Imagine there are only two flavors of ice cream. One is vanilla, and it comes from a big company named Kraft. The other is California pistachio from a little company named Ben & Jerry. There are no other ice cream companies and no other flavors.
Once in a while you hear about an intriguing flavor from a cooperative, but it requires you to boil custard, crush ice and crank a machine.
Now imagine the chance to move to a new land, where there might be five or six flavors of ice cream. Which land would you prefer?
This has been the environment for personal computer operating systems for 15 years: Windows and Mac. (And Linux). We are now migrating into a new environment for personal computing — the world of smart phones and smart devices — and more choices would be much more attractive. People are adopting these mobile Internet devices faster than any other computing hardware in history, because they accompany you everywhere and enable you to perform tasks in short, fragmented lengths of time.
Recent momentum appears to have created a world in which iPhone and Android replace Mac and Windows. Apple iPhone is so far ahead of everybody else that it’s hard to name one main competitor: Google Android. But I will anyway, because the others — RIM Blackberry, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Samsung bada, and Nokia Symbian and Maemo — come from developers who unsuccessfully tried to shape mobile phone access to the Internet for the last 10 years. They haven’t done it by now, and they probably won’t in the next 10 years, either.
What would it take to create a world of mobile Internet computing in which there are more than two operating systems? Is a golden age possible? A Renaissance of empowerment, creativity and enlightenment for everyone? Where the computer in your pocket is tailored just to make you smarter, faster, more productive, more considerate?
Yes, it’s possible. In the next 18 months, if five companies make five things happen, their smart phones could survive against mythic iPhone. If not, they’re stuck making phones that only talk, and we’re stuck again in the land of two flavors.
- Train people that buying apps is good. When was the last time somebody at a party showed you an app for a Blackberry? RIM hasn’t trained people to buy apps, because the Blackberry experience is all about rock-solid e-mail. People use e-mail on Blackberries to ignore everybody else at parties. And if you do buy an app for a Blackberry, it’s tricky to download and install, and harder to use.
- Manage a marketplace where companies that develop apps for you make money. People don’t develop apps for Blackberry and Symbian and Windows Mobile because nobody buys them. Gartner says iPhone owns 99.4 percent of the market for smart phone apps. Why would a developer write for any other platform? On a good day, they might think about writing for Android. But probably not.
- Create a consistent interface for developers and users. The iPhone screen is 320 pixels by 480 pixels. When the screen’s longest dimension is only 3.5 inches, 60 pixels can mean including a function on a home screen, or not. Decide on multi-finger gestures. As a big part of the iPhone interface, developers know to work with them. Android developers don’t know whether they’re available, and cannot include them.
- Ensure a consistent level of quality on the apps developed for your operating system. People buy iPhone apps partly because they know they’re going to work, and partly because they’re slick.
- Create hardware with a low cost of entry into your marketplace. The Apple iPod Touch starts at $200. But it gets me hooked on iPhone apps without locking me into a phone company contract that costs $3,800 over two years.
Many of our friends have already tasted this new land, and they are calling us to emigrate. Come on over, they say. Pistachio is all you need. But what flavors do you want?
Photo of a New York gelateria from the Flickr photostream of Robyn Lee, who shoots for Serious Eats.
Thanks to Zach Bishop, Sheji Ho, Karen Jirak, Tom Moore, Ethan Nicholas, Brendan O’Kane, Dawson Roark and Rob Terrell for their observations on mobile Internet application development.
