Every year there are a bunch of articles this time of year predicting what will happen in 2012. So I’ll join the fray and reference a few with my own thoughts, mostly about mobility.
BlackBerry users continue their exodus This is low-hanging fruit. I’ve been on this bandwagon for a while. I’ll amend his prediction to say RIM abandons the North American market for the third world, where they are currently making their money. They will focus on the BES in the North American marketplace. If they were smart they would focus on enterprise customers instead of consumers, but there is no evidence of good decision making at RIM. RIM should be bought by Google for the BES business alone in order to help Google get a foot hold in the enterprise back-end space. If not Google, the next most likely buyer is Microsoft, followed by Amazon.
Apple Releases the iPad3 I think the iPad3 will be incremental, like the iPhone 4S, but will continue to dominate the consumer space. With no real competition at this point, there is little incentive for Apple to introduce innovative features that may be hit-or-miss. The real prediction in the tablet space will be Windows 8. Business are craving an enterprise-oriented tablet, and the inclusion of Microsoft Office will make Windows 8 tablets sell like crazy to business customers. Business users want Excel and PowerPoint on their tablets in meetings. The lack of Office on a Windows 8 tablet or late delivery will kill the platform.
NFC gets real traction – but not for payments There are not enough phones with NFC support today. Until NFC is common in phones, there is no incentive for businesses to adopt it on the other side. Users have two year contracts, and very few normal folks change phones during the contract time frame (unless you are an iPhone addict, and still no iPhones have NFC). So even if a bunch of phones get NFC in 2012, there will not be enough users to cause a change. Currently there is no widespread NFC infrastructure on the non-phone side because of that, so it will be 2013 before the common user gets NFC.
Make that two mobile shakeouts Mobile device management (MDM) will be huge in 2012. 2011 saw the proliferation of bring your own device to businesses. The enterprise will have to figure out how to do this securely, and I think MDM is the key. I agree this will cause buyouts and consolidation.
Google finally gets its Android act together I think Google side-steps the fragmentation by buying RIM/BES to get an MDM solution, and adapting it to hook into Android as a core feature that still allows the hardware makers to customize Android in crazy ways and still be secure for business. The good news for Google is that users largely blame the hardware maker and not the OS for issues with their phones. Google is selling to the hardware vendors, not the consumers directly, so they have a large incentive to please those vendors.
Amazon buys Netflix No way. Netflix is the biggest user of the Amazon cloud, and probably a huge source of revenue for that business, which is really important to Amazon’s future plans. Why buy your biggest customer? Unless Netflix is going to go out of business, there is no point for Amazon to acquire them, it will hurt their cloud business.
Video Conferencing on Phones Video conferencing has not caught on and still won’t in 2012. Why? No one really wants everyone to see you while on the phone for lots of reasons. PJs, bathrooms, hair, and many more.
Users lose confidence in Android, WP7 gains because of this Again, I don’t think users blame Android as the problem, but the hardware vendor, whose name is prominent on the front of the device. Look at bad reviews for apps in the MarketPlace. The disgruntled users often list their device. The fragmentation is squarely on the hardware vendors’ shoulders, and they will pay for bad implementations. There is no alternative OS for the hardware vendors. (Bada? MeeGo? Can I get Angry Birds on that?) Users are not smart enough to understand the problem and move to a platform consistent across hardware vendors like WP7. It would be great if Google would stand up to vendors and reduce the crapware and customization, although Microsoft never has for Windows and still dominates. Android is open-source after all, and fragmentation is one of the often discussed possible outcomes of an open source project.
I’ve been so entrenched in learning the mobile paradigms over the past few months, that I suddenly realized I’m living in a mobile bubble. I have come to the stark realization that most companies don’t get mobile. I don’t think it’s that hard or a long way to go, but I can see it’s not happening yet.
