Tag Archives: Android

Can Windows 10 Disrupt Android and Get Microsoft Back in Handset Game?

Microsoft Tries to Disrupt Mobile Phone Market

Can Windows 10 Disrupt Android and Get Microsoft Back in Handset Game?I came across an article on Mashable recently highlighting a new Microsoft experiment. It highlights something that Microsoft has prototyped to test as part of their strategy to regain momentum in the mobile phone market by focusing on markets outside the United States where the first generation of the smartphone adoption battle hasn’t already been decided.

The first Microsoft branded phones are now appearing in the market as the relevance of the Nokia brand in the mobile phone market has nearly completely disappeared. With a single digit market share, Microsoft has to do something disruptive to get back in the game and get some value out of their huge Nokia acquisition. Most people would say that doing something disruptive is outside of Microsoft’s comfort zone, but there are examples to the contrary where Microsoft has been more innovative than Google or Apple, so nothing is impossible.

So enough buildup. What exactly is Microsoft fooling around with as a potential strategy to get back in the global smartphone market?

It is this…

Microsoft is working with Xiaomi to prove that it is possible to bring Windows to Android hardware. The technical details aren’t all that important, the bigger question is whether Android handset owners would consider doing this or not.

The big value proposition highlighted in the Mashable article is that Windows is less hungry for resources than Android and so especially for people with older smartphones the switch could make their handset feel more responsive. Someone switching like this probably wouldn’t make Microsoft any immediate money, but of course the hope would be that when they upgraded that they would choose a Microsoft OS handset for their next smartphone.

As someone who ditched his Android phone for a Nokia Lumia phone running Windows Phone and never looked back, I can confirm that Windows Phone is better than Android (althought the App selection is much smaller).

Given that Windows Phone biggest weakness is probably App availability, Microsoft better do everything they can to convert phones over to their new Windows 10 OS, other way that gap will never close. Will this experiment be fully unleashed? Will it work? Could Microsoft disrupt the smartphone market and get back in the game with this approach?

I guess only time will tell.

In the meantime, if you want to see more, check out the video above and work on your Chinese at the same time.

If you’re not sure what I meant by seamless computing when I referred to it above, I encourage you to check out my previous article – Cloud Computing is Dead, Long Live the Cloud! (which is also available as a narrated audio file)


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Apple iPhone 6 Killer App Revealed

Apple iPhone 6 Killer App RevealedWhile most people are focused on what the new Apple iPhone 6 hardware might look like and what new gizmos it might have, the real killer app for Apple’s latest refresh of their flagship mobile device will be an App and a little tiny NFC chipset.

Rumored for the iPhone 5 (rumors which were heightened by Apple’s acquisition and subsequent inclusion of fingerprint sensor technology), mobile payments may finally be a built-in feature of the Apple’s newest handset, the iPhone 6.

Apple has been reportedly out talking to the likes of Visa, American Express, Nordstrom and others, and if that is all true then expect part of Apple’s Tuesday September 9th announcement to be focused on the new mobile payment capabilities of the iPhone 6.

I was one of those who thought that mobile payments might launch as part of the iPhone 5’s capabilities, but obviously the technology, or more likely the relationships and contracts, were not ready for prime time a year ago.

Will mobile payments authenticated by your fingerprint finally appear in the iPhone 6?

If so, soon we will finally be able to stop carrying around wallets and switch to money clips and mobile phones, as such a feature will not only replace credit cards, but loyalty cards, insurance cards, and more.

Yes, Samsung may have done it first with the Galaxy S5, but you know Apple will do it bigger (and better).

I guess we’ll find out next week.

Image credit: Ricardo Del Toro


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Is Windows Phone a Serious Competitor to iPhone and Android?

Is Windows Phone a Serious Competitor to iPhone and Android?A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to receive a shiny new Nokia Lumia 810 in the mail courtesy of Nokia USA. This was very welcome because I’ve been subjected to what I can only describe as a technology torture inflicted upon me for more than a year by a horribly designed Samsung Galaxy S. So anything would have been a step up, but so far the Nokia Lumia 810 has been a BIG step up.

My Samsung Galaxy S used to decrease my productivity, but the Nokia Lumia 810 now adds to my quality of life.

This isn’t exactly a product review, because that’s not typically something that I do. I will however give you my honest reaction to the Nokia Lumia 810 and how it has fit into the life of this busy innovation and marketing professional so far.

To date, the Nokia Lumia 810 has yet to crash a single time. My old Samsung Galaxy S in contrast crashed at least once every one to two days, and because of what seemed to be a flawed design I was never really able to download and successfully use applications on the device that weren’t loaded at the factory (despite a 16gb SD card being installed).

