A 500 word article that rings true to me. It’ll also be the central hub for all the health sensors that will spring to prominence in the coming months. I’ll put my order in next week. In the meantime, read some wise words here.
Software
Apple Watch: what makes it special
Based on what I’ve seen discussed – and alleged – ahead of Monday’s announcement, the following are the differences people will see with this device.
- Notifications. Inbound message or piece of useful context? It will let you know by tapping gently on your arm. Early users are already reporting on how their phone – which until now gets reviews whenever a notification arrives – now stays in their pocket most of the time.
- Glances. Google Now on Android puts useful contextual information on “cards”. Hence when you pass a bus stop, up pops the associated next bus timetable. Walk close to an airport checkin desk, up pops your boarding pass. Apple guidelines say that a useful app should communicate its raison d’être within 10 seconds – a hence ‘glance’.
- Siri. The watch puts a Bluetooth microphone on your wrist, and Apple APIs can feed speech into text based forms straight away. And you may have noticed that iMessage already allows you to send a short burst of audio to a chosen person or group. Dick Tracey’s watch comes to life.
- Brevity. Just like Twitter, but even more focussed. There isn’t the screen real estate to hold superfluous information, so developers need to agonise on what is needed and useful, and to zone out unnecessary context. That should give back more time to the wearer.
- Car Keys. House Keys. Password Device. There’s one device and probably an app for each of those functions. And can probably start bleating if someone tries to walk off with your mobile handset.
- Stand up! There’s already quotes from Apple CEO Tim Cook saying that sitting down for excessively long periods of time is “the new cancer”. To that effect, you can set the device to nag you into moving if you appear to not be doing so regularly enough.
- Accuracy. It knows where you are (with your phone) and can set the time. The iPhone adjusts after a long flight based on the identification of the first cell tower it gets a mobile signal from on landing. And day to day, it’ll keep your clock always accurate.
- Payments. Watch to card reader, click, paid. We’ll need the roll out of Apple Pay this side of the Atlantic to realise this piece.
It is likely to evolve into a standalone Bluetooth hub of all the sensors around and on you – and that’s where its impact in time will one plus to death.
With the above in mind, I think the Apple Watch will be another big success story. The main question is how they’ll price the expen$ive one when its technology will evolve by leaps and bounds every couple of years. I just wonder if a subscription to possessing a Rolex price watch is a possible business model being considered.
We’ll know this time tomorrow. And my wife has already taken a shine to the expensive model, based purely on its looks with a red leather strap. Better start saving… And in the meantime, a few sample screenshots to pore over:
Hooked, health markets but the mind is wandering… to pooh and data privacy
One of the things I learnt many years ago was that there were four fundamental basics to increasing profits in any business. You sell:
- More Products (or Services)
- to More People
- More Often
- At higher unit profit (which is higher price, lower cost, or both)
and with that, four simple Tableau graphs against a timeline could expose the business fundamentals explaining good growth, or the core reason for declining revenue. It could also expose early warning signs, where a small number of large transactions hid an evolving surprise – like the volume of buying customers trending relentlessly down, while the revenue numbers appeared to be flying okay.
Another dimension is that a Brand equates to trust, and that consistency and predictability of the product or service plays a big part to retain that trust.
Later on, a more controversial view was that there were two fundamental business models for any business; that of a healer or a dealer. One sells an effective one-shot fix to a customer need, while the other survives by engineering a customers dependency to keep on returning.
With that, I sometimes agonise on what the future of health services delivery is. One the one hand, politicians verbal jousts over funding and trying to punt services over to private enterprise. In several cases to providers of services following the economic rent (dealer) model found in the American market, which, at face value, has a business model needing per capita expense that no sane person would want to replicate compared to the efficiency we have already. On the other hand, a realisation that the market is subject to radical disruption, through a combination of:
- An ever better informed, educated customer base
- A realisation that just being overweight is a root cause of many adverse trends
- Genomics
- Microbiome Analysis
- The upcoming ubiquity of sensors that can monitor all our vitals
With that, i’ve started to read “Hooked” by Nir Eyal, which is all about the psychology of engineering habit forming products (and services). The thing in the back of my mind is how to encourage the owner (like me) of a smart watch, fitness device or glucose monitor to fundamentally remove my need to enter my food intake every day – a habit i’ve maintained for 12.5 years so far.