Lunch with my wife yesterday was a perfect example. It was a sub shop (that I love), and they had advertising cubes on the table. I picked one up, and was briefly excited to find a QR Code on the bottom. I immediately thought, “Wow, these guys are addressing mobile!”, until I actually scanned the code. The URL was a link straight to their home page. OK. I followed the link on my phone. The page opens and the main content is one single graphic, but at least the navigation and header are not. If you have a smart phone, you would know that you can’t scroll the page easily by swiping a big graphic, especially when the page/graphic is loading. So to scroll I had to carefully swipe the obligatory right “social media” box to scroll the page to find out there was nothing below the huge picture. The whole experience was disappointing to me. So lets enumerate the mistakes here:
The QR Code
It contained only the link to the home page. Huge opportunity lost. How are they tracking users coming from the code? They are not. No query string parameters, no redirection/click-through.
No reward for scanning the code. Does this company use email promotions? Why yes they do. Did they give me some incentive to scan any of their QR codes again later? Nope.
The web site
The site is not mobile friendly, yet they made an effort to get me there on a mobile device.
The navigation menus on the web site rely on hover. There is no hover in mobile.
Big graphics load really slowly on mobile networks. Abandon the 1990’s, come to the present. One big picture might look good, but it’s not functional. If pretty pictures sell your food, why bother with mobile devices and QR codes?
Of course the site isn’t formatted for mobile devices. It’s a fallacy to think that because it renders OK on the newer mobile browsers, that forcing the user to pinch-zoom to read anything is acceptable.
This brings me back to my bubble. I probably have unrealistic expectations of how companies are using or embracing mobile. The information on how to do this well is out there. Why aren’t companies finding it? Is it that the technical audience knows these things, but the marketing audience does not? Or is the mobile customer base really that small, and the companies just don’t care at this point? I think in this case they must care if they made the effort to put QR codes on their tables. So maybe I’m in a bubble, expecting these things because it’s what I’ve been immersed in for the past few months. Maybe normal mobile users don’t have that expectation. Maybe next year companies will get mobile.
If you move your user profile off of your c:\ drive (in Windows 7 x64 in my case), Eclipse will no longer be able to start the Android emulator (AVD). It gives the following error message in the console:
PANIC: Could not open: C:\Users\dave\.android/avd/myAVD.ini
This issue has been documented here, and also a few solutions. The solution that worked for me was to make a symbolic link on the command line to the directory that actually contains the AVD settings:
When testing an HTML5 app on multiple BlackBerry simulators, on some of them I was getting the error:
SECURITY_ERR: DOM Exception 18
What this turned out to be was the lack of an SD card in certain simulators. The browser was expecting to use that storage space for the SQLite DB files. Once I set up the SD card for the emulator the error disappeared.
At one time, Novell was the king of the networking hill. Anyone interesting in becoming a network administrator had to know Novell. Then Microsoft came along and took their lunch money pitting the graphical and desktop friendly NT Networking against NetWare. Novell was seen as lacking vision and lagging behind their competitors. Sounds an awful lot like RIM today. Their last smartphone entries have been failures, and the upcoming PlayBook doesn’t look like an improvement in their track record. One of the strengths of the BlackBerry platform has been messaging, and they are releasing a product that doesn’t do that without being tethered to an existing BlackBerry device. The PlayBook is going to support Android apps instead of fostering their own third party developers because it’s another new platform that is coming out before there is a developer ecosystem. It feels rushed. RIM’s main customer is the enterprise, not the consumer. Enterprise executives want the sexiness of an iPhone or iPad with the security of a BlackBerry. RIM is not making that happen.
RIM has a definite hold on the enterprise market for mobile phones. This is in large part due to their tremendous security on the devices. The BES server is encrypting data transfers and improving network response time to the devices. Everything stored on the device is encrypted. Administrators can remotely wipe data from the devices. None of this is going to come from Apple. The enterprise is not their main customer, it’s the consumer. Google might be able to do this with Android, but more than likely it will come from the cloud. Google does not have the internal server market in hand.
Microsoft has built a huge empire in the enterprise with sever software and networking. They are the most likely competitor to take out RIM. Why haven’t they focused on extending their enterprise platform for mobile devices? If they came out with a secure phone that was integrated with their products (Exchange, Office, SharePoint, CRM) RIM would be out of the game. Microsoft has been blinded by the iPhone’s success (and now Android) in the consumer market. Recently, they have seen consumer success with the XBox and Kinect. It seems to me they want Windows 7 phones to do the same thing. I really don’t think that is the market for them. RIM is trying to give the enterprise market to someone, why isn’t Microsoft taking it this time?
