Dear phone OSes in 3rd place and beyond: Please accelerate your demise

Cozi is expanding its family software to the mobile domain. We have a Cozi iPhone application, and are obviously looking at Android as well. The problem is what to do about Blackberry, Palm webOS, and perhaps Windows Phone 7. As an entrepreneur with friends at two of those companies, I wish good luck to those OSes in third place and beyond. As a designer of family software, I have a goal to address the needs of my users, and support whatever phone they find meets their needs. And as an executive at a company that makes mobile phone applications, I wish those OSes in third place and beyond would please die—and soon, if they wouldn’t mind.

       
Dear Blackberry, Windows Phone 7, Palm webOS: Could you all go away? Please?

As an ISV working on top of a platform, I want exactly two platform providers. Not one, not three, or four, or ten. Two. If there’s only one platform provider, the provider inevitably becomes arrogant and insensitive to the needs of the ISVs that keep it alive. Not three, or four, or more—those platforms can never get enough market share to make it worth your while. All they will do is produce enough users to make your life miserable with endless requests for when you’ll get around to supporting the OS they prefer, with its 3% market share. The only good case with the smaller players is if they can become commoditized, ideally in combination with the first or (more likely) second place platform, in which case their existence makes no difference to the ISV.

An ISV wants exactly two platform providers in any given space. The first one can be the successful one, with something like 70% market share. The second one can be the underdog, with 25% market share. From the ISV’s perspective, the underdog’s job is to keep the top dog honest, while maintaining sufficient market share to justify the ISV’s investment developing for that platform. Without the latter justification, the ISV can’t justify the investment, which means the underdog eventually loses compelling apps, and loses market share until they can no longer play a meaningful role as underdog. The remaining 5% of the market should be splintered among tiny players. None of them should have sufficient market share to create a compelling business case to the ISV, so the ISV can focus on the two players that really matter.

This effect has been demonstrated over and over again.

• In the golden age of personal computer OSes, the Mac had just enough market share to be worth developing for, which kept Microsoft honest. When the Mac nearly became irrelevant, Microsoft slowed its pace of innovation, and took forever to release Vista. Without OS/X nipping at its heels, it’s exceedingly unlikely that Microsoft would have gone on to produce a nice Windows 7. Thankfully, a personal computer OS is now largely a commodity whose greatest purpose is to run a web browser, and web-based ISVs can often ignore the space entirely.
• In the gaming console space, game ISVs resent Nintendo’s steadfast refusal to die. Microsoft and Sony can keep each other honest on their own. So, from a game developer’s perspective, Nintendo’s existence doesn’t improve their life, it only complicates it.
• When Microsoft maneuvered IE into a position of browser dominance, ISVs had no choice but to optimize for IE, giving Microsoft so much market power that they could ignore the call to adopt standards. When Mozilla, Chrome, and Safari eventually became clawed their way to being good enough and threatening enough, Microsoft finally had to get serious again about making IE good. In this particular case, web standardization has commoditized the smaller players, so as an ISV, I really don’t care whether Mozilla and WebKit both stick around. All that matters is that, collectively, they can force Microsoft to improve.

Now, the mobile OS space is increasingly dominated by iOS and Android. To an ISV, that’s fantastic news! The fewer players, the less work the mobile ISV has to do to reach more users. I’m really hoping Android manages to create a meaningful application marketplace and sustain fast growth. When iPhone was the sole high-end mobile OS of interest, they could afford to subjugate ISVs with completely mysterious and arbitrary rules for who could be in the App Store. With Android on the rise, Apple has been finally forced to open up a bit.

The mobile ISV wants to see that tussle between Apple and Android. But what would really make me happy would be to see those other guys get a lot weaker. The other mobile OS providers don’t weigh enough on their own, and hence can only serve to make the ISV’s life harder. Hey, you guys can all share that last 5%!

Comments

[Speed]

I'm sure that Toyota and GM (or is Ford number two?) share your sentiments.

[Evanfeldman.wordpress.com]

You bring up a great issue! However, I wonder if there are other ways to extend your reach to all of those other platforms without having the expense of deeply developing on all the minor different platforms. Cozi does have a passable mobile website, the question I would have is why not build out the mobile website to a higher degree (think what Facebook did with touch.facebook.com) that would generally render well on all of the different smartphone platform out there?