The primary challenge is that, for most people, there is little newsworthy data that comes out of this exercise most of the time. The habit would be difficult to reinforce without useful news or actionable data. Some of the current gadget vendors are trying to encourage use by encouraging steps competition league tables you can have with family and friends (i’ve done this with relatives in West London, Southampton, Tucson Arizona and Melbourne Australia; that challenge finished after a week and has yet to be repeated).
My mind started to wander back to the challenge of disrupting the health market, and how a watch could form a part. Could its sensors measure my fat, protein and carb intake (which is the end result of my food diary data collection, along with weekly weight measures)? Could I build a service that would be a data asset to help disrupt health service delivery? How do I suss Microbiome changes – which normally requires analysis of a stool samples??
With that, I start to think i’m analysing this the wrong way around. I remember an analysis some time back when a researcher assessed the extent drug (mis)use in specific neighbourhoods by monitoring the make-up of chemical flows in networks of sewers. So, rather than put sensors on people’s wrists (and only see a subset of data), is there a place for technology in sewer pipes instead? If Microbiomes and the Genetic makeup of our output survives relatively intact, then sampling at strategic points of the distribution network would give us a pretty good dataset. Not least as DNA sequencing could allow the original owner (source) of output to connect back to any pearls of wisdom that could be analysed or inferred from their contributions, even if the drop-off points happened at home, work or elsewhere.
Hmmm. Water companies and Big Data.
Think i’ll park that and get on with the book.
iOS devices, PreSchool Kids and lessons from Africa
This is Ruby, our two and a half year old Granddaughter and owner of her own iPad Mini (she is also probably the youngest Apple shareholder out there, as part of her Junior ISA). She was fairly adept with her parents iPhones and iPads around the house months before she was two, albeit curious as to why there was no “Skip Ad” option on the TV at home (try as she did).
Her staple diet is YouTube (primarily Peppa Pig, Ben & Holly’s Magic Kingdom, and more recently Thomas the Tank Engine and Alphablocks). This weekend, there was a section on BBC Click that showed some primary school kids in Malawi, each armed with iPads and green headphones, engrossed doing maths exercises. The focus then moved to a Primary School in Nottingham, using the same application built for the kids in Malawi, translated to English but with the similarly (and silently) engrossed.
I found the associated apps (search for author “onebillion” and you should see five of them) and installed each on her iPad Mini:
- Count to 10
- Count to 20
- Maths, age 3-5
- Maths, age 4-6
- 2, 5 and 10 (multiplication)
The icons look like this, red to the left of the diagonal and with a white tick mark, orange background on the rest; the Malawi versions have more green in them in place of orange.
We put her onto the English version of “Count to 10”, tapped in her name, then handed it over to her.
Tapped on the rabbit waving to her, and off. Add frogs the the island (one tap for each):
Then told to tap one to remove it, then click the arrow:
Ding! Instant feedback that seemed to please her. She smiled, gave us a thumbs up, then clicked the arrow for the next exercise:
which was to add three birds to the wire. Press the arrow, ding! Smile and thumbs up, and she just kept doing exercise after exercise on her own bat.
A bit later on, the exercise was telling her to put a certain number of objects in each box – with the number to place specified as a number above the box. Unprompted, she was getting all those correct. Even when a box had ‘0’ above it, and she duly left that box empty. And then the next exercise, when she was asked to count the number of trees, and drag one of the numbers “0”, “1”, “2”, “3” or “4” to a box before pressing the arrow. Much to our surprise (more like chins on the floor), she was correctly associating each digit with the number of objects. Unprompted.
I had to email her Mum at that stage to ask if she’d been taught to recognise numbers already by the character shapes. Her Mum blamed it on her Cbeebies consumption alone.
