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European Tech Analysis

IOT: Islands of Isolated Things?

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IOT: Islands of Isolated Things?

Bob O’Donnell at Tech.pinions on the need for standards for the Internet of Things to take off:

While it’s unlikely that all the specific needs for potential vertical industries can be determined by a single set of standards, there’s no question in my mind that to even start the process of reaching millions of new “things” (let alone billions of them), significant industry-wide standards efforts around communications protocols, data structures and more need to get started—and soon. We have seen a few interesting efforts—including the Qualcomm driven AllJoyn initiative—but we need to see other larger players either join this organization or drive the creation of alternative or, preferably, complementary initiatives that can start to build the links that will be necessary to fulfill the dream of IOT.

The Search For The Next Platform

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The Search For The Next Platform

Fred Wilson:

So for the next few years (I have no idea how long this search for what’s next will go on), a game to be playing is building a platform that can plausibly be the next big thing. It’s a risky game. But the payoff can be large. And you can even start by crowdfunding your first round. Man I love this business.

Throwing sheep

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Throwing sheep

Benedict Evans:
“by plugging into the address book, camera, photo library, notifications etc the frictional barriers to doing a new social app fade away: the smartphone is a social platform in the same way that Facebook is. The obvious expression of this is WhatsApp and similar things that directly address the core Facebook use cases. But it seems to me that there’s at least as much potential in doing things that use the platform without trying to take over a core use case – things like throwing sheep. That is, the smartphone social platform enables a lot of experimentation with new ideas and behaviors that don’t need to be your core comms channel and that would never have worked on the web, and (for a bunch of reasons) might not have been possible on the desktop Facebook platform.”

box fight

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Good analysis from Ben Thompson on where Box and Dropbox are coming from:

In other words, what we have here is one of the more interesting business experiments we’ve ever seen: is it better to have established a firm foundation in the top-down enterprise market that actually matters – i.e. Box – or to have built tremendous goodwill and customer loyalty with actual users – i.e. Dropbox?

There is another aspect to it that he doesn’t talk about. Both companies are from the US. Both will have to deal with a blow to their business because of the NSA. I don’t see a major company outside of the US choosing Box or Dropbox now and some existing business clients will most certainly leave Box. It’s a shame but it is not the fault of the companies nor of the boxes.

We will see how this will turn out. I used to think that Box is better positioned but post Snowden Dropbox might be slightly better off having already started to establish a platform1 agnostic way for app developers to store personal data from their customers.

  1. As in Apple, Google. Should I call it ecosystem agnostic? ↩

Would Microsoft fork Android? Not likely.

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Windroid: What if Microsoft forked Android? Venturbeat:

Windroid could still support Windows Phone apps in parallel, enabling Microsoft to piggyback the Android app ecosystem while building out its own.

A Windroid phone could have exclusive (or, at least the best) integration of Word, Excel, Powerpoint for productivity, Skype for communications, Xbox for entertainment, Nook for reading, Bing for search and navigation, IE for browsing, and so forth. Microsoft is the one company that can replace nearly all of Google’s services one-for-one with a compelling alternative.

Fascinating idea. It is true that Microsoft is one of very few companies which could indeed offer alternatives to Googles services that hardware vendors are so dependent on.

But I don’t believe this will ever happen.

First: This is not in Microsofts company culture. Microsoft is (deservedly or not) too proud to even consider this. They build their own OS from start to end, end of story. No matter wether it actually still makes sense or not.

Secondly: This step would not necessarily lead to those obvious looking consequences as laid out in the article. In fact, have a look at what multihoming did to IBMs OS/2 as it was going with this very strategy. Ars Technica on OS/2:

OS/2’s DOS box was so good that you could run an entire copy of Windows inside it, and thanks to IBM’s separation agreement with Microsoft, each copy of OS/2 came bundled with something IBM called “Win-OS2.” It was essentially a free copy of Windows that ran either full-screen or windowed. If you had enough RAM, you could run each Windows app in a completely separate virtual machine running its own copy of Windows, so a single app crash wouldn’t take down any of the others.

