Immediately following my most recent two blog posts at the end of last week, I (and no doubt the rest of the mobile world) came across some very interesting numbers this morning that are also relevant for those blog posts of mine.

First, it was reported today by analyst firm Canalys that in Q4 2010 Android-based mobile phones (in their totality, from all phone device makers that make Android phones) surpassed Nokia Symbian devices in total smartphones sold for the quarter. Nokia sold 31 million Symbian devices…mobile devices powered by Android sold 32.9 million. I will note here that I’m not making a distinction between what was actually ‘shipped’ by all Android vendors and what has actually been ‘sold’ into the field (whether for consumer or enterprise use). Here is the chart from Canalys:

 It would appear that Android indeed has something ‘more than a press release’ in its hands.

At the very same time, Strategy Analytics has just released a report detailing its analysis of tablet market share. Here is the chart from Strategy Analytics:

Source: Strategy Analytics

The full report, Global Tablet OS Market Share: Q4 2010, is published by the Strategy Analytics Tablet & Touchscreen (TTS) service.

Last, the following post by David Klein on Seeking Alpha, Microsoft Still an Attractive Value Play also appeared today – it does, I think, an interesting job of explaining why Microsoft is quickly evolving towards becoming a ‘dividend play,’ as I noted in my blog post from last Thursday. As Microsoft becomes a dividend play (and value stock, rather than a growth stock) it serves as a strong indicator of Microsoft’s ability to shape new markets (for the most part, in decline) relative to its ability to continue to dominate and grow its traditional markets (strong as ever).

The charts I’ve provided here serve as hard numbers that underscore the difficulties not only Microsoft, but RIM and Nokia as well, now face in moving their mobile businesses forward. For Nokia and RIM, of course, mobility is their entire livelyhood. Microsoft, meanwhile, is in absolutely no danger of losing its position as a gargantuan generator of cash – but moblity never the less remains at the center of its efforts to continue to be perceived as ‘the player’ that can still control and shape the technology landscape. Unless Microsoft can pull off a tablet and smartphone miracle those days are essentially long gone.

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I dunno…maybe it’s because I’m looking at yet another 18+ inches of new snow I’ve got to shovel off my 100 ft driveway – bringing the total this year, at least in my CT neck of the woods to somewhere around 48 inches total since our first storm back on the day after Christmas…or maybe it’s because last night I heard my wife telling her brother over the phone that I was going to have to get a snow blower next year because I’m getting old…or maybe it’s because my normal 1.5 hour commuter train ride took over three hours yesterday heading back home from NYC following our latest snowstorm…but I’m feeling a bit curmudgeonly this morning.

What I’m feeling particularly curmudgeonly about at the moment is Microsoft’s tablet strategy. While I was on my commuter ride yesterday I spent some time reading through a variety of things, several of them from CNET and ZDNet, focusing on Microsoft’s new strategy to dominate tablet computing and beat the pants off iPad and its ilk. CNET/ZDNet got their hands on some very interesting Microsoft slides that detail how Microsoft views the tablet world and how they are planning to work with their partners on marketing and positioning their tablet strategy – these are well worth exploring. You can find the CNET story here, and the ZDNet story here. You can find the slide show here.

You should also read a VERY interesting blog post by someone named Richard Turner, a ten year veteran Microsoftee who left to build a startup. His post, Will Windows Phone 8 run the Windows Kernel?, looks at the notion that Microsoft may very well take WP7’s Metro UI, ditch the underlying WP7 OS, and use the Metro UI on top of the Windows 8 kernel. Turner suggests that the real argument to make is as follows, which I grabbed from a comment he made on the ZDNet post noted above:

Any chance we could stop referring to Windows Phone 7′s Metro UI as being ‘a better operating system than Windows for slate devices?’

It’s FAR more accurate to say that the Metro UI might be ‘a better user experience than desktop Windows for slate devices.’

The fact is that there’s a whole heck of a lot more to an OS than the UI. One might argue that the vast majority of an operating system exists outside of the UI/UXP.

