Apple in the Enterprise in 2012

From CIO.com, Apple in the Enterprise: $19 Billion to Be Spent on iPads, Macs in 2012.

A Forrester report this week predicts CIOs will pour $19 billion into Apple products in 2012—$10 billion in iPads, $9 billion in Macs. This is up from around $12 billion last year, where the split between iPads and Macs was roughly even.

I think a couple of things are happening here, neither of which is unexpected.

For one, the device operating system (Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, etc) is losing relevance. It still matters of course, especially among most big companies that are heavily invested in the Microsoft toolset, but the new direction is obvious and inevitable. With the ascendancy of mobility both in the workforce and society in general, applications and data are gradually being decoupled from the old desktop OS frameworks.

Also, the so-called ‘consumerization of IT’ is really about a backlash from users who are tired of working with tools that are often second-rate in quality and reliability—like some cheap PCs running Microsoft Windows, and Blackberry phones that have not kept up with Apple’s iPhone or the popular Android smartphones. Increasing numbers of employees get better results with their personal devices, and have begun to demand something better at work. With cheap commodity technology you usually get what you pay for.

The Apple assault on the corporate market has so far taken place without much formal Apple support, and probably without Apple itself understanding its full extent.

This is the interesting subplot. Beyond building in some management and security tools in their devices, it doesn’t appear that Apple has made much of a directed effort at the corporate market. I think some of this has been due to Steve Jobs’ insistence on secrecy with regard to product roadmaps, and I wonder if Apple under Tim Cook might be heading in a more collaborative direction with corporate customers. There’s a lot of opportunity for them there.

How smartphone users see themselves

Source: brianshall.com/content/smartphone-warsin-animated-form

RIM to release the Blackpad

According to this Bloomberg article, Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of Blackberry smartphones, plans to release a competitor to the iPad this November: the Blackpad.

Pricing for the device will be in line with the iPad, which starts at $499, the person said. RIM is focused on reaping additional profits from the tablet effort, rather than competing on price to sell a large number of devices, the person said.

In the tablet market, RIM will have to demonstrate how its device can stand out against products including the iPad, which has attracted buyers because of its integration with Apple’s iTunes service and many software applications, or apps. More than 225,000 apps are available for Apple devices, the company said in June. RIM said in April it had more than 6,000 apps.

So they’re going to launch a new device with far fewer native apps, to compete against the iPad which has a mature app store containing tens of thousands of titles and huge brand awareness right now, and they’re going to demand the same price as the iPad? Good luck with that strategy. I have a few questions:

• Where’s the mobile OS to compete with Apple’s iOS4? RIM still hasn’t delivered anything close to the touch capabilities found on the iPad/iPhone today. This is not a trivial point and I don’t know that RIM has the engineering chops to do it.
• What’s RIM’s answer to the App Store/iTunes ecosystem? Easy integration is critical to the adoption of a new device like this.
• What’s the retail strategy — is there a store people can walk in to and get their hands on the Blackpad when it’s released? This has been huge for Apple, and RIM needs a response here.
• What’s the differentiator? Is there anything about the Blackpad that says better than iPad?

I can see RIM getting some limited traction in the enterprise just due to brand recognition, but I don’t know if that’s enough to take the Blackpad very far considering they’re already late to a game they probably don’t even want to be in. And Blackpad is an awful name.

Hewlett-Packard Co., which bought smartphone maker Palm Inc. this month, said it plans to produce a tablet device that runs on Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system.

HP bought a company with a strong mobile operating system (Palm’s webOS) and tons of valuable patents, and they’re going to put Windows on their tablet instead?

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said yesterday the software company plans to increase its focus on tablets.

Translation: The software company plans to increase its focus on what the innovative companies are doing and attempt to duplicate that somehow.

What I think is likely to happen with these companies scurrying to jump into the ‘tablet’ space is something akin to the commodity PC market: A race to the bottom.

HTML5

There’s a lot of debate going on now about HTML5 vs Flash and the future of the mobile web. I thought it might be helpful to shed some light on what HTML5 is about, and why it’s a good thing for the web and mobile technologies.

Others have written more in-depth on this topic, so rather than duplicating that work I’ll hit it briefly and provide links below to some of those other resources if you want to dive deeper.