When we returned her home after her weekend stay, the first thing she insisted on showing both her Mother and her Father was how good she was at this game. Fired it up herself, and showed them both independently.
So, Kudos to the authors of this app. Not only teaching kids in Malawi, but very appealing to kids here too. Having been one of the contributors to its Kickstarter funding, I just wonder how long it will be before she starts building programs in ScratchJr (though that’s aimed at budding programmers aged 5-7). It’s there on her iPad already when she wants to try it – and has her Scratch literate (and Minecraft guru) 10 year old brother on hand to assist if needed.
I think buying her her own iPad Mini (largely because when she stayed weekends, I never got my own one back) was a great investment. I hope it continues to provide an outlet for her wonder of the world around her in the years ahead.
Yo! Minimalist Notifications, API and the Internet of Things
Thought it was a joke, but having 4 hours of code resulting in $1m of VC funding, at an estimated $10M company valuation, raised quite a few eyebrows. The Yo! project team have now released their API, and with it some possibilities – over and above the initial ability to just say “Yo!” to a friend. At the time he provided some of the funds, John Borthwick of Betaworks said that there is a future of delivering binary status updates, or even commands to objects to throw an on/off switch remotely (blog post here). The first green shoots are now appearing.
The main enhancement is the ability to carry a payload with the Yo!, such as a URL. Hence your Yo!, when received, can be used to invoke an application or web page with a bookmark already put in place. That facilitates a notification, which is effectively guaranteed to have arrived, to say “look at this”. Probably extensible to all sorts of other tasks.
The other big change is the provision of an API, which allows anyone to create a Yo! list of people to notify against a defined name. So, in theory, I could create a virtual user called “IANWARING-SIMPLICITY-SELLS”, and to publicise that to my blog audience. If any user wants to subscribe, they just send a “Yo!” to that user, and bingo, they are subscribed and it is listed (as another contact) on their phone handset. If I then release a new blog post, I can use a couple of lines of Javascript or PHP to send the notification to the whole subscriber base, carrying the URL of the new post; one key press to view. If anyone wants to unsubscribe, they just drop the username on their handset, and the subscriber list updates.
Other applications described include:
- Getting a Yo! when a FedEx package is on it’s way
- Getting a Yo! when your favourite sports team scores – “Yo us at ASTONVILLA and we’ll Yo when we score a goal!”
- Getting a Yo! when someone famous you follow tweets or posts to Instagram
- Breaking News from a trusted source
- Tell me when this product comes into stock at my local retailer
- To see if there are rental bicycles available near to you (it can Yo! you back)
- You receive a payment on PayPal
- To be told when it starts raining in a specific town
- Your stocks positions go up or down by a specific percentage
- Tell me when my wife arrives safely at work, or our kids at their travel destination
but I guess there are other “Internet of Things” applications to switch on home lights, open garage doors, switch on (or turn off) the oven. Or to Yo! you if your front door has opened unexpectedly (carrying a link to the picture of who’s there?). Simple one click subscriptions. So, an extra way to operate Apple HomeKit (which today controls home appliance networks only through Siri voice control).
Early users are showing simple Restful URLs and http GET/POSTs to trigger events to the Yo! API. I’ve also seen someone say that it will work with CoPA (Constrained Application Protocol), a lightweight protocol stack suitable for use within simple electronic devices.
Hence, notifications that are implemented easily and over which you have total control. Something Apple appear to be anal about, particularly in a future world where you’ll be walking past low energy bluetooth beacons in retail settings every few yards. Your appetite to be handed notifications will degrade quickly with volumes if there are virtual attention beggars every few paces. Apple have been locking down access to their iBeacon licensees to limit the chance of this happening.
With the Yo! API, the first of many notification services (alongside Google Now, and Apples own notification services), and a simple one at that. One that can be mixed with IFTTT (if this, then that), a simple web based logic and task action system also produced by Betaworks. And which may well be accessible directly from embedded electronics around us.