Another example of why it’s important to differentiate the UI from the OS is that there’s a very real possibility that Microsoft will eventually replace the actual OS underneath WP’s Metro UI with a minimized version of Windows itself, allowing it to bring a whole host of features to their phone OS that are currently prohibitively expensive to port to WinCE.

Turner’s blog post takes it all a step further, and suggests that the above notion, coupled with Microsoft’s new planned support for ARM processors, and coupled with the idea that the Metro UI can be paired with the Windows 8 kernel, may very well prove to be the biggest thing that will happen in mobility over the next five years.

It’s all very interesting – Turner’s viewpoint in particular about the separation of UI and OS kernel, and the potential move to WP8 running the Windows 8 kernel some day is intellectually satisfying. It seems right to me – or at least it would seem right if we had the means to turn back time two years or so and Microsoft were actually delivering the technology today. I’ll come back to this.

It’s Deja Vu all Over Again

Fellow blogger Matt Torgersen just used that line in his own most recent blog post, but it is so dead on here I had to use it as well. In terms of how Microsoft intends to ‘win’ the tablet wars, once I went through the slides my first thought was: well, good God, haven’t we heard this exact tale before? It’s mind boggling to me that we are hearing the Zune story all over again – Microsoft is going to kill the iPad. It will own the tablet business because, as the slides demonstrate, it has the killer features in Windows 7 that all tablets will need – and that users want - and that the iPad won’t be able to match. Etc. etc. etc. Is it arrogance? Is it hubris? Is it a lack of humbleness?

Does Microsoft not know and understand that the Zune is a non-entity? Has it learned absolutely no lesson here that just because its field tests suggest that some set of users might like the beast being tested doesn’t mean that it will allow Microsoft to deliver a product that will sweep the nation and put its competitors six feet under? Does Microsoft not remember what Ballmer said about Android? (To paraphrase: All Google has is an Android press release…Windows Mobile sits on 20 million devices…Let me reference my blog post about what Ballmer said yet again - you can find it here.)

The problem Microsoft had/has with the Zune, the problem Microsoft is likely to find itself having with WP7 (especially if it only thinks about consumers and forgets about the enterprise), and the problem Microsoft has with tablets is all the same problem – it is following, it isn’t leading. Period. Followers are late to the game. Followers don’t have impact. Followers make lots of noise while the leaders continue to take market share. Followers are not able to shape their markets.

Having arrived (once again) at Microsoft following rather than leading, we can now circle back to Richard Turner’s WP8/ARM thoughts. How quickly can such a scenario pan out? The end of 2012? Sometime in 2013? Truly, all Microsoft has is a PowerPoint…Android has how many devices out there? How many apps in its store? Apple will have sold how many iPads by 2013?

WP8 – the Metro UI + the Windows 8 kernel + ARM…I like it, but without the time machine to bring it all into place today rather than two or more years down the road, I’m not seeing that Microsoft will successfully navigate the dance floor to a victory here.

Meanwhile, WP7 has a few problems of its own to overcome if it is to bridge the gap to the enterprise while WP8′s dev team cranks out the code over the next 18 months. But that’s for another blog post…maybe next week.

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Nokia and Microsoft – so much mobile possibility…so much incoherence.

Both Nokia and Microsoft reported their earnings this week. Though I won’t go into any specifics on the earnings themselves (there are numerous other places for that) it is well worth pointing out that Nokia’s mobile device share has slipped again, from an overall 35% to 31% share of the market. Microsoft, in the meantime, continues to successfully run three giant businesses; and a collection of much smaller ones – among which is found its mobile products – that somehow hold far more sway over how the company’s future is perceived than the gigantic ones do.

Nokia merely continues to generate speculation about its mobile OS future. CEO Stephen Elop left plenty of clues on the table about upcoming changes – and it’s possible we’ll hear concrete details on February 11^th – a day that could become a marker for either the first day of Nokia’s true decline, or the first day of an Apple-esque recovery.

Microsoft continues to deliver huge revenue streams through its mature businesses – Windows, Office, and the Server teams are all Fortune 500 companies operating underneath the Microsoft banner. The problem with these enormously successful companies is that they are DULL – in fact, dull, dull, dull – they no longer capture the imagination of anyone – with the exception perhaps of the IT elves that appreciate how well-oiled the enterprise products they put out are and how well they work in the enterprise.