The primary arguments today around HTML5 and Flash are as follows:

• Technical Architecture
  • HTML5 renders video in the browser, with no other software required
  • Flash video requires a browser plug-in to be installed – this plug-in is known to sometimes be buggy and prone to crash the browser
• Mobile Performance
  • The Flash player requires a lot of power to run, which drains the battery in mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, others) and puts an additional load on the processor
• Authoring Tools
  • If you develop with Flash you have to buy expensive authoring software from Adobe
  • Development in HTML5 requires a simple text editor, which is free for a basic product or low cost for something with more advanced editing features
• Dependencies
  • If you develop in Flash, you’re counting on Adobe to keep the Flash product current with support for new features found on mobile devices. If Adobe doesn’t keep the Flash development tools current on the new features, you can’t take advantage of them. For Apple, this creates an obvious risk to their platform. They don’t want iPhone or iPad development to be held hostage to another company’s ability (or inability) to deliver quality development tools for those devices.

There’s a lot more to HTML5 than video rendering, but that’s the gist of the debate today around Flash and Apple’s decision to disable it on the iPhone and iPad. Steve Jobs recently published an article called Thoughts on Flash where he goes into detail about Apple’s thinking on this subject. It’s a bit self-serving, of course, but generally I think the points are valid. And apparently a lot of major web operations agree: Apple has posted a list of high-profile sites that are making the conversion from Flash to HTML5 for serving video.

The upshot: HTML5 is the near-future vision of developing for the web, both for mobile devices and traditional desktop use. There are tangible benefits to keeping web standards open and accessible by any device that connects to the web, but especially so now that millions of users are going mobile.

HTML5 Resources

Preview of HTML5 (A List Apart)

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5

Draft specs by the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group)

http://www.whatwg.org/html5

Dive Into HTML5 – good writeup by Mark Pilgrim, software developer at Google

http://diveintohtml5.org/

HTML5 Tutorial

http://html5tutorial.net/

Mobile Banking

The bar has been raised again for mobile services.

USAA is a financial services company for military personnel and their families. They recently announced a new mobile initiative whereby members can use their iPhone to deposit checks by taking a photograph of the check with their iPhone camera and submitting the photo as the deposit. There are some restrictions of course, but this is a huge leap forward in mobility. I assume this works by having the bank’s servers run a scan of the image and confirming that it captured the amount, account number and routing number from the check. I suspect the major US banks are looking into similar functionality in an effort to retain and attract customers.

This is what I like so much about all of the work on mobility that’s happening now. When a services company can take a fairly routine aspect of their business and make that available on a mobile platform, and eliminate the need for the customer to travel to a facility to conduct business, this is a game-changer. Any incremental advance in service delivery by one company forces the rest of the industry to keep up, and this kind of innovation can only be good for the customer.

Wells Fargo doesn’t offer anything like this yet, but they do have a couple of nice mobile offerings:

With your phone’s browser, go to www.wf.com for the mobile-optimized Wells Fargo site. The interface is very lean and simplified for the small screen and provides a nice way to do some basic things like check balances and transfer funds among your accounts. You are required to enter your username and password since this is basically just another version of the Wells Fargo banking web site.

With the Instant Messaging program on your phone you can text BAL to 93557 (WELLS) and within a few seconds you will get a text response with your account balance. You have to first set this up online with your account so that the Wells Fargo system will recognize and authorize your phone, but it only takes a couple minutes to do so. Also, you can text ACT to this number to get recent account activity, like cleared transactions and deposits to the account. This is really handy if you just need a quick view into your account without having to log in over the web.

Mac & iPhone Programming on the Rise

O’Reilly, a leading publisher of technical books, posted on Friday a State of the Computer Book Market report that points to an increase in sales of books relating to programming for the Mac and iPhone platforms.

The big success story among programming languages is Objective-C, which has grown from a small (low unit sales) language into a large (high units sales) language. iPhone and Mac development is fueling this growth.

This is not surprising to me. Mobile platforms like the iPhone and Blackberry (and maybe the Palm Pre) represent perhaps the greatest growth opportunity in application programming in the coming years. There is a growing trend towards working and communicating from anywhere, and the mobile technologies are now taking shape to support this. These are not just cell phones anymore — they’re mobile computers.

The big winners will be those companies that can execute well in a couple of key areas: (1) attract talented software developers to design and write applications, and (2) make it easy for customers to get those apps on their devices. As I mentioned in a previous post about mobile applications, Apple’s iTunes App Store has set the standard for this model. I expect that Research in Motion (RIM, the Blackberry maker) and Palm are focused heavily on building out their app stores now, but they have some catching up to do. With more than 1.5 billion downloads in its first year and over 100,000 software developers on board, Apple has serious momentum on its side.

Evernote

Evernote (www.evernote.com) is a product that probably falls into the Personal Information Management (PIM) category, but goes a little further in overall functionality. I’ve been using it since early July and I like it pretty well, although I’d like to see some minor improvements in upcoming releases.

