Posts Tagged ‘Verizon’
In Hindsight: What Went Wrong with Adobe Flash in Mobile
[This is a repost of my guest article at the SlashData blog]
Ever since Adobe announced that it will stop developing Flash for mobile browsers, the blogosphere has been buzzing with a broad range of sentiments including “I told you so” by critics, disbelief by Flash developers, Monday morning quarterbacking by analysts, and even a petition for Adobe’s CEO to resign. Check out also the Occupy Flash and Occupy HTML manifestos from the opposing camps. Flash is one of those topics that attract very emotional responses from both its passionate developer community and its very vocal detractors. Although I am generally an Adobe supporter, I will put emotion aside and summarize, in hindsight, what went wrong. For full disclosure, I am a former Adobe employee, but this post is based only on publicly available information.
HTML5 did not kill Flash. Steve Jobs did not kill Flash. The death of Flash was caused by a time bomb planted inadvertently by Adobe many years ago.
Although Flash for mobile ultimately died because Adobe did not adapt fast enough to post iPhone changes in the ecosystem, the seeds for Adobe’s failure were planted earlier on. To understand what went wrong, let’s first review what happened before the iPhone and how those events set the stage for what happened later.
Read the rest of this entry »The Mobile App Store Landscape 5 years Ai (After the iPhone)
[This is a repost of my guest article at SlashData‘s blog]
2009 was the year of the app store wannabes. Following the remarkable success of the Apple App Store, OEMs, mobile platform vendors, mobile operators, and traditional aggregators either created new app stores or repositioned their existing offerings as app stores. There are now between 24 to 32 app stores depending on who is counting (see Distimo’s app store report and the WIP App Store Wiki for reference), and more stores are surely to follow. However, key questions remain about how the app store landscape will emerge after the current period of hysteria subsides and the dust settles.
– Are we going to see many app stores on each handset?
– Will app malls emerge to host multiple app stores within?
– Will operator stores gain critical mass?
[Or will we see a “no app store” future as proposed by Matt Millar via the comment thread?]
Andreas Constantinou wrote an excellent article that defines the app store building blocks and predicts a “dime-a-dozen” app store future. I will build on this post, but will offer an alternative view of how the landscape will evolve.
It’s a Winner-Take-All Contest
If we were to extrapolate the current trend, we could expect a future where each handset will host many app stores. An LG Android device on the Orange network would have the LG App Store, the Android Market, and the Orange App Shop. The Verizon version would have the V CAST store in place of the Orange App Shop. On top of this, you could add the Getjar multiplatform store and several specialty stores for say, games, health, and productivity apps to name just a few. Can you imagine the mess this would create for the user experience? Which app store do I launch? Which apps do I find on which store? Are apps duplicated on multiple stores? Are the prices the same across stores or do I need to shop around? Are the versions of the apps consistent across stores?
Read the rest of this entry »Why Droid will hurt RIM more than the iPhone
By now I’m sure you’ve seen Verizon’s aggressive “idon’t” campaign to compete against the iPhone with its new Motorola Droid. This is Verizon’s second attack on the iPhone after the first attempt with the Blackberry Storm failed miserably. Despite the Storm, AT&T continued to add new subs on the strength of the iPhone. Just last quarter AT&T added another 3.2 million new iPhones, 40% of whom were new customers to AT&T (a 2 year trend now).
Although Verizon desperately needs to counter the iPhone, I believe this latest attempt will hurt RIM much more than Apple. In other words, it will backfire cannibalizing more Verizon RIM devices than AT&T iphone devices. Here are two reasons why:
Is BREW Dead? Lessons learned.
A while ago I attended Fierce’s Mobile Operating System Debate webinar and could not help but notice the dismal future of BREW as a platform for mobile application development. As illustrated on slide 5 (see presentation from webinar referenced above), iGR found that ZERO percent of existing mobile developers surveyed planned to develop for BREW in the future. We could debate the specifics of the data in the survey, but it is clear that BREW is losing developer mind share rapidly (while Apple, Google and RIM are all gaining share, as confirmed by iGR’s survey).
To make matters worse, just yesterday Lowell McAdam, Verizon’s CEO, announced that Verizon (BREW’s biggest supporter) will be putting its weight behind the Java platform as part of its new effort to open its network to application developers. Could this be the final nail in the coffin for BREW? It’s not clear, but please voice your opinion via the poll below. In any case, what is most important is to understand the key lessons learned from the BREW experience:
Francisco Kattan 