The one remaining puzzle is how the authors will be able to monetise their work (their main asset is an idea of the type and frequency of notifications you welcome receiving, and that you seek). Still a bit short of Google’s core business (which historically was to monetise purchase intentions) at this stage in Yo!’s development. So, suggestions in the case of Yo! most welcome.
Microbiomes and a glimpse to doctors becoming a small niche
When I get up in the morning, I normally follow a path on my iPad through email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Feedly (for my RSS feeds) and Downcast (to update my Podcasts for later listening). This morning, Kevin Kelly served up a comment on Google+ that piqued my interest, and that led to a long voyage of discovery. Much to my wifes disgust as I quoted gory details about digestive systems at the same time she was trying to eat her breakfast. He said:
There are 2 reasons this great Quantified Self experiment is so great. One, it shows how important your microbial ecosystem is. Two, it shows how significant DAILY genome sequencing will be.
He then gave a pointer to an article about Microbiomes here.
The Diet Journey
I’ve largely built models based on innocent attempts to lose weight, dating back to late 2000 when I tried the Atkins diet. That largely stalled after 3 weeks and one stone loss. Then fairly liberated in 2002 by a regime at my local gym, when I got introduced (as part of a six week program) to the website of Weight Loss Resources. This got me in the habit of recording my food intake and exercise very precisely, which translated branded foods and weights into daily intake of carbs, protein and fat. That gave me my calorie consumption and nutritional balance, and kept track alongside weekly weight readings. I’ve kept that data flowing now for over 12 years, which continues to this day.
Things i’ve learnt along the way are:
- Weight loss is heavily dependent on me consuming less calories than my Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), and at the same time keeping energy deduced from carbs, protein and fat at a specific balance (50% from Carbs, 20% Protein, 30% fat)
- 1g of protein is circa 4.0 Kcals, 1g of carbs around 3.75 Kcals, and fat around 9.0 Kcals.
- Muscle weighs 2x as much as fat
- There is a current fixation at gyms with upping your muscle content at first, nominally to increase your energy burn rate (even at rest)
- The digestive system is largely first in, first out; protein is largely processed in acidic conditions, and carbs later down the path in alkaline equivalents. Fat is used as part of both processes.
- There are a wide variety of symbiotic (opposite of parasite!) organisms that assist the digestive process from beginning to end
- Weight loss is both heat and exhaust. Probably other forms of radiation too, given we are all like a light bulb in the infrared spectrum (I always wonder how the SAS manage to deploy small teams in foreign territory and remain, for the most part, undetected)
I’ve always harboured a suspicion that taking antibiotics have an indiscriminate bombing effect on the population of microbiomes there to assist you. Likewise the effect of what used to be my habit of drinking (very acidic) Diet Coke. But never seen anyone classify the variety and numbers of Microbiomes, and to track this over time.
The two subjects had the laboratory resources to examine samples of their own saliva, and their own stool samples, and map things over time. Fascinating to see what happened when one of them suffered Salmonella (the green in the above picture), and the other got “Delhi Belly” during a trip abroad.
The links around the article led to other articles in National Geographic, including one where the author reported much wider analysis of the Microbiomes found in 60 different peoples belly buttons (here) – he had a zoo of 58 different ones in his own. And then to another article where the existence of certain microbiome mutations in the bloodstream were an excellent leading indicator of the presence of cancerous tumours in the individual (here).
Further dips into various Wikipedia articles cited examples of microbiome populations showing up in people suffering from various dilapidating illnesses such as ME, Fibromyalgia and Lyme disease, in some instances having a direct effect on driving imbalances to cause depression. Separately, that what you ate often had quite an effect in altering the relative sizes of parts of the Microbiome population in short order.
There was another article that suggested new research was going to study the Microbiome Zoo present in people’s armpits, but I thought that an appropriate time to do an exit stage left on my reading. Ugh.
Brain starts to wander again
Later on, I reflected for a while on how I could supply some skills i’ve got to build up data resources – at least should suitable sensors be able to measure, sample and sequence microbiomes systematically every day. I have the mobile phone programming, NoSQL database deployment and analytics skills. But what if we had sensors that everyone could have on them 24/7 that could track the microbiome zoo that is you (internally – and I guess externally too)? Load the data resources centrally, and I suspect the Wardley Map of what is currently the NHS would change fundamentally.