Financial analysts and investors are beginning to look to these core Microsoft capabilities as a dividend play – if only Microsoft would cooperate and start paying out meaningful ‘regular’ dividends. Another one time special dividend sometime in the future isn’t an answer – it leaves far too many people with no way to utilize MSFT for financial planning, and kills the stock. Speaking of which, as everyone knows, MSFT has not done anything since the dot com bomb – it has been stagnant in that $25 range for what now looks like forever – a decade (although those that got on the very short-lived $16 to $34 dollar ride a couple of years ago did OK).

So, with Nokia we are left with speculation – Android? MeeGo? Windows Phone 7? I’ve already put out thoughts on this that make a lot of sense, at least to me. We’ll see which way the wind blows on February 11^th – I’m sure it will be a big ‘blogging about Nokia’ day.

With Microsoft we’re left with Kinect, which to its credit has managed to capture a few imaginations; we’re left with wondering why Microsoft appears unable to capture the mobile mindset; and we’re left with speculating not about how Microsoft is going to win the tablet wars, but rather with why Microsoft will no doubt lose this vital war.

Tablets represent an urgent do or die war? Yes, they do.

There is one very simple metric that is critical for Microsoft in relation to mobility and tablets: Every tablet sold, whether for consumer or enterprise use (especially for enterprise use) means one less PC (desktop or laptop) that will be sold. Period. The vast majority of PC owners are not computer junkies. Computer junkies (developers, ultra power users, etc) make up a very tiny percentage of the population.

Most PC users are ‘convenience users’ who simply want Internet, Web – and increasingly – Facebook access. All of these are what tablets are already excellent at. As PC sales decline, so will the Windows side of Microsoft’s business decline. Once the PC sales decline begins to accelerate in the second half of this decade, Microsoft’s Windows business will directly follow suit.

Microsoft’s lack of a coherent tablet strategy (something I’ll take a closer look at in the very near future) – coupled with what some of us perceive as an ‘unendingly’ incoherent mobile OS strategy – is likely to doom Microsoft’s Windows business.

But what does ‘doom Microsoft’ mean here exactly?

The answer comes down to capturing the imagination of young people: Kinect is a minor victory; Mobility is a major ongoing failure. Microsoft is no longer a mover and shaker. Such is Steve Ballmer’s dilemma…Steve is not the CEO that is going to fix this.

As a mature and entrenched set of businesses Microsoft does exceedingly well. The next enterprise generation of cloud computing will continue to drive enormous revenue for Microsoft, even as Windows licensing sales on individual PCs declines. Microsoft rightly points out that cloud computing, not mobility, is the next big revenue generator.

But…enormous revenue from cloud products is a pure ‘MSFT as a dividend stock’ play. It will capture no young person’s imagination – the prime motivator in driving forward the stock price of any company – mature or otherwise, especially in a consumer-dominated business such as mobility. My biggest concern is that Microsoft is also on its way to blowing the enterprise mobility market.

At the beginning of this month I posted the following: A Look ‘Back’ at Both Steve Ballmer & Nokia on Android – it Doesn’t Get Any Funnier Than This! I posted it in anticipation of possibly saying at the end of the month, following their earnings calls, that both have managed to put the thinking expressed in that post behind them. Alas, it’s even funnier now.

Nokia and Microsoft – so much mobile possibility…so much incoherence.

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Yogi Berra, the hall of fame catcher for the NY Yankees was one of the most colorful players of his time. He was also one of the most quotable. Among his many ‘Yogi-isms’, he once quipped ‘This is like Deja Vu all over again.’ As a Mets fan, I remember Yogi as the man that took over as the Manager following the death of Gil Hodges in 1971, and led the Mets to the World Series in 1973.

I’ve heard that statement used in comparing the rise of enterprise mobility with the last ‘game changing’ technology, which was the World Wide Web. There’s no question that both are disruptive technologies which provide unprecedented opportunities to make fundamental shifts in how business is transacted and how companies communicate with their customers. But I do question if this is a fair comparison as I believe the impact of mobility can be much more powerful and the underlying issues more complex.

