Strange what a few years means to the technology sector. Google, once champion of the little guy, the individual, the anti-Mircosoft, now becomes the problem. The Michigan – Ohio State rivalry of the tech industry was supposed to be Apple and Microsoft. They have spanned great battles over the years – and better commercials…
Yet, all of a sudden Google is the evil invader in the space. What else could make Apple and Microsoft consortium partners?
The RIM letter to BGR referenced a video from Simon Sinek on TED. While I think he makes an incredibly difficult task seem a little too easy, I think he certainly raises some interesting questions. He talks about the Gold Circle, how we market the what instead of the why.
Execution is far more difficult than transforming the marketing message from the “What we do” to the “why we do it”, it is more about leadership and a unique focus on the customer that is not easily replicated.
Today, Facebook launched a new email service. It has long been in the works as Project Titan. While perhaps not a direct threat against Google, it is certainly an attack on Gmail.
Remember back to the good old days…when we walked uphill to school in the snow both ways, when children actually played baseball (and not the video game version), when information was delivered with ink and paper, when cell phones were the size of our heads…
…err I digress, remember when Google was the white knight against Microsoft. We wanted to use Netscape just to make Microsoft mad, but IE was just better. Ah, yes the good old days and the turn of the century. Was it really just in 2000 when they signed the pact with Yahoo to make them the default search engine? A mere decade it took them to go from White Knight to feared Big Brother. It took Apple 26 years to go from 1984 to being mocked by Futurama with its Eyephone or from having their great anti-Microsoft ad campaign spoofed by TMobile in Piggyback.
Has Google really done this in less than 10 years? We will soon see. Earlier this month Google found itself in a little hot water over their StreetView cars that were driving around picking geographically based personal information. I understand that personal privacy may be dead, but I would venture a bet that if there is a backlash it will be aimed squarely at Google (and ironically in this case Facebook).
Clearly not all markets move at breakneck speed, but it does tell a story of thinking about tomorrow in a more methodology approach.
OK, so I upgraded to iPhone 4. I had to do it…it was like an addiction. For some reason, the iPhone has a tremendous amount of cache to it. How do we create brands with this much power? And how do we use this for our own advantage for the longest time?
From a Strategy standpoint, we can discuss and debate a great deal about their relationship with AT&T….
AT&T Exclusive….
From the very beginning the AT&T thing has been called out and questioned. Apple has always been about propriety…and while somethings work it is clear that others do not. I think in the Cell Phone market, this tactic is about to hurt them. By creating the exclusive arrangement with AT&T Apple created motivated competition. Verizon, whom most feel is the superior cellular network, was extremely motivated to come up with a competitive plan as was Google who was just entering the mobile market. It created a substantially sized hole for Google Droid to take advantage of.
What Apple felt was a compelling advantage with the App Store, is now just a “me too”. The Android market is coming on fast, and momentum (prior to the iPhone4) was clearly leaning to the Droid. It is also being argued that the pressure from the Droid momentum had pushed Apple to rush the iPhone 4 to market, thus causing it to make some well known missteps and product issues.
By making a conscious choice to go with the weaker carrier, it created a vacuum….and in the business world vacuums don’t last long. Verizon and Google have created a very viable competitive piece to the iPhone legacy.
Data Hog
With the iPhone 4 and its video functionality, it is going to need a much better network than AT&T can offer.
AT&T has already leveraged the iPhone platform to change its terms and conditions which the user community is less than thrilled with at this time. The first change was the cloaked ‘Smart Phone Cancellation Policy.’ To cancel a smart phone account, the penalty fee has now doubled.
The second main item was dropping the unlimited data plan. Users are now going to be hit with overage penalties, though AT%T claims the fees are not going to be excessive. While AT&T is offering two levels of data plans, one which allows minimal usage (200 MB per month) for $15 and the other which offers 2GBs per month for $25. The third option is for tethering but is still limited to 2GBs per month.
While I have been told the fees were primarily geared to get people to be smarter with when they were downloading, this is really a ploy to offload the supply and demand issues that AT&T is having with their cellular network. This tells me that AT&T expects their dropped call issue to either continue or perhaps get worse. When you combine this with the unprecedented demand for the data hungry iPhone 4s, I think AT&T is going to have some issues.
So how does AT&T deal with this mess, they are arguably a year behind in launching their 4G cellular network compared to Verizon.
I am sure in the end that Apple has to be less than thrilled that their cellular carrier is the weakest link in its product. It was embarrassed during the iPhone 4 launch when the demo could not find a connection (arguably not an AT&T issue), when a member of the audience responded to Steve Job’s delay in what to do with “try Verizon”.
So in the end by choosing the weaker of the cellular carriers…
1. They created a vaccum which Google Android has exploited extremely well. Apple iPhone may struggle over the next few years as the Android market continues to expand.
2. It created a faulty product due to poor service, and in some ways product and marketing snafus due to the increased competitive pressure around the iPhone 4 launch.
3. Strangely they have become what they once fought against – they are the machine (see video below).
4. If they Apple iPhone market is over taken by the Droid market in the next couple of years, it is perhaps fair to blame the relationship with AT&T. If they would have worked with all markets the Droid market would have materialized much slower.
How much time do we spend making the customer experience simple?
Is the customer on-boarding process painful, or straight forward?
Do customers get lost in our beauracracy, our legal needs?
How many customers do we lose in those final steps?
We spend tremendous time developing technology – whether externally for paying customers, or internally for process improvement. Yet, we often spend very little time planning for the adoption phase.
What do our customers want – stuff just to work the first time, to be easy to use and provide the value they paid for. If we are spending millions, if not billions on product development, why do we not start with the end in mind (see Jonathan Becher’s – Manage by Walking Around blog)? Especially in the age of the internet, people need to be able to sign up and get started without complexity, nor mind-numbing data entry. There is a time and a place for each of those, and it is not necessarily right after “hello”.
One great shiny example is Apple. Most of their products are far more simple to operate than their competitors. Think of how easy to use each of their products are, then think about using them as part of a network of parts and it gets even more simple to use.
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