if connected

People’s unofficial use at work of personally-bought smartphones will lead to personal devices and personal information being managed by corporate IT departments. RIM has just announced BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, a new product to help companies manage the proliferation of employee-bought smartphones and tablets connecting to company networks.

Fusion has support for employees to use a single device for both work and home, the ability to manage multiple devices per person — critical in an era where individuals routinely use smartphones, tablets and notebook PCs in tandem — and self-service for individual employees to lock their phone if it’s lost or stolen.

But consumer smartphone owners already routinely have many of these abilities, even if their smartphones are not used for work, or provided by their employer. While RIM has been slow to extend its core expertise into the consumer market, other than with BlackBerry Messenger (BBM),  numerous other companies have jumped into the fray and offered consumer versions BlackBerry’s enterprise features upon which RIM’s phone success was originally built.

The ‘ITization of the Person’ is already well underway. Here’s a selection of the many examples where consumers have corporate-style IT tools to manage their digital lives:-  Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone knows the biggest battles in technology are today being fought by a small number of large organizations. We intuitively know who these great powers are: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and maybe Microsoft. But we’re not so clear on what it is that makes those particular companies the key protagonists rather than other equally large digital companies — Samsung, Sony, Nokia and Yahoo! among them — who appear to be sidelined.

Calling this a battle, or “The Great Tech War of 2012″, misses the point. It’s far too negative a sentiment when these companies’ main focus is on long term strategy. They are aiming to construct a future in which their products and profits will prosper.

These great digital powers are now building Digital Civilizations, rather than a series of mere products, individual platforms or even ecosystems (around a platform). They are pursuing strategies that reach far beyond the confines of existing markets. They are causing widespread market collisions as they push industries to overlap, merge or cease to exist. They are outflanking and disrupting companies that follow less ambitious corporate strategies.

These new Digital Civilizations use identity to tie numerous disparate products, many devices, multiple platforms and product portfolios together into their long term strategy. Each Civilization has hundreds of millions of active users — often with credit cards attached — far more than even the largest telecom operators or media companies. They straddle industries rather than operating within legacy market sectors. They have an organizing ideology underlying their strategy that motivates and attracts talented employees, excites partners, and is the foundation for the marketing that entices users to become their customers.

What defines these Digital Civilizations? What makes them new and different? Many organizations, companies, industry consortiums, and companies have parts of this strategy in place within their current products. But the new Digital Civilizations have all of the following characteristics:  Read the rest of this entry »

With the launch of the 2011 iPhone models, Apple will also launch iCloud, a new online services play that replaces MobileMe. This is a part of the iOS5 software that will be available for free to existing iOS devices and will ship as standard on new iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch’s.

This is a core part of Apple’s near term strategy to drive greater device sales — iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Mac — as Apple builds a post-PC world. Over the long haul iCloud will also help Apple’s content and services revenues but that won’t be its most important initial impact.

Apple still makes the vast bulk of its revenues from hardware sales despite having by far the most successful app store, music download store and various other services initiatives. Example: In the first three years after the launch of the Apple App Store Apple generated $1.1bn in revenue from iOS apps (1). But this figure is dwarfed by their iOS device revenues of over $100bn in the same period (2). Apple has great margins on those hardware revenues too.

Because of that hardware model, Apple has enormous incentives to create new product features to drive device sales, even if that means offering those new features or services for free. Apple can be disruptive with “free” offerings too. The “contagion of free” business models are not just the preserve of Google and Valley-based VC-funded startups.

This is the cloud the way it should be: automatic and effortless. iCloud is seamlessly integrated into your apps, so you can access your content on all your devices. And it’s free with iOS 5. — Apple marketing, October, 2011

Those devices sales give Apple a massive incentive to package its cloud services for free. In so doing, Apple undermines those that have cloud-based services as their core business. This includes Google. Although Google charges for few cloud services — the main exception being Google Apps for businesses — it still generates direct advertising revenues across all of its cloud services such as Gmail. So, if people choose to use Apple’s services instead of Google it still hurts Google’s bottom line.

iCloud supports Apple’s desire to sell more devices by helping two overlapping groups of consumers:

Read the rest of this entry »

Next week Apple will announce new iPhones. There will be a backlash. There will be praise. Much of significance will be lost in the noise.

Instead, Apple’s metrics should focus rivals’ attention on the importance of multi-year strategies.

Competitors are forever seeking to emulate Apple. But too many deploy me-too tactics, rather than following a consistent and sustained long term strategy:

• HP fired its CEO under a year after appointment. There’s only time to kill things, not build them, in such a short period.
• Nokia dithered on MeeGo. In 2009, Nokia partnered with Intel on MeeGo, then killed MeeGo just a year later, to focus on Microsoft Windows Phone instead.
• Samsung’s Galaxy S of 2010 resembles the Apple’s old iPhone 3GS of 2009, not the designed-from-scratch iPhone 4 that the S actually competed against at the time the S arrived in the market.