This was a really cool feature, but it made it simple for GUI application developers to decide which operating system to support. OS/2 ran Windows apps really well out of the box, so they could just write a Windows app and both platforms would be able to run that app.

Given the reach on each platform the decision from a developers perspective was easy to make.

Now look at the scale of Android and compare it to that of Windows Phone. The differences in installed base are not that far off from Windows versus OS/2 back in the mid-nineties.

If Microsoft would go the multihoming route it would just serve the Android ecosystem. Piggybacking and enforcing its own ecosystem would not work this way. 

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Music is mainly purchased through aggregators like iTunes and Spotify who charge a hefty tariff. You need a comprehensive catalog to convince users to commit to a payment relationship.

In-app payments on iOS and Android are the one place where paid snacks exist at scale. They have been wildly successful, quickly becoming the dominant business model for games, replacing up-front payments and banner ads. (There are individual games that generate over one billion dollars per year from in-app payments.) Outside of games, entrepreneurs have started building interesting new products that wouldn’t have been viable without in-app payments.

The Internet is for snacking – Chris Dixon

https://newnetland.com/2013-09-music-is-mainly-purchased-through-aggregators-like/

Memo #1 to Jeff Bezos: Try Washington Post Prime

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Memo #1 to Jeff Bezos: Try Washington Post Prime

“My bet is Jeff Bezos will use lessons from Amazon’s Prime service. For Monday Note readers outside the United States, Amazon Prime is a special service from which, for an annual fee of $79 (€60), you get free two-days shipping, free video streaming and the right to borrow Kindle titles in a catalog of 350,000 (I can hear writers and bookstore owners faint…) The least we can say is that it worked: more than 10m people joined the Prime program (including a couple of friends of mine who quickly dumped their cable subscription — call it collateral damage…) And that’s just the beginning: Amazon expects to reach 25m Prime customers by 2017. Even more interesting: when you cough up eighty bucks a year to use the service, you also tend to buy more, that’s the juiciest psychological facet of the Prime program.”

Bundling on a grand scale.

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And yet, under Ballmer, everyone at Apple would be working so hard, and be making so much money, both for themselves and for Apple’s shareholders, that they would ensure that Apple never again reinvents consumer computing.
See, if Steve Ballmer were the CEO, Apple would make more money, but they would slowly but surely become irrelevant. Just like Microsoft.
[..]

Ballmer did exactly what our capitalist system dictate he do: he maximized profits to the benefit of Microsoft’s shareholders. The implications of suggesting he was a failure are far more profound than most of his many critics likely realize.

If Steve Ballmer Ran Apple

Faszinating analysis by Ben Thompson. If you look closely you can see arguments being made which are being talked about constantly by Horace Dediu.

I think we are close to the beginning of a sea change in business science.

https://newnetland.com/2013-08-and-yet-under-ballmer-everyone-at-apple-would-be/

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Lastly, the disruption of the TV will empower a new entertainment platform like no other. When you think about devices like smartphones, tablets, and PCs, we understand them to be largely computing platforms. Of course, elements of entertainment take place, but so do levels of creativity and productivity. What the three platforms I mentioned have in common from a computing perspective is a software development kit (SDK), enabling software developers to write relevant applications for these computing platforms. What excites me about the disruption of the TV is the prospect of an SDK for the TV. It would transform the TV, for the first time ever, into a platform that smart developers can write unique new applications for. We have not yet even scratched the surface of this idea. Those who have the most to lose when TV gets disrupted need not fear piracy; they should fear the SDK. When developers can take advantage of a platform, the possibilities are endless.

Why We Want TV to Be Disrupted So Badly | TIME.com

Fear the SDK.

https://newnetland.com/2013-08-lastly-the-disruption-of-the-tv-will-empower-a/