However I think part of your motivations is the ability to be "featured" in the platform's application market and thus having a quick and available shortcut to the service. Obviously prominent placement in the Apple App Store did wonders for Cozi :-) ...

This could be addressed by creating a "wrapper" application that adds some additional on device functionality onto of the mobile web site which would be embedded into the app. In theory this could mean a small amount of development work on these minor platforms, but wouldn't necessarily require making a "HUGE" investment especially since you didn't even consider Meego in addition to Windows Phone 7, Palm, and BB.

But of course life is simpler with only 2 contenders since it helps to reduce the number of tools needed. But HTML apps really can be cross platform to a decent extent and the heart (brains?) of the app can be something that could thus be shipped out to as many platforms as needed -- assuming that the platforms continue to (and improve) the ability to render it.

[Peter H.]

I'm curious why you did not choose to implement Cozi's mobile experience in HTML 5. This has been well hashed in other places, but it seems for a wide swath of applications there are few to no benefits of going to the expense of building an native app. And with HTML 5 you could just pivot the argument of the 3d place platform customers back to their vendor- we'll gladly support the device when it supports HTML 5.

[Jody]

Er, so you want Android and iPhone to die?!

Smartphone OS's Q2 2010 top three are Symbian, RIM, Android.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone

So, are you targeting the US market only or globally? In the global case you are completely off the mark.

[tzenes]

I have to say, that most of your arguments seem to lack data to back them up. Your initial assertion is that you'd wish RIM (who makes Blackberry) would disappear so you could have a larger market penetration (you're not the only one). However, this logic suffers from the fact that RIM has the largest Smart Phone OS following. According to Comscore, RIM has almost 40% market share in the Smart Phone market. By comparison Apple is at 23% and Google 17%.

I'm not saying that I don't understand your frustration, working on multiple platforms is a headache, but I think you've sort of missed the boat here. By developing for RIM you could double your market penetration...

Later on you seem to suggest that Vista is the result of a lack of competition, but Apple's market share was growing by 16% back in 2006 (when Vista was released, today it is growing at 20%). Certainly Apple benefited from the poor quality of Vista, but their velocity predates Vista's launch. (cite: Gartner)

You also bring up Nintendo in comparison to Sony and Microsoft in the console market. But the Nintendo Wii has sold 30.6 million units compared to Microsoft's 21.6 million Xbox 360s and Sony's 13.4 million. While month to month sales of Wii have lagged in Summer 2010, it still out sells the Playstation 3. (cite: NDP)

I understand as an independent software vendor, too much competition is bad for business, but I think you have a heavily slanted point of view based on which companies you personally favor. If nothing else, I'd take a second look at developing for the Blackberry. While it may be losing market share today, there are still 21 million RIM phone users who you could be selling your product to.

[theone]

HTML5 is your answer.

[no_more_walled_gardens]

Just make a web interface that works on mobile browsers. There is simply no need for a native app for something such as cozi.

[Jan Miksovsky]

tzenes: I appreciate the thoughtful comments; thanks for taking the time to share them and for your readership. As you, Evan, and several others have pointed out, RIM has bigger phone market share in absolute terms. But I am skeptical of the proposition that they have bigger market share in terms of phones that get heavy application use -- the sort of phone an ISV cares about. Or, at least, the sort of phone Cozi users care about. The vast majority of Cozi's mobile users have iPhones; there's simply no contest. This was true back when we didn't even have an iPhone app, and only offered a mobile-optimized web site. And Android is coming up quickly. Our customer service feedback shows that far fewer Blackberry users ask for Cozi. We could go through the expense of creating a Blackberry app (and regularly consider this), and while it might double our addressable market, it's unlikely this would double our market penetration as you suggest. And as for Symbian, I can't recall hearing a single piece of feedback about Cozi's mobile site from a Symbian user. Overall, I don't think I have a bias towards the companies I personally favor (I personally resisted our entry into the iPhone app market); I have a bias towards the companies my users favor. YMMV.

I don't make video games, and don't follow the market closely.The source I checked showed that Nintendo currently holds the #3 position. But they could be wrong, or I could easily have misinterpreted their data. And regardless of which companies are in which position, I think my initial point still stands: 2 platforms are better for the ISV than 1 or 3.

Having joined the Vista team when the project got underway (about March 2001), I can attest to the fact that Apple's small market share definitively contributed to a sense of complacency on the team.

[Everettm]

Ouch, Jan! This post is harsh!