Thus far on the Nokia Lumia 810 I’ve been able to set up Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, GMail, Twitter, Outlook, Linkedin, CNN, ESPN and other applications. I’ve also been able to load 15GB of music successfully onto the phone and use all of these applications multiple times every day and keep them synced without issues. Bottom line, the Nokia Lumia 810 has been a much smarter smartphone than my Samsung Galaxy S.

The one thing I haven’t found to be as good on the Nokia Lumia 810 as my old Samsung Galaxy S is the voice command functionality. The Nokia Lumia 810 doesn’t seem to recognize my voice as well with my new Motorola Elite Sliver bluetooth headset.

Now obviously today’s Samsung Galaxy S3 is probably a better device than the Samsung Galaxy S, and the iPhone 5 is for sure a solid device. But so far I find the Windows 8 OS on the Nokia Lumia 810 to provide a much more attractive user interface than iOS or Android thus far and to provide roughly a level of parity in overall functionality with these other competitors and a serious competitor to the market leaders.

Is parity and a better UI enough to help Nokia and Microsoft get back into the game?

Only time will tell, but it is my opinion that Nokia and Microsoft will need some kind of a killer app to truly gain traction towards regaining market share. Unfortunately, as I’ve written before, I think that Apple will introduce the next killer function to the smartphone – truly useful and viable mCommerce. But, only time will tell to see if this theory plays out or not.

What do you think?


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Dumping Facebook Ads the Obvious Choice for GM

Dumping Facebook Ads the Obvious Choice for GMThe twittersphere erupted with news of GM’s announcement that it was refusing to pay for 2013 Super Bowl advertisements and $10 Million worth of advertising on Facebook.

Much of the popular press and self-proclaimed social media experts are jumping on the bandwagon and calling GM “idiots” for ending their advertising of Facebook and talking about how GM “doesn’t get” social media. If you listen to the amount of noise out there you would think that there was consensus that GM was wrong in making these moves.

I disagree. GM is making the right move.

Companies need to re-think how they spend money on marketing and advertising to make money in the showroom. Traditional advertising is becoming more expensive all the time and as the saying goes “I know I’m wasting half of the money I spend on advertising, only I don’t know which half.” The key here is that with advertising you pay to blast everyone that sees it with a single message – including people who just bought what you sell and those who will never buy what you sell just to hit the people who are considering a purchase of what you sell. As a result it is expensive and nearly impossible to place the right message with the right people at the time (and only those people). So I am not surprised at all that GM is re-evaluating its advertising spend, possibly investing more (not less) in the future in social media. Done well, you can be more impactful with pull marketing and social media than you can with push marketing and advertising.

So, personally it seems odd to me that so-called social media experts are in favor of a company spending money advertising on social networks. Wouldn’t it be smarter for them to advocate that GM spend money on build an interactive, engagement-driving social media campaign instead of spending money on advertising?

Something like the Chevy Game Time App?

Wait a minute, did the same company that doesn’t “get social media” launch an app built by hometown company – Detroit Labs – before Super Bowl 2012 that rocketed into the Top 10 free apps for the iPhone on Apple’s App Store (a top 10 that included Facebook and Instagram)?

“For all intents and purposes, all of the expectations that we had and that GM had were far exceeded… in a positive way!”

– Henry Balanon, Detroit Labs Co-Founder

Hmmmm…

First let’s be clear. Social networks and social media are two separate things, but people talk about them as is if they were one thing.

A social network is a place where people connect online and interact, whereas social media is content that is created to be shared. But, many so-called social media experts confuse the two, and confuse advertising with social media too. Advertising on a social network is not a social media strategy – it’s still advertising. Identifying the content that you should place on your Facebook page or other digital destination and creating a reason for people to tell others that they should come to that digital destination, well that’s a social media strategy.

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Now, I must disclose that I specialize in helping companies creating pull marketing strategies to drive an increase in inbound sales leads by researching the customer purchasing journey online and then helping them attract and engage customers, partners, or employees by placing the right content in the right places at the right time. Part of this is achieved by using my proprietary single content input, multiple content output methodology and yes, that sometimes includes using social media. But social media is a tool not a religion, and it needs to be used only when appropriate.

I think GM made the right call in ceasing to advertise on the Super Bowl and Facebook and here’s why:

  1. Super Bowl advertisements are expensive and for GM much of the cost is allocated against people who will probably NEVER buy a GM car
  2. Facebook advertising is not very prominent or engaging
  3. Their Chevy Game Time App experience should have given GM an idea that next year they can drive huge engagement during the Super Bowl (without advertising)

If GM is so clueless at social media, then why does the Facebook page for Chevrolet look so much better than the Facebook page for Ford or Toyota or Dodge. Honda is the only one I looked at amongst the car companies that had a more social feel at first glance, oh and Honda has the most likes of these companies too – go figure. But the engagement of people on Facebook around these brands is tiny in comparison to BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Harley-Davidson – both in terms of the numbers of likes and the number of people talking about them.