Deja Vu all Over Again!

From a pure business impact perspective I understand how people make this comparison. The potential business impact and opportunity for mobile is amazing and the rise of the iPad and tablets will only accelerate this trend. Can you imagine today doing business with a company today that does not have a website? Of course not, and a highly branded and functional website is table stakes for any business today.

Mobile is quickly becoming equally important to enterprises. The importance of having a high fidelity app in the app stores is a key factor in helping new customers discover, connect and most importantly, interact with your brand.

On a recent business trip I had a series of delays. Rather than waiting on a long line to speak with an agent or try to get a call through to an 800 number I went out to the app store in search of an app. To my dismay, I was surprised to find that US Airways did not have an app in the iTunes app store. So I had to interact with US Airways in the old fashion way – I wasn’t happy.

The Mobile Web is equally critical for those customers who want to spontaneously connect with your brand. A well designed mobile website enables users with smartphones or more traditional feature phones to connect with your company from anywhere at anytime.

Upon further inspection, it’s important to note that these new mobile channels have a key fundamental difference when compared to the Web. A lack of standards for mobile. On the Web, while there are different browsers they do follow a general set of standards. A webpage should be equally valuable if viewed through Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer.

Mobile devices on the other hand have no standard screen size, resolution or operating system. Clearly, this complicates the issue of supporting a variety of mobile devices. So the partnership between business and IT for planning is critical to how you approach mobility

Most companies have incorporated the internet into their operations as a channel for communication and commerce. Very few businesses – maybe none – will reach their full potential with solely a brick and mortar operation. Mobile offers another new opportunity.

Now is the time to for every business executive to take a hard look and mobile and understand how this new channel can raise the bar for their operations. Now is the time to review the daily workflow of your employees and understand how mobile will enhance their effectiveness.

The next step is to understand how customers and potential customers can engage with your brand via mobile technologies. What is the demographic of your customer today, and how can you expand it? It’s been reported many times that smartphone users are a young affluent community – most brands view this as a very desirable audience.

A well planned business strategy, not technology tinkering, should be the first step in determining how mobile can add impact to your enterprise. Just as with some websites of the early days – it was clear which were designed to enhance business and which were designed as part of a technology project.

In mobile, you only get one chance at a first impression – but that’s a topic for another post.

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Going Mobile!

‘We want to be mobile!’ the web site crowd roared in the year 2010.

‘What are you talking about?’ came the response back, ‘We have been mobile for years. We went mobile back in the mid-1990s, some early pioneers went mobile way back in the age of disco.’

The crowd stood silent with disbelief, just like my parents did on the day disco died. I know, disco, what were they thinking?

The History of Mobile:

What do businesses mean when they want to be mobile? I’ve had some very interesting conversations and confused looks over the past year when I ask people to help me define what mobile means to them. Before looking at the here and now, however, it might be interesting to review some history.

The first mobile computer, IBM’s 5100, became available back in 1975. It didn’t come with Angry Birds installed or Internet access, but the sexy design more than made up for those minor oversights.

The first World Wide Web browser was created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. Not exactly mobile, but another important milestone. The first mobile browser was created back in 1994 for the Apple Newton PDA, and finally, the first mobile phone with a browser came from AT&T in 1997. Like the iPhones of today, it also didn’t support Flash, but now we’re talking about customers, on the move, being mobile.

Finally, Apple launched the App Store on July 10th, 2008, about 14 years after the first mobile browser.

So what are we talking about today?

Did the iPhone and App Store reinvent mobile? I think so. Phones, the smart ones, finally surpassed the clunkiness of IBM’s 5100 and truly became the device that people wanted to use anytime and anywhere. Browsing the Internet or running apps on earlier mobile phones quickly became a frustrating experience and forced people to flee back to their PCs to read the news, watch videos, play Madden 2009, or buy the latest best seller from Amazon. With the iPhone, however, the mob finally had the perfect mobile device and an app store from which to download very user friendly applications – applications that could make checking the weather report fun and interesting.