I also suspect that age-old Chinese Medicine will demonstrate it’s positive effects on further analysis. It was about the only thing that solved my wifes psoriasis on her hands and feet; she was told about the need to balance yin/yan and remove heat put things back to normal, which was achieved by consumption of various herbs and vegetation. It would have been fascinating to see how the profile of her microbiomes changed during that process.
Sensors
I guess the missing piece is the ability to have sensors that can help both identify and count types microbiomes on a continuous basis. It looks like a laboratory job at the moment. I wonder if there are other characteristics or conditions that could short cut the process. Health apps about to appear from Apple and Google initiatives tend to be effective at monitoring steps, heart rate. There looks to be provision for sensing blood glucose levels non-invasively by shining infrared light on certain parts of the skin (inner elbow is a favourite); meanwhile Google have patented contact lenses that can measure glucose levels in the blood vessels in the wearers eyes.
The local gym has a Boditrax machine that fires an electrical up one foot and senses the signal received back in the other, and can relate body water, muscle and fat content. Not yet small enough for a mobile phone. And Withings produce scales that can report back weight to the users handset over bluetooth (I sometimes wonder if the jarring of the body as you tread could let a handset sensors deduce approximate weight, but that’s for another day).
So, the mission is to see if anyone can produce sensors (or an edible, communicating pill) that can effectively work, in concert with someones phone and the interwebs, to reliably count and identify biome mixes and to store these for future analysis, research or notification purposes. Current research appears to be in monitoring biome populations in:
- Oral Cavity
- Nasal
- Gastrointestinal Organs
- Vaginal
- Skin
each with their own challenges for providing a representative sample surface sufficient to be able to provide regular, consistent and accurate readings. If indeed we can miniaturize or simplify the lab process reliably. The real progress will come when we can do this and large populations can be sampled – and cross referenced with any medical conditions that become apparent in the data provider(s). Skin and the large intestine appear to have the most interesting microbiome profiles to look at.
Long term future
The end result – if done thoroughly – is that the skills and error rates of GP provided treatment would become largely relegated, just as it was for farm workers in the 19th century (which went from 98% of the population working the land to less than 2% within 100 years).
With that, I think Kevin Kelly is 100% correct in his assessment – that the article shows how significant DAILY genome sequencing will be. So, what do we need to do to automate the process, and make the fruits of its discoveries available to everyone 24/7?
Footnote: there look to be many people attempting to automate subsets of the DNA/RNA identification process. One example highlighted by MIT Review today being this.
The madness that is Hodor and Yo. Or is it?
One constant source of bemusement – well, really horror – is the inefficiency of social media to deliver a message to it’s intended recipients. In any company setting, saying “I didn’t receive your message” is the management equivalent of “the dog ate my homework” excuse at school; it is considered a very rare occurrence and the excuse a poor attempt to seek forgiveness.
Sending bulk (but personalised) email to a long list of people who know you is just the start. Routinely, 30% of what you send will end up finishing short of your destination; no matter how many campaigns i’ve seen from anyone, none get higher than 70% delivery to the intended recipients. In practice, the number routinely read by the recipient normally bests at 20-30% of the number sent. Spam filters often over-zealous too. With practice, you get to find out that sending email to arrive in the recipients in-tray at 3:00pm on a Thursday afternoon local time is 7x more likely to be read than the same one sent at 6:00am on a Sunday morning. And that mentioning the recipients name, an indication of what it’s about and what they’ll see when the email is opened – all hooked together in the subject line -vastly improves open rates. But most people are still facing 70-80% wastage rates. I’ve done some work on this, but that experience is available to my consulting clients!