So, yes GM still has things to learn about engaging on social media (and about building better products too), but then so does every company. Social media and pull marketing are two new tools in the toolbox for every CMO, brand manager, and product marketer, but as long as we all continue to instrument for learning, as marketers we will continue to get better at utilizing these new tools to attract, engage, and retain the people who will love our products and services as much as we do.

Keep innovating!

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Can Microsoft win the Android and iPhone Haters?

Can Microsoft win the Android and iPhone Haters?Nobody, including people inside Microsoft, would argue with the fact that Microsoft beat Google and Apple to the Mobile OS marketplace, but lags them both in terms of market share.

According to Wikipedia, the IBM Simon was the world’s first smartphone and was released to the world nearly twenty years ago. This means that the smartphone market is yet another example of a market where mass adoption has lagged behind initial product introduction by 20-30 years. For the inventor audience this is important to note, because it shows that #1 – innovation takes time – and #2 – that being first is no guarantee of being number one in the market when mass adoption arrives.

Well, mass adoption in the smartphone market is now upon us.

The only question is – which operating system maker will dominate the golden years of the smartphone market?

Will it be Apple or Google?

Or do Microsoft and RIM have a change to counterattack and make themselves relevant again?

Invention does not guarantee innovation. Innovation requires that you create value above every existing alternative and that you achieve wide adoption. The reason we often see changes in the leadership of the marketplace of an emerging innovation is that often the market creator does a worse job than new entrants of adapting their solution offering for the evolving desires of the customers. New entrants generally see an opportunity to solve problems that the incumbents don’t, and an create new value that the incumbent solutions don’t deliver.

But can an incumbent react to newer entrants and rebuild momentum in the marketplace?

Motorola’s revitalization in mobile handsets shows that a competitive response focused on leadership instead of reaction can in fact get you back in the game.

So can Microsoft do the same thing and steal share from Apple and Google in the smartphone OS market?

The answer lies in whether Microsoft can do a better job than Apple or Google (or even RIM) of understanding why people hate their current smartphones, while also anticipating:

  1. What the needs of customers will be in 6-12 months
  2. What customers will want in 6-12 months
  3. What emerging technologies will make possible in 6-12 months

Timing is one of the key components to successful innovation. You can invent things at any time, but you can only turn an invention into an innovation when customers and other parts of the value chain can see the value and are ready to accept it. Whether customers and the value chain can see the value is of course dependent on how well you translate for them how a potential innovation will fit into their lives.

Can Microsoft and Nokia come up with the answers that the marketplace will accept in 6-12 months? Are their existing phones the right answer for customers now?

I don’t know. But I can tell you that I hate, absolutely hate, the Google Android operating system on my Samsung Galaxy S. The Samsung device itself seems relatively well-designed but the Google Android OS is always crashing, doesn’t make smart use of the SD Card (the internal memory is always filling up), and leaves me constantly frustrated.

I bought two Samsung Galaxy S phones on T-Mobile over two iPhones on Verizon or AT&T for my wife and I, because they will cost me $1,000 less over the two-year commitment.

I can tell you with certainty that my next smartphone when I’m eligible for an upgrade will NOT be a Google Android phone. At the same time I know people who hate their iPhones and their Blackberries as well, so this represents an opportunity for Microsoft to convert disgruntled iOS, Android and Blackberry customers. Plus, there are a still a lot of people without a smartphone that will buy one in the next 6-12 months.

These two market dynamics represent a huge opportunity for Microsoft to get back in the smartphone OS market. The only question is:

Will they take advantage of this opportunity?


Article first published as ‘An Opening for Microsoft and Nokia?’ on Technorati.

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‘Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire’ on Kindle

Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire on KindleStoking Your Innovation Bonfire – A Roadmap to a Sustainable Culture of Ingenuity and Purpose is now available for Amazon Kindle both in the United States and in the United Kingdom.

Enjoy the book on your iPad, Kindle, Nook, iPhone, Android, PC, or Mac before it is widely available. If you buy the electronic version of the book from either Barnes & Noble or Amazon, you can download their readers for almost all of today’s major computing platforms.

The book will be available in hardcover October 5, 2010 from online retailers in the United States, and a week later it will be available in book stores and other electronic retailers outside the United States (UK, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, and more).

If you’re curious about the book, you can look inside it on Amazon, or use Google Preview on the publisher’s web site, or watch on Monday, September 20, 2010 for a link to a free sample chapter from the book to be posted on http://innovationbonfire.com.

Getting a copy of the book is a great way to support the blog and keep it free.

Click here to pre-order the book

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