So, I propose the following as a way to define what ‘mobile’ means today.

Anatomy of Mobile 2.0:

Screen Size – how much real estate do you have to play with? Phones, tablets, and laptops, are all mobile, but each has a different resolution. Your app needs to work on both small and large screens. Dynamically changing the interface based on screen inches available is in some ways the holy grail here.

Input Method – support a physical keyboard, track-ball, mouse, touch-screen, motion sensors, or all of the above? Will your user have a smooth experience regardless of their choice of favorite input method.

Location – do you need to know where in the world your user is located? It seems that every app I have downloaded recently has asked my permission to track where I am hiding. So, will knowing the phone’s longitude and latitude add value to your application?

Camera – have you ever wondered what those nameless and faceless people look like? Almost every device has a camera these days, so obtaining mugshots is now possible. Do you really want to see them?

Phone – of course! But tablets and laptops don’t have the ability to call home when they run out of money. Will you integrate phone capabilities?

Connectivity – G, 2G, 3G, 4G, wireless, tethering, coffee shops. From weak to strong signals, sending just data or streaming the Super Bowl, what kind of bandwidth will be needed?

Web or Native App – web apps can be built once, changed quickly, and accessed by any browser compliant with well known standards; native apps can take advantage of native device features and performance, but lead to higher maintenance costs, more time needed to make updates when distributing through an app store, and require multiple versions of the code to be maintained.

In conclusion:

I think ‘mobile’ means many things and has been around since the 1970′s. It only seems new because of the technical advances and improvements over the last few years made by Apple, Google, and others. How do you define it?

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1 – Mobile security – the mobile world is about as secure as the desktop world was ten years ago.  If companies are going to start devoting real resources to exploring/exploiting mobile opportunities, this will need to get addressed.  2011 is the year this starts in earnest.

2 – Cars – Like last year I think automobiles (heck anything with wheels) + wireless technologies represent an enormous opportunity for innovation for all the reasons you can think of – safety, energy management, convenience, etc etc.  Ford’s Sync product line is just the tip of the iceberg.

3 – Home automation continues to suck – this market is always “about to be huge” and will continue to be in 2011.  That said, some interesting new directions may emerge and, thank God, they won’t look anything like what’s come before.  What will be different?  Interoperability, open architectures, web interfaces and Android to name a few.

4 – Health care continues to suck – see #3. But in this case it’s worse because of all the big money invested in the status quo.  But 2011 should see insurance companies finally getting serious about helping their customers leave healthier lives via technology (and I don’t mean Health Buddy and/or similar).

5 – M2M shows signs of life – this decades old set of markets could hold the keys to the kingdom for wireless carriers worldwide looking for ways to increase data traffic and drive new interest in 4G/LTE.

6 – Mobile enterprise finally becomes real – After a ten year gestation period the year of the mobile enterprise is upon us.  Everyone wants more than just email on their corporate device and we can all thank St. Jobs for that.  Enterprise applications (and the stores that support them) will help drive this segment in a big way.

7 – People start to realize that Facebook is more limiting than freeing – ok, a long shot, but come on.  At some point people will start to realize this is just AOL v2.  I suppose I’m acting my age (old).

8 – LBS services have hard time scaling to the big time – reason?  See #1 above.  But not security like https, etc.  In this case we’re talking about trust – as in are-you-where-you-say-you-are (vs a piece of software duping the system)?  2011 will see the emergence of technologies that help support trusted mobile transactions – applications that create fully audit-able data trails.

9 – MS changes leadership – this is a holder over from last year.  But this year I really mean it.  I think MS will need to change CEOs if it’s going to get back on a leadership trajectory.  Who will it be?  My crystal ball is cloudy on that one.

10 – VCs start investing in hardware companies again – long shot, 4 sure.  But I think there are many, many opportunities in this area and the contrarian in me thinks that it makes sense to invest where no one currently is (and I do mean no one!).

