Tuesday, April 24, 2012
The war on the personal cloud has started
I have been talking about (and doing) personal cloud for years now. Ten years ago I wrote the first line of code of what became Funambol (thankfully, now not including any line of code I wrote :-)
I have to admit it: I thought it would happen sooner. I was a tiny bit early ;-) Still, it is still a satisfaction to see it is actually happening.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced a bunch of new features of its personal cloud service, called SkyDrive (including a Mac and iOS app, which is cool). Strangely missing an Android app...
Today, Google announced Google Drive, strangely missing the iOS app...
Both look like great products, although way too vertical (Google is going to be mainly Android, and Microsoft will try as hard as they can to make it Windows Phone perfect) but still better than iCloud, which is the closest thing on planet earth.
However you look at it, today marks the start of the personal cloud war.
I am expecting Amazon to jump on it fully, because their Amazon Cloud Drive right now is just a mockup of what a good product it could be. Actually, I am surprised they will end up late to the party, when they started so early. I believe it is going to be a four horses race, eventually.
Honestly, it does not look good for Dropbox. They just do not have the weapons to fight in a war of this size. The price of storage is going down, and they have no business model or major feature advantage that can sustain their growth. Even worst for SugarSync.
Right now, I am so glad that we positioned Funambol not in the B2C space... I believe the opportunity for mobile operators and the other device manufacturers to fight this battle is still there. They have the size and the reach to consumers (and most importantly, the billing relationship) to make it. In particular, in countries where there are no credit cards and the OTT players are not that strong.
Especially when you look at cross-device synchronization, because I do not see Google or Microsoft or Apple to really do a good job there. And cross-device in a family means everything, in particular if you start adding a lot of other devices, like TVs, DVRs, game consoles, stereos, scales and so on.
The carriers, and those in particular providing a multi-screen service (Phone+Internet+TV) have a great advantage when you look at the family cloud. That is the next battle.
Long live to the personal cloud. We are living exciting times.
Posted by Fabrizio Capobianco at 11:34
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Monday, April 23, 2012
Why onboarding should be priority #1
If you do not live in mobile, you probably have never heard about the word "onboarding". Too bad, because it is the most important word in this space today.
When the mobile revolution started, phones did not store any meaningful user data. Yes, there was the address book, and it was a pain to move it around (for example, to your new phone), but the suffering was minimal.
Nowadays, your phone contains your entire life. Not just your friends, the pictures of your kids, the video of your graduation and much more. Losing a phone is a horrible pain, so many people do backups, or use a personal cloud solution (such as iCloud, or SkyDrive, or really soon Google Drive) to store their stuff somewhere secure.
That does not solve one little problem, actually it makes it worst: it locks you onto one platform. If you are an iPhone user and you start using iCloud, you are stuck for life. You cannot change device. The same for Google with Android, and soon for Microsoft with Windows Phone and SkyDrive.
Onboarding is the process of moving your data into a new device, just after you buy it.
It is simple if you buy an iPhone after an iPhone. However, if you have an iPhone and you want to move to Android, good luck. What about having a BlackBerry and moving to something else? Or a Symbian phone? Exactly.
If you are a device manufacturer, and you want to expand your market today, you need to steal a user from someone else. It is not a green field anymore. You need to take a user from a dumbphone, or another smartphone. You need to make it super duper easy to move its data. Or you are dead.
It is not just address book, video and pictures. It is everything. It is apps, for example. If I have 75 apps on my Android, how do I know if I will find them in the other device? Am I going to lose all of them? If you leave a user with a doubt, you are not going to convince her to move. Period. We have too much data in our phones now. The pain of switching is too big.
Funny enough, onboarding is a very tough problem to solve for a device manufacturer. Think about it: you need to build apps for different operating systems, own by your competition. Put them on their App Stores... It is a task nobody is assigned to, in a device manufacturer. Nobody owns this. And it is the most important thing you should be looking at, to get market share. Forget the color of your device and the megapixels of your camera, nobody will buy your phone if you cannot move their data.
Of course, I should add a disclaimer: I have been working on onboarding for a long time. The company I founded (Funambol) is the only one I know that allows data to move from a Blackberry to an iPhone, to an Android, to a Symbian, to a Windows Mobile, ... and back ;-)
That said, despite my clear bias, I still believe onboarding should be the most important task on a device manufacturer list. One that is always overlooked, left at the end of the process, just in time for that "oohhh crap, nobody is buying our phone because we are not giving them a way to move their data".
Interesting how fast this market moves. In the span of a few years, this item moved from priority #100 to #1. Trust me. This is where it belongs. There is no market for a phone that does not allow you to move your data. None.
Posted by Fabrizio Capobianco at 18:11
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Monday, March 19, 2012
Europe lost the mobile race. For good
When I moved to Silicon Valley in 1999, one thing really hit me: my grandma in Italy had a cellphone then, and in my soon-to-IPO tech startup only few people had one. I mean, in the heart of Silicon Valley, at Tibco, going IPO that year... I was puzzled, my grandma (she is over 90 years old now) was ahead of the geeks here.