So, thank god for Facebook. Except that the visibility of status updates routinely only gets seen by 16% of your friends on average (the range is 2%-47% depending on all sorts of factors, but 16% is the average). The two ways to improve this is to make your own list that others can subscribe to, and if they remember to access that list name, then they’ll see the works. But few remember to do this. The other method is to pay Facebook for delivery, where you can push your update (or invite to an interest list, aka ‘likes’) to a defined set of demographics in specific geographic areas. But few guarantees that you’ll get >50% viewership even then.
So, thank god for Twitter. Except the chance of some of your followers actually seeing your tweets drops into the sub-1% range; the norm is that you’ll need to be watching your stream as the update is posted. So you’re down to using something like Tweetdeck to follow individual people in their own column, or a specific hashtag in another. You very quickly run out of screen real estate to see everything you actually want to see. This is a particular frustration to me, as I quite often find myself in the middle of a Tweet storm (where a notable person, like @pmarca – Marc Andreessen – will routinely run off 8-12 numbered tweets); the end result is like listening to a group of experts discussing interesting things around a virtual water cooler, and that is fascinating to be part of. The main gotcha is that I get to see his stuff early on a Saturday morning in the UK only because he tweets before folks on the west coast of the USA are headed to bed – otherwise i’d never catch it.
Some of the modern messaging apps (like SnapChat) at least tell you when that picture has been received and read by the recipient(s) you sent it too – and duly deleted on sight. But we’re well short of an application where you can intelligently follow Twitter scale dialogues reliably for people you really want to follow. Twitter themselves just appear happy to keep suggesting all sorts of people for me to follow, probably unconscious that routine acceptance would do little other than further polluting my stream with useless trash.
Parking all this, I saw one company produce a spoof Android custom keyboard, where the only key provided just says “Hodor”. Or if you press it down for longer, it gives you “Hodor” in bold. You can probably imagine the content of the reviews of it on the Google Play Store (mainly long missives that just keep repeating the word).
Then the next madness. Someone writing an application that just lists your friends names, and if you press their name, it just sends through a message to them saying “Yo!”.
Just like the Facebook Pokes of old. A team of three programmers wrote it in a couple of days, and it’s already been downloaded many thousands of times from the Apple App Store. It did sound to me like a modern variation of the Budweiser “Whats Up” habit a few years back, so I largely shook my head and carried on with other work.
The disbelief set in when I found out that this app had been subject to a $1.5 million VC funding round, which valued the company (this is their only “significant” app) at a $10m valuation. Then found out one of the lead investors was none other than a very respected John Borthwick (who runs Betaworks, an application Studio housed in the old Meat Packing area of New York).
His thing seems to be that this application ushers in a new world, where we quite often want to throw a yes/go-ahead/binary notification reliably to another entity. That may be a person (to say i’ve left work, or i’ve arrived at the restaurant, etc) or indeed a device (say ‘Yo’ to the coffee maker as you approach work, or to turn on the TV). So, there may indeed be some logic in the upcoming world of the “Internet of Things”, hyped to death as it may be.
John’s announcement of his funding can be found here. The challenge will no doubt be to see whether his investment is as prescient as many of his other ones (IFTTT, Bit.ly, Dots, Digg Deeper, etc) have been to date. In the meantime, back to code my own app – which is slightly more ambitious than that now famous one.
On the unusability of internal systems. Ugh!
Saw this picture alongside an excellent blog post today. Does this look familiar?
The company have probably spent many millions buying software to automate their business processes or to fulfil all manner of other objectives. But the User Interface and Operating Nuances are so involved, the poor user has to keep a notebook to hand to help navigate around the mess served to them. And they have to interact with their ultimate customers with a smile on their face, protecting them from the mess behind the scenes.
If that was served up on a phone handset, no consumer would touch it with the longest bargepole known to man. One of the things that plays on my mind is how to disrupt these vendors. Or the companies whose directors decide to buy this stuff and inflict this (and the associated costs) to their downstream customers.
Jon Barrett had a lot of the glue to sort this phenomenon with Digital’s Jabberwocky project back in the early 1990’s, with what amounted to be an Enterprise Software Bus with some basic screen scraping functionality. At least pilot users could string together some business process interactions atop those disparate applications that behaved in a way that today’s mobile phone users might have found a bit more palatable. It’s been a long time since, and little apparent progress.