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Another big CES is over. Another gadgets-fest out of the way. Lots of tablets (none however that I believe will overshadow or even remotely be able to challenge the iPad, with the possible exeption of RIM’s PlayBook – assuming it ships sometime in the not too distant future); lots of ‘me-too’ mobile devices; a few new state of the art beasts that will look obsolete in three to four months; and some tried and true workhorses in updated flavors. And Nokia is not shipping its new X7 full touchscreen phone in the US – fearing that AT&T was going to skimp on incentives and marketing.

All of these many devices will somehow find their way into the enterprise. All of them will need to be accounted for. All of them will need to be made secure. All of them will need to be ‘enterprise-provisioned’ to insure that policy management is properly enabled, that the right enterprise mobile apps are sitting on the right devices, that the wrong apps are nowhere to be found (or at least kept entirely separated from the business apps), that critical enterprise data is properly and fully encrypted, and that users are fully vetted and authenticated before they ever get near those apps and data.

There isn’t anything new here – we say all of this a good deal around Mobile Masters. And yet, as enterprises gear up for what will, throughout 2011, turn into a major national and international enterprise mobilization effort, we hear the noise of confusion – and in some cases traces of fear – from CIOs and CTOs everywhere. Too many devices, too many options, too much complexity!

There are two types of people in the mobile enterprise (or perhaps more accurately the ‘soon to be mobile’ enerprise). The line of business executives that want to increase and grow old business while significantly driving new business – they all get mobile, there is no doubt, and they are generating huge demand. And then there are the IT folks that have to figure out how to handle and meet the demand. Executive management is in the business team camp – executive management now has no tolerance for IT not being able to deliver or to meet demand. In fact, this intolerance is a key sign that 2011 is going to be a huge mobile enterprise year.

It gets more demanding than we’ve noted so far. What we’ve highlighted above is all the ‘prep work’ that has to go into the mix before IT even starts to think about actually building the mobile apps. Complex back end and edge infrastructure – without the right approach, it becomes a downright nasty, hugely time consuming and hugely costly effort just to get those preparations in place for building the mobile apps.

Worse still, as all of this is going on, the very landscape for defining what a mobile app is is rapidly evolving, and represents an enormous moving target. Apps evolve into pure content publishing and distribution (that begs the question: will there be anything left that isn’t defined as content?).

Enterprise app stores will take on far more importance.

Public-facing enterprise app stores will need to be able to securely expose their APIs to third party developers.

We’re just touching the surface here of the new mobile world that enterprises will face in 2011 – all fodder for detailed and ongoing Mobile Masters coverage – stay tuned!Meanwhile, what’s an enterprise to do to maintain mobile sanity?

First things first, adopt my new enterprise mobile slogan:

Mobile Complexity Removed, Simplicity Enhanced.

What is critical for enterprises going forward is to smartly jump start mobile operations. Let’s be fair here – while there are numerous mobile pioneers, the vast majority of enterprises are only now getting started on the mobile front – the window of opportunity is there and awaits. There aren’t yet any real enterprise mobile laggards – but if 2012 rolls around and you still aren’t in the mobile game then you’ve effectively killed your business off (or you will have begun your business’s inevitable downward spiral).

For the rest of this decade mobility will be a fast moving and shifting target. If you don’t get on board in 2011 you will forever be chasing your competitors.

How then to jump start the mobile process? How do you lay the groundwork?

It all starts by insuring that you make the decision to adopt a Mobile Application Platform (MAP). This is the HUGE first step. The right MAP will be fully deployed in the cloud, though the ability to run a MAP on-premise is no less critical and must always be supported. How do you decide on the right MAP? For that I refer you directly to Jason Wong’s 10 Mobile Commandments. Go there first – do not pass go, do not (yet) collect $200.

Next, read and then re-read my 4 part Mobile Strategy blog posts, starting with, of course, Part 1.

Get that cloud-based or on-premise MAP into place FIRST. Then go to your line of business execs and start your mobile apps planning and development processes ASAP. The enterprises pioneers and those enterprises already well on their way in 2011 will otherwise leave you in the dust. When your CFO asks: ‘Why the MAP?’ remember all of the huge cost and time to market reductions that will be entirely driven your new mobile slogan:

Mobile Complexity Removed, Simplicity Enhanced.

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