At that time, the gap between Europe and US on mobile was huge. Europe had the fastest networks, the best phones (remember Nokia), the software developers (crying over JavaME differences), the ecosystem... Everything.
Here, we had nothing.
A few years later, I started pitching a concept of a mobile synchronization play to investors in the Valley. It was 2002 (Funambol is about to pass the 10th year mark, wow ;-) and there was no mobile signal whatsoever at 3000 Sand Hill, the heart of the VC world. For years, the mobile signal over there sucked.
For years, there were no mobile companies here. And the networks were so bad that I could drive from San Francisco to San Jose and have the connection drop five times (and I knew the spots where it was going to happen, so I could tell the european guy at the other end of the phone that I was about to drive into a tunnel...).
First, the mobile companies started showing up. I was one of the early people to say Silicon Valley will jump on the mobile bandwagon, that this valley would not miss the biggest change in our lives. Many in Europe thought I was dumb to try to do a mobile company here. They told me to move to Finland instead (too bad I like the weather here better ;-)
Then the mobile OS war started. Palm first. Then Apple with iOS. Then Google with Android. Then Microsoft moved their mobile team here. In a few years, the mobile world moved here. On mobile operating systems, iOS and Android alone command over 90% of the market. Easy. Bye bye Europe, with Symbian and all the other stuff.
Still, Europe had the better networks. UMTS, HDSPA, the 3.5G: just ahead of the US by a mile.
It all changed when I went to MWC in February. Before leaving, my friend Hal (our VP Marketing at Funambol) showed me his new Android phone. It had LTE. I did a SpeedTest and my jaw dropped. This thing is faster than my DSL at home. By a lot. It seems like something coming from the future.
Then at MWC, I heard the CEO of Telecom Italia say: "we have started an LTE trial in Turin".
Hey, what do you mean "An LTE trial"? Trial? But it is live in pretty much the entire US! And it works, I saw it with my eyes, from a guy who is not even a geek!
When a week ago Apple announced the new iPad, with LTE, I just had a flashback. Hal is like my grandma (sorry buddy ;-) and my geek friends now live in Pavia, Italy. They have no idea what LTE is and how fast it is. If Apple has LTE on its flagship device, it is mainstream, not a trial.
Mainstream is the US now. Europe just lost the mobile race. For good.
Posted by Fabrizio Capobianco at 19:11
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Monday, February 20, 2012
The return of the stylus
Among the somewhat interesting things I saw at CES, the Samsung Note topped the list.
Mostly, because Samsung made a big deal out of it: they hired graphic artists to sketch your face on the device and that created a long line of people (there is nothing people like more then themselves: smart move, Samsung...).
What is the Samsung Note? A huge phone or a small tablet, depending on how you look at it. It is 5.8 by 3.3 inches (if you are not American, don't worry, it means it is huge). It fits in your pocket, if you are ok with going around with a brick in your pants. You can also use it to make calls, unless you are worried that people will look at you holding an iron board.
You know what I think about super-sized phones (a.k.a. versatile bricks), and I have the same feeling about the Note. It is just too big.
However, the new (?!?) thing about the Note is that it sports a stylus pen. Yes, exactly like the one we had in the old Palm Pilots. The one we hated. The one we lost so many times, we all bought five replacement pens. It stays inside the device, you push it and it comes out. You can write or sketch on the device (there is a Note app), while you use the finger for anything else.
I had lunch with a friend a few days ago and he had one of these monsters. I sketched a face (not mine) and the experience was quite good. Still, the thing is too big, sorry. It will be a device only for a niche.
However, it made me think about the stylus. It was gone when the BlackBerry introduced the mini-keyboard and even more when the iPhone introduced multi-touch.
Do I ever miss it?
Yes, I did. I clearly remember one day when I went looking online for a pen. For my iPad. I could not find one that would actually work and I gave up.
Why was I looking for a pen?
To sketch ;-) And take notes while in meeting. Typing on an iPad in a meeting is just too much and the social experience is still bad: better than taking notes on a laptop, with the screen creating a visual barrier, but still bad because you must look at your fingers while others are talking. We are so good at writing, that we do not need to look at it. We write and we look at the person in front of us, or we alternate. It is socially acceptable.
The same for taking notes in school. Try doing it with your fingers. It is too hard. Personally, I believe tablet will totally eliminate sketchpads eventually. Now, it is not possible. With a pen, it could.
Somehow, the idea of a stylus for a tablet makes sense to me. And not only me: I heard rumors that Samsung is about to launch a Note 10.1, a tablet with a pen. It is something that would make it different than any other tablet out there. On a phone, I say no. On a tablet, oh yes.
More, let me predict one thing about the new iPad 3: you will be able to write on it with a pen. A magic pen, sold as an accessory. Probably nicely fitting in your cover.
This is the return of the stylus.
Posted by Fabrizio Capobianco at 10:42
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Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Is 2012 the year of Nokia?
I am on the plane back to the Bay Area from CES. Las Vegas is always a cool place, even if you have a lingering jet-lag. Actually, in that case you might be able to experience the beautiful dawn in the desert while sober, which is not common in Sin City. I definitely recommend it.