In the meantime, the blog post by Leisa Reichelt is here. Well worth a read.
Footnote: within 12 hours of posting this, I read an excellent article here on the failure of a “Choose and Book” system on which over £300m was spent. Reading the drains up, it looks like a set of top level objectives were being pursued, but with no appreciation of the unwanted constraints being placed on the users of the resulting service, so the whole thing fell into disrepute. Like the old dutch proverb: “a ship on a beach is a lighthouse to the sea”.
Nadella: Heard what he said, knew what he meant
That’s a variation of an old “Two Ronnies” song in the guise of “Jehosaphat & Jones” entitled “I heard what she said, but knew what she meant” (words or three minutes into this video). Having read Satya Nadella’s Open Letter to employees issued at the start of Microsoft’s new fiscal year, I did think it was long. However, the real delight was reading Jean-Louis Gassee – previously the CTO of Apple – not only pulling it apart, but then having a crack at showing how it should have been written:
Team,
This is the beginning of our new FY 2015 – and of a new era at Microsoft. I have good news and bad news.The bad news is the old Devices and Services mantra won’t work. For example: I’ve determined we’ll never make money in tablets or smartphones.
So, do we continue to pretend we’re “all in” or do we face reality and make the painful decision to pull out so we can use our resources – including our integrity – to fight winnable battles? With the support of the Microsoft Board, I’ve chosen the latter.
We’ll do our utmost to minimize the pain that will naturally arise from this change. Specifically, we’ll offer generous transitions arrangements in and out of the company to concerned Microsoftians and former Nokians.
The good news is we have immense resources to be a major player in the new world of Cloud services and Native Apps for mobile devices.
We let the first innings of that game go by, but the sting energizes us. An example of such commitment is the rapid spread of Office applications – and related Cloud services – on any and all mobile devices. All Microsoft Enterprise and Consumer products/services will follow, including Xbox properties.
I realize this will disrupt the status quo and apologize for the pain to come. We have a choice: change or be changed.
Stay tuned.
Satya.
Jean-Louis Gassee’s full take-home on the original is provided here. Satya Nadella should hire him.
Paid Queue Jumping, San Francisco Style
There’s a fair amount of controversy about two mobile applications in San Francisco right now; MonkeyParking and ReservationHop. Both offer a twist on selling a place in a queue to a limited resource:
- In an environment where it can sometimes take 45 minutes to find a car parking place, MonkeyParking enables someone currently occupying a space to sell this to another driver in the same proximity.
- Likewise, where Restaurants having waiting lists that may extend to over a month, ReservationHop prebooks tables and sells these to customers who want to make a late booking
Transport authorities are objecting to the scalping of public parking spaces, and likewise there is concern about unsold restaurant bookings causing inefficiences when virtual diners don’t turn into real ones.
Besides the market for ticket touts, i’m also reminded that some customers will pay a hobo (tramp) to reserve their place in queues for new iPhones. I also recall Sir John Harvey-Jones, ex CEO of ICI plc, who once vented his frustration at the management of Morgan Cars, who maintained a multi-year waiting list for cars rolling off their production line. Customers would routinely sell their positions at greater than the cost of a new car, a practice resulting in much shrugging of shoulders at a practice that they felt wasn’t really cricket – but which they allowed to carry on regardless.
I guess the answer is to charge a premium for a standard car, and to discount personal customisations ordered up front. Customising something normally increases the value to the originally intended recipient, while decreasing the value to everyone else. Anyone who doubts that hasn’t looked at the value an iPad sale achieves on eBay between stock machines and ones engraved with the owners name.
But, same old. It’s happened from the dawn of time, and rarity of any resource (and timely access to same) normally attracts some value that scalpers can attribute a price to. The only thing I find distasteful is the name coined for mobile apps that enhance this process on the West Coast of the USA right now – that of “Jerkware”. Hopefully we can come up with a more appropriate name going forward.