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 »

Just eight months after Nokia announced a complete reversal of their smartphone strategy, Nokia unveiled the first new phones to result: the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710. And, impressively, the Lumia 800 is already shipping and will be available for sale in six European countries in November.

On the eve of Mobile World Congress 2011 — the mobile industry’s main conference — new Nokia CEO Stephen Elop overturned Nokia’s previous smartphone strategy. Rather than building smartphones based based on in-house Symbian and MeeGo software, Nokia instead embraced Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Nokia’s future rests on the success of this decision, at least in developed countries across Europe, Asia and North America.

Alongside their initial Windows Phone handsets, Nokia today announced a new range of smarter feature phones aimed at emerging markets. This new Asha range includes more dual SIM devices, more full keyboard designs, and more touch screens. “Asha” means hope in Hindi but Nokia’s real long term hopes rest more with the new Lumia smartphones than with these evolutionary Series 40 handsets.

With Windows Phone, Nokia hopes to regain market share in the high end part of the mobile phone market because today’s high end technology and features become tomorrow’s mid market mainstream. If Nokia loses to Android and Apple in the high end, then the danger Nokia faces is that it will lose in the mainstream just a few years from now.

Early signs are that Nokia has regained credibility and is on a path to recovery with its Nokia World announcements:

• Dual SIM is now a foundation of Nokia’s emerging market strategy. Nokia was slow to offer consumers the ability to switch SIMs — essentially run more than one number on a phone with different pricing — compared with LG, Samsung and numerous small phone makers. In the second quarter of this year their phone shipments suffered dramatically: down 34% compared with the previous quarter. But the arrival of dual SIM enabled a full recovery in Q3, although admittedly with lower average price per handset. Nokia shipped just 2.6m dual SIM handsets in Q2 but 17.9m in Q3 and has launched five new dual SIM handsets since June. Across Asia, the Middle East and Africa Nokia phone unit shipments rose 32% in Q3.
• Nokia is finally executing quickly. The Lumia 800 Windows Phone is already shipping from Nokia’s factories just eight months after the major strategy change. It will be available in November. By contrast, Nokia unveiled 2010′s flagship phone, the N8, in April but failed to ship in time for Nokia World 2010 that September. Read the rest of this entry »

[Update after the event - my analysis of Nokia's just unveiled Windows Phone smartphones is here, enjoy]

Nokia is about to unveil the results of its decision to use Microsoft’s Windows Phone as its main smartphone, rather than Symbian or MeeGo. CEO Stephen Elop will be  leading the keynote at Nokia World 2011 in London.

The presentation starts at 1am San Francisco / 4am New York / 9am UK / 10am Berlin / 4pm Hong Kong / 5pm Seoul / 7pm Sydney.

Here’s the list of sites with live coverage:

• Nokia official webcast
• This is my next / The Verge: Liveblog
  (lots of great ex-Engadget folks)
• Engadget: Liveblog
• ZDNet: Liveblog

Today’s round-up of recent wireless, smartphone, tablet, and other mobile data.

There’s a summary of the data at the top with more figures, analysis and links to all of the sources included further down after the break.

1. comScore: August 2011 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share

In one of its key countries, the US, RIM is really struggling. RIM sees a decline of 1% in share of the mobile handset market and a dramatic 5% fall in share of smartphone OS platforms in just a three month period. But these figures pre-date the introduction of RIM’s completely new portfolio of low end Curves and higher end Bold’s and Torch’s all running BlackBerry OS 7.

Despite widespread sentiment that Apple is losing out to Android in the US, the company’s share of the total US mobile market edged up by 0.7% between May and August. This reflects continued strength for the iPhone 4 although the handset design is a year old.

2. Apple: Latest iOS, iPhone and other Apple statistics from the “Let’s Talk iPhone” event

Apple’s own figures from the iPhone 4S launch re-enforce how well it was doing on the eve of Steve Job’s death. Some of the many metrics (many stats further down after the break):

• 250m iOS devices sold, including iPads, iPhones and iPod Touch models.
• 18m total app downloads cumulatively.
• 500,000 iOS apps in the store, of which 140,000 are for the iPad.
• 67m Game Center users.
• >16bn songs sold by the iTunes music store.
• $3bn paid out by App to app developers to date

3. Nielsen: In U.S. Market, New Smartphone Buyers Increasingly Embracing Android

Data on new smartphone buyers shows that Android is growing dramatically and now represents 56% of recent smartphone acquirers. However, Apple is maintaining its smartphone market share (28%) when comparing recent smartphone acquirers and all smartphone subscribers. Result: More bad news for RIM and Microsoft Windows Phone, it’s these other smartphone platforms that are being squeezed by the rise of Android, not Apple.

4. J.D. Power: The Right Blend of Design and Technology is Critical to Creating an Exceptional User Experience with Smartphones and Traditional Mobile Devices

Customer satisfaction is greatest for thin and light devices, even among smartphone users. Current feature phone owners demonstrate the same trend as smartphone owners for portable devices but have a lower tolerance for weight with their satisfaction levels dropping off when devices weigh over 4 ounces compared with a threshold of 5 ounces for smartphone owners.

My take: This explains partly the success of the iPhone 4. Apple’s handset is a particularly thin and light smartphone that has wide appeal to normal mobile customers, not just savvy users. J.D. Power data picks out the iPhone as the highest rated phone for satisfaction.

5. Nielsen: 40 Percent of U.S. Mobile Users Own Smartphones; 40 Percent are Android

Apple and Android are neck and neck in appeal for those adults that intend to buy a smartphone in the next year: Both appeal to 30% of prospective buyers. But among an “Innovators” group of early adopters 40% intend to buy an Android smartphone compared with 32% for iOS. My take: This data demonstrates that the iPhone has broader appeal across mainstream users than Android.

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 »

This week the first significant feature update to Windows Phone 7 should roll out to users’ phones. Or perhaps it will be next week, Microsoft is being vague. Either way, this should be a reason for Microsoft to market the hell out of their innovative and worthy smartphones.  Instead, the world is being distracted by Windows 8 and competitor activity, rather than the update variously called Mango or version 7.5. Microsoft is at risk of presenting multiple personalities to the world.

“We haven’t sold quite as many as I would have liked in the first year… I’m not saying I love where we are but I am very optimistic on where we can be. We’ve just got to kick this thing to the next level.” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO,  at Microsoft’s financial analyst meeting, September 14, 2011.

To date, Windows Phone hasn’t sold as well as Microsoft hoped and wanted. Microsoft really needs Mango to succeed or Windows Phone 7 may itself stagnate and eventually die, despite its highly differentiated social network integration, hubs, and Metro user interface (UI).

The use by Windows 8 of the same Metro interface pioneered on Windows Phone 7 should boost adoption of Microsoft’s smartphones. By confirming Microsoft backing for the Metro UI it should help app developers to create apps for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Having more quality apps should then boost Windows Phone sales. It’s the classic virtuous circle.

And Windows Phone really needs more apps, and more quality apps too: as of September 2011 there are just over 32,000 apps available compared with over 425,000 for Apple’s iOS; over 250,000 for Android; even the iPad has over 90,000 apps in Apple’s App Store.

This virtuous circle won’t happen unless Microsoft amends its strategy.

Read the rest of this entry »