The basic concept behind Evernote is to have a quick and easy way to capture bits of information that you want to keep for future reference, and be able to manage and access it from anywhere — on your own computer (Mac or Windows), on another computer with web access, or on your smartphone (iPhone, Blackberry, Palm Pre or Windows Mobile device). Think of it as an all-purpose “digital bucket” for holding random things that you want to get to later.

You can capture notes, tasks, links, emails, web pages (entire pages or selected parts), photos, sounds, documents (PDF, text, html, Word, etc) — pretty much anything you want to grab and drop in there. It leverages the cloud to keep things in sync between your computer and handheld device. You can create tags in Evernote to categorize the things you put in there, which makes it easy to find them as the collection grows. Multiple tags can be associated with any item for cross-referencing, and the entire collection is searchable.

There’s an ad-supported free version that provides some good features and makes it worthwhile to try it out if you’re interested. The premium version is $45 for a year and offers much more — higher online storage amounts, SSL encryption for security, greater monthly upload allowance, and sharing and collaboration options.

In the short time I’ve been using it I have been pretty impressed with Evernote. Synching between my computer and my phone has worked quickly and seamlessly. If mobility is an important part of your work life, this is a good way to grab information from just about anywhere and have it with you wherever you go.

Mobility & The Killer App

I will be writing later about the major players in the mobile device category — iPhone, Blackberry and Palm Pre. I’m not even sure how much there is to say about the Palm Pre at this point since it’s still the new kid on the block, but the initial reviews are mostly very good. As a practical matter, though, it’s a two-horse race right now between the iPhone and Blackberry, at least in the US.

(See this report showing that the iPhone and Blackberry account for 3% of cell phone market share and 35% of the profits. Nokia sells more phones than any company in the world, and they recently reported a 66% decline in profits.)

But first I want to look at one thing that’s critical to the success and viability of any mobile platform: applications.

Up to now most organizations’ mobile strategy meant having your email, calendar and contacts on your phone — maybe a couple of specialized business applications too, but email was the “killer app” for mobile workers.  Today though, email is pedestrian. Nobody is going to win the race with email. So what is the killer app now?

I think the killer app now is not even an application. The killer app is the App Store.

The App Store is the link between mobile device users and the programs they want. The wireless carriers and phone manufacturers are hard at work building out systems to deliver applications to their customers, while also trying to recruit talented developers to write software for their device. Each device runs a different kind of operating system, so you can’t run a Blackberry app on your iPhone, and vice-versa.

Software developers prefer to channel their efforts into one programming format because it’s too hard to maintain software for multiple systems. Developers are smart and will naturally focus their efforts where the greatest opportunity lies. Writing and testing and debugging and updating software is a time-consuming and laborious effort. If you’re going to go to all that trouble you want to get your product in front of as many potential buyers as possible. So where’s the activity today?

Let’s look at some numbers as of July 2009.

But counting the number of available applications doesn’t tell the whole story. The iPhone App Store may have 65,000 apps, but we know that many of these are in the personal/entertainment category (which are fun but the business community doesn’t much care), or just crap (there are over a hundred iPhone apps that make fart noises*). The point for developers is that people are flocking to the iPhone and buying this stuff. Imagine how well the truly quality apps are selling.

An app store is the software developer’s marketplace. Apple’s terms for iPhone developers are basically this: you write an app, set any price you want, and submit it for review. As long as it meets some basic guidelines, we will publish it and keep 30% of the sales revenue to cover our costs for maintaining the store (bandwidth, credit card processing fees, infrastructure, etc). The remaining 70% is paid to you monthly.

If you’re a software developer you know that every iPhone owner has iTunes installed on their computer and on their device, which means the marketplace is always at their fingertips. Apple wasn’t the first company to create an app store, but they have set the standard that everyone else is chasing now. The iPhone App Store is one year old and recently reported surpassing 1.5 billion downloads — averaging out to 125 million downloads per month. If you create mobile software you might be interested in these numbers.

So the question is not how many apps does any particular store have today. The better question is: where are the developers going? Right now, they’re going to the iPhone.

(*Apparently there’s money to be made in fart apps. There’s a report that on Christmas day 2008 there were nearly 40,000 downloads of an app called iFart Mobile, which netted the developers almost $30,000 on one day’s sales from a 99¢ app. Only in America.)

p.s. I did find something that might just qualify for killer app status. Take a look at this one minute video of a subway locator application by crossair. Amazing.