise. Yet still, I would have expected cable to be dead for at least 5 years by now.

Realtors
Buying a house is a ridiculous experience. Pages and pages of meaningless reports, statements and disclosures complemented by mysterious fees for pro-forma inspections and mysterious services like ‘title insurance’. The realtors get up to 6% for ...what exactly? Driving me around to a bunch of lame houses only to make sure I have no choice but to put an offer in for the most expensive one? In the age of Google Earth, Zillow, and Craigslist, who needs a realtor? Both, the seller and the buyer would be better off closing the transaction directly with the title company still acting as the secure clearing house. Yes, the Internet has failed us here.

Borders
The Internet was expected to obliterate country borders. After all, I can access any web site in the world from my iPhone, right? Well, sort of. Web sites providing entertainment content from NBC to Netflix and from Pandora to Amazon are restricting the access to their content from abroad. Even when I pay for a monthly subscription, I am precluded from accessing the content as soon as I cross the border. These are artificial frontiers that have been set up to enforce the country-based content distribution rights - a rather obsolete concept in the age of the Internet. As a frequent traveler, the Internet has failed me big time on this one.

Smart appliances
The smart refrigerator that would automatically re-order milk when I’m running low might indeed not be that useful. But smart appliances would make a lot of sense and yet they are nowhere. Part of the reason why Apple killed off the entire industry of home entertainment devices is the fact that all those amplifiers, decks, equalizers, and tuners were pretty dumb - the manufacturers never considered connecting them to the Internet. How about remotely setting my thermostat to warm up the place before I arrive at home? Makes sense, doesn’t it? I cannot fathom why Honeywell and GE have not thought of that. Today, there are rumors about the perhaps-soon-to-be-announced Apple TV. If it comes, you can bet that it will be a smart, Internet appliance that will change the way we watch TV.

These are a few examples of everyday items and activities that I would have expected to be completely changed by the Internet by now. Yet it didn’t happen so far - the Internet has failed us here. There are probably many more examples you can think of - please do share them in the comments below.

Does Windows Phone Stand A Chance?

I must say, I am pretty impressed by the Windows Phone operating system. Unlike the Google Android which is, let’s face it, a poor copy of the the Apple iOS, Microsoft created a truly original user experience. The notion of having the same OS that spans the desktop, laptop, tablet, and the smartphone is a very compelling idea. Even Apple didn’t quite make that happen as their Mac OS is still distinct from  iOS.

I have also been impressed by some of the strategic moves Microsoft has been making with their Windows Phone. The partnership with Nokia is a strong endorsement - no matter how long and painful Nokia’s recovery might be. Microsoft also recruited many other vendors including Samsung, LG, HTC, Dell, and others.

Since Google acquired Motorola, there is more and more doubt about Google’s innocence when it gets down to the openness of the Android operating system. That fact alone makes the Windows Phone operating system a rather compelling alternative for the hardware vendors. While none of them have publicly switched their allegiances yet, I’m sure they all are talking to Microsoft.

Also, the recently announced deal with Barnes & Noble and their Nook ebook reader could be a major coup for Microsoft. Sure, Nook runs on Android today but I would bet many chips that the next release will run the Windows Phone OS. Not a bad move for Microsoft if you ask me!

With all of these strategic moves going in Microsoft’s favor, it is surprising that the Windows Phone market share continues sliding down. According to the latest ComScore market share report, Windows Phone has merely 3.9% of the US market - compared with 4.7% three months ago. The trend has been heading south over the last 18 months and frankly, any player in the single digits is questionable...

So what should Microsoft do to reverse this trend? Well, releasing a truly differentiated and innovative operating system is a good start. Windows 8 with all its bells and whistles and particularly with the Metro-style user interface is very promising. The Metro-style apps that Microsoft is going to release next look awesome. But one thing is still missing...

A mobile operating system is supposed to be a platform. And a platform requires applications. This is where Microsoft is not doing so well. When I try to find my favorite iPhone apps on the Windows Phone, I am striking out more often than not. Yet Microsoft understands how to cater to developers. Their tools and developer programs are second to none in the software industry. But there is more to that.

Microsoft should be actively recruiting developers to port their apps to Windows Phone. That is not a slam dunk for most developers as Windows Phone is currently their number 4 platform of choice after Apple, Google and RIM. Yeah sure, RIM has some problems but the BlackBerry OS still has more than double the market share than Windows Phone. Today, building an app for Windows OS is a major gamble with uncertain payoff.