Part of the problem is that Apple keeps its strategy to itself: New products seem to appear out of Apple’s magic hat fully-formed at high profile launch events as if they’ve been born an adult, with no incubation or nurturing period. There are rarely betas or pre-announcements months ahead of availability, unlike the perpetually beta services of others. But we know Apple takes years to create these products. The iPad’s origins pre-date the iPhone and go back to around 2004 — six years before it launched — while serious development began in 2007, again years before competitors had anything publicly available that they could copy.

By mistaking tactics for strategy Apple’s many competitors are doomed to poor results. The time needed to build products as deeply and well designed as Apple’s can’t be completed overnight. Software design takes years to do. The supplier relationships that Apple is securing are long term. The investment that Apple is placing in key component design — moving into chip design with the A4 and A5 — is not something that any company could achieve without clear multi-year strategy.

Despite the Android evangelists and Apple naysayers, Apple’s metrics are nothing short of outstanding:

Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies again for the title pun.

Now the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet is official, everyone has set out their view of how well it will do. Almost all of these forecasts are positive.

But all of this analysis has been based on a tiny little assumption: That the product works as described, is quick, elegant and bug free. Ok, it’s not such a small assumption. It’s massive.

At the event yesterday, Amazon controlled access to the Fire. Attendees were not able to test it out free form. Amazon staff showed it, yes, but they also pressed the buttons, browsed the web, scrolled the screen, and played the music and videos. PC World columnist Harry McCracken tweeted about Amazon’s demo control first. Now, Engadget reports it wasn’t able to go hands-on, as do Venturebeat, Gizmodo, and This is my Next and others. Kindle Fire tablet demo videos from the event all have in common Amazon staff holding the Fire, they look similar: see Techcrunch ; WSJ etc. etc.

This lack of access to the Fire this close to launch is suspicious.

By not allowing attendees to try it, Amazon is implying that the current Kindle Fire software is sluggish, buggy, or not yet fully implemented. The last time I saw a tablet shown in this way was behind closed doors at HP’s Mobile World Congress booth back in February. There they showed me the Touchpad but wouldn’t let me use its apps myself. As history records, the Touchpad launch wasn’t smooth. Early buyers complained the software was sluggish and HP killed the whole Touchpad line just 48 days post launch.

Read the rest of this entry »

I speculated ahead of Amazon’s launch that the Kindle tablet should be called the Kindle 451, from the Bradbury book where the temperature of 451F is that which causes book paper to spontaneously ignite. I was wrong. Kindle Fire is the better name as the Fire will burn so varied a selection of physical media that no single named temperature could describe its impact.

This is the first true media tablet, as I predicted it would be. With the Kindle Fire, Amazon is making a play for movies, TV, music, magazines, apps, games as well as books.

The Kindle Fire is the first tablet that has its whole design optimized for content consumption. There’s no extraneous features. No camera. No aspirations to replace a notebook PC.

While Apple, Google and Microsoft aim to build tablets and smartphones that drive a post-PC world, Amazon is taking ownership of digital media. And, as digital media will become all media, by implication Amazon is now becoming the leading player in media as a whole. It’s impossible to assess the prospects for the Kindle devices without also assessing the potential for the total digital media market.

Yet despite the Kindle Fire’s impressive hardware the price is extremely aggressive at just $199, a fraction of the price of Apple’s iPad. Until the component breakdowns have been completed we can’t be sure… and I’m writing this minutes after the end of the launch event… But I strongly suspect that Amazon has only achieved that price due to its expectation of strong sales for Amazon’s content services, ie an effective content subsidy again as I predicted would happen.

Read the rest of this entry »

The sites below will be providing live coverage of the Amazon announcements today, where Amazon’s first tablet will likely be unveiled.

I’ll be analyzing the news live on twitter, follow me here @ianfogg42 or read now my preview of what potential tablet features to watch out for and what the impact will be of each: Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Will Be The First True Media Tablet .

The event starts at 7am Pacific, 10am Eastern, 3pm UK and 4pm CET.

• This is my next, soon to be The Verge: Liveblog
  (lots of great ex-Engadget folks)
• PC World / Technologizer: Liveblog
• Cnet: Liveblog
• Engadget: Liveblog
• Gizmodo: Liveblog
• Arstechnica: Liveblog
• Boy Genius Report: Liveblog (will work later today in time for the event)
• Byte / Information Week: Liveblog (page not yet live)
• intomobile: Coverage here (they’re attending but not sure if this will be a liveblog)
• Reuters: Liveblog