CES was packed with people, but lacked exciting stuff, in my opinion. I traveled the show extensively and I can't say many booths impressed me because of new gadgets. I actually felt sad in the empty BlackBerry booth, looking at a new tablet OS whose top feature is email (really? It sounds like a joke ;-) Even TVs looked like TVs, just oversize and slim.
The only place where I saw something exciting is the Nokia booth (yep, they had a booth this year, pretty big and quite crowded). The Lumia 900 was in big display. It is the Windows Phone device coming out with AT&T.
In particular, what caught my eye was the blue model.
I know the sample of one is meaningless, but she is my wife so she must have good taste...
Jokes apart, the Lumia 900 is a big deal. The hardware looks different. The shape is cool, and it feels great in the hands. It is simply sexy. Even without turning it on.
Once it is on, Windows Phone shows up. It is a eye-catching OS. Nobody is taking it seriously, but with a sexy hardware and a massive marketing campaign (just wait, combine Microsoft and Nokia budgets, both at the last chance to make it in mobile...), I think it has a big chance.
Honestly, I believe there is a concrete possibility this device will finally spark adoption of Windows Phone.
That would be exciting. I do not like monopolies, and duopolies are not that much better (it is what Apple and Google are doing these days, with the variation that Amazon is creating a lot of trouble for Google). With Windows Phone in the middle, the competition will be even better.
I personally thought Nokia was done for good (same for RIM, but I have not changed my mind on that...). Instead, I am now convinced they have a winner in their hands, despite the crappy name (said the guy who came up with the name Funambol...). They have the big carrier behind them, which is not going to push the iPhone anymore (and has no reason to push Android much). That will help tremendously. If they execute the plan well, at the end of the year we could be looking at 2012 and realize it was the year of Nokia.
In any case, welcome back old friend.
Posted by Fabrizio Capobianco at 20:06
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Friday, December 09, 2011
HP dumps WebOS in the open source trash can
Hey, this should be a day to celebrate for me. I wrote a post 18 months ago titled "Why HP should open source WebOS" and it finally happened. They did it.
Yay, right?
Nope.
When I wrote that post, HP had just acquired Palm. Android was not as big as it is today (not even close). The time was perfect. It was a phenomenal opportunity for HP.
Let me pick a statement from that post:
My suggestion on WebOS is easy: open source it. Fast. If there is one thing I believe Palm did wrong, it was following the Apple model. Keep it closed and you die, unless you are ahead of everyone and big.I still agree with myself (which is good, I guess). The "keep it closed and you die" sentence, in particular ;-) HP did not open source WebOS. And, therefore, they killed it.
Throwing something which is dead in the open source trash can does not revive it. Try throwing a dead body in a trash can (after asking Siri where to find one) and let me know.
Open source is not the panacea. Or the emergency room. You can't expect the magic to happen, just because you threw some code out. It does not.
Open source is a lot more than that. It is a community. People who believe on a common mission, with common interests. It is changing the world together.
I know, I am too romantic. Tell my wife. But it is true, even for Android, even when there is a giant behind a project. You get people excited to participate, only if there is a reason, a mission, a common goal.
What is the common goal on WebOS being open source? I have no idea.
Opensourcing WebOS was the right thing to do 18 months ago. Now it is useless. It is an excuse not to say "we screwed up and we killed it".
It is simply too late. RIP WebOS.
Posted by Fabrizio Capobianco at 11:15
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Tuesday, November 15, 2011
The tipping point: Android won
I know we all love Apple. I know you do not see many Androids in the hands of pundits in Silicon Valley. I know you like to think different. Still, Android keeps taking market share away from everyone. And iOS market share is shrinking.
Look at today's data from Gartner:
You are reading it right: Android has now more than 50% of the market, while iOS has less market share than a year ago. Android keeps growing, quarter after quarter. Apple will grow this quarter for sure, because of the iPhone 4S, but Android is going to grow faster.
There is a moment where you realize a team has won, that it has taken an insurmountable lead. That moment is now. Android has passed 50%. There is no way back. It is the tipping point.
Let me brag a little: I told you so :-) Mobile Open Source wins.
All those that claim that Android is not really open source, please click here. See, Google has just released the source code of Android 4.0 (ICS or Ice Cream Sandwich). I know, there is no steering committee blah blah. However, can you negate how powerful open source has been for Android (and Google)?
Look at the tablet world. Amazon has just launched the Kindle Fire. No help from Google whatsoever. It is open source at its best. You can even take other APKs and install them on it. If you ask me, I am ready to bet that the Kindle Fire (with its younger brothers) is going to be the most popular tablet ever, even passing the iPad eventually.
Fragmentation is innovation. Open source is pushing the limit of mobile, making it better and more interesting. More, it is an open world, where the OS moves around, and apps move around. Add an open cloud, where data will move freely, and we will have a perfect world (we are far from it, but there is room to fight).
To me, the game is over. Android is dominating. The next player is so far behind, and it will not catch up. Android won.
Posted by Fabrizio Capobianco at 08:58
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