This is where Microsoft could and should use its market power. Instead of billboards, Microsoft could be paying a few thousand dollars to the developers of the key apps to port their apps to Windows Phone. Microsoft should just go aggressively after all these developers and entice them to make it happen.

Particularly in the enterprise market , Microsoft should aggresively solicit the vendors’ support. Right now, Windows Phone OS is the number 4 priority on the list for any enterprise software vendor - after Apple, Google, and RIM. Number 4 rarely makes it into a released product. Everybody’s budget is tight and the money is barely enough for priorities 1 and 2...

Developing apps for a platform that has 3.9% market share with a declining trend is a tough business case to make. This is the top problem Microsoft has to focus on to make Windows Phone a success and without addressing this issue, the platform will likely fail.

Content Analytics - Crossing the Chasm?

The overabundance of information is one of the greatest challenges today. Things have sure changed a bit since the days of the 90s when Microsoft used to promise us a PC on every desk and information at our fingertips. Today, we have plenty of information at our fingertips. In fact, we have so much information coming at us from all sides that making sense of it became one of the key information management challenges.

That’s where information analytics come in with all their applications such as semantics and auto-classification. Simply put, these technologies are analyzing the actual content of information, deriving insights, meanings, and understanding. It is done by applying powerful algorithms that analyse the content and complete complex tasks such as concept and entity extraction, similarities, trend identification, and sentiment analysis.

Therein lies the problem with the technology. The greater the volume of information, the more content analytics are useful - if the volume is small, humans can do it themselves. But to apply analytics on a large volume of information, one needs a significant computing power.

That’s the reason why the actual use of analytics was confined to very few scenarios where money was not an issue. The US intelligence agencies used supercomputers with analytics to weed through millions of intercepted messages from suspected terrorists. Similarly, IBM’s Watson, the Jeopardy winning machine, was a supercomputer. It was fed with encyclopedic knowledge and optimized for a single task: winning Jeopardy. Even though content analytics have been around for well over a decade, most organizations simply could not afford the computing power required.

That may be changing now, thanks to a couple of market shifts. First, Moore’s Law is helping - computing power is becoming more and more affordable and the algorithms are becoming more powerful and efficient.

The other improvement comes from our understanding of what the technology is expected to accomplish. The early requirements for analytics and classification asked for ultra-accuracy. One of the key objections used to be the lack of dependability on automatic classification - if it isn't 100% accurate, it is no good. But today, we understand that the alternative is not perfect by any stretch. The alternative is to rely on humans who are actually pretty pathetic at analyzing and classifying content. In fact, humans are notoriously poor and inconsistent at the job. Getting to 60% accuracy is a typical result of human classification.

That means that a technology that can get us to 80% or even 90% of accuracy is actually much more accurate than any humans and this kind of approach doesn’t require as much computing power as the attempt to reach 99.9% accuracy.

For example, one of the common applications for analytics is legal discovery - the need to quickly produce any electronic evidence requested by a court subpoena. Here the goal today is to produce all the relevant documents and emails with a defensible level of accuracy. Of course we don’t want to pay the expensive lawyers for manual review of thousands of documents. They are paid by the hour - and paid rather well. But we also don’t want to stand accused of failing to produce an important piece of evidence. Until recently, the fear was that unless we can prove that we have electronically discovered all the pertaining documents, the approach would not be defensible in a court of law. And only humans (ehm, lawyers) can guarantee such accuracy - for a hefty fee...

Today, that has changed. The courts increasingly understand the futility of aiming for 100% accuracy and instead accept statistical sampling as a way to confirm accuracy at a reasonable level. After all, both both opposing parties - the plaintiff and the defendant - are in the same boat when it comes down to reviewing a mountain of electronic evidence. That means that the lawyers no longer have to review every document. Instead, statistical evidence of accuracy is considered defensible.

As a result, auto-classification no longer has to aim for 100% accuracy. Instead, a more reasonable level of accuracy backed by statistical sampling has become acceptable - because it is still much better than what humans could ever do manually. And cheaper, of course. That makes analytics much more effective and affordable. With that, analytics are no longer confined to the world of super-computers and finding real-world use cases. Analytics may indeed have crossed the chasm.