The Network Garden - Mark Sigal's Blog

Five reasons iPhone vs Android isn't Mac vs Windows (Guest Column @ O'Reilly Radar)

Last week I presented at Stanford Graduate School of Business in a session on Mobile Computing called, "Creating Mobile Experiences: It's the Platform, Stupid."

As the title underscores, I am a big believer that to understand what makes mobile tick, you really need to look beyond a device's hardware shell (important, though it is), and fully factor in the composite that includes its software and service layers; developer tools and the ecosystem "surround." Successful platforms, after all, are more than the sum of their parts' propositions. They are not simply a bunch of dis-integrated ingredients.

Having built hardware and software platforms since 1994, this thought process has led me to harp endlessly on why the iPhone platform (and its derivatives) is such a game changer. By contrast, I would argue that the long-term success of Android is anything but a given.

It's human nature to look to the past in an attempt to understand the future. As such, I was unsurprised when I was asked during my presentation if Apple and iPhone vs Google and Android in mobile computing is "destined" to play out as Apple and the Mac did when confronted by Microsoft and Windows in the PC wars.

As I have provided "big picture" analysis on this topic before in other posts (here and here), I want to share what I see as the five "little picture" reasons Apple vs Google isn't destined for the same outcome as Apple vs Microsoft:

Read the full post @ O'Reilly Radar by clicking HERE.

Update 1: John Gruber of Daring Fireball gave this piece some loving, saying "Astute analysis from Mark Sigal. Android may well grow to overwhelm the iPhone OS in terms of market share, but if so, it won’t be for the same reasons Windows did on the desktop." He also linked to it as well, which given his massive audience, generated a sizable traffic pop (John is the consummate Apple insider, whose pieces have been cited more than once by senior Apple management, including most recently, Apple CEO Steve Jobs).

Update 2: This piece has generated jaw-dropping comments (~100) and re-tweets (467 and counting), and through the one bit.ly link I have that I can trace, shows almost 6,700 reads, which doesn't even factor direct access to the article (from folks like Gruber, O'Reilly site visitors, Google searches, etc.).

Related Posts:

1. Check Mate: Understanding Apple's iPad
2. The Google Android Rollout: Windows or Waterloo?
3. Google Android, the Dawn of Mobile, and the Missing Leg

“Unfair Advantages” – Assessing Apple’s March, 2010 Quarter

Remember the snarky dismissals that they were a marketing-driven company, little more than sugar water and sparkly bubbles? 

Or, the contentions that they were merely a high-end niche product builder that could never achieve mainstream prominence? 

First, they “ignored” the worst recession and global financial crisis since the depression to avoid suffocation from a consumer spending swoon, and in the process, take market share, grow their already mighty operating margins and fortify their swollen cash reserves.

That, my friend, should have been the moment when the naysayers finally grokked once and for all that Apple had built themselves an “unfair advantage” predicated on halo effects, deeply integrated solutions across product, ecosystem and channel, and a simple mantra, “It’s the Platform, Stupid!”  

Alas. Enter March Quarter, 2010, and Apple has done it once again.  

How so? They grew top line revenues 49% year-over-year to $13.5B (12.5% better than projections) and net income 90% year-over-year to $3.07B (36% better than projections), in the process, throwing another $1.9B of cash into their coffers (they now have $41.7B in cash/cash equivalents).

But, it’s the “how “ side of the equation that is most impressive, beginning with the iPhone and ending with the Apple Stores.

Simply put, iPhone blew the doors off the barn, realizing a best-ever quarter of 8.75M units sold – a year-over-year increase of 131%, which is over three times the growth rate of the overall smart phone segment – while maintaining an ASP (average selling price) of ~$600 per iPhone. 

What made iPhone so strong? Well, consider that Asia Pacific grew 474% year-over-year; Japan grew 183%, Europe another 133%, and so on.  

In other words, the iPhone continues its run unabated as a global phenomenon, not so easily dismissible by skeptics as a bauble for wealthy Americans defaulting through savvy marketing to a popular consumer brand. 

Candidly, the iPhone numbers are what impressed me the most about the earnings, given rumors of a new iPhone coming this Summer (which could have led to consumer purchase delays), and the very valid question of whether Apple has captured the low-hanging fruit of well-to-do consumers, and thus, would face slowing growth ahead.  It wouldn’t have shocked me if it had played out differently, but it didn’t.

Meanwhile, Apple still apparently sells these things called Macs, and in the March quarter, Apple achieved its best March quarter ever, selling 2.94M Macs (vs. a 2.7M units consensus), representing 33% year-over-year growth (relative to 24% for the rest of the market).

Similarly, the iPod business, which is rapidly coming to mean iPod touch, did 10.9M units in the quarter versus 11M in the same quarter last year, which translated to 12% revenue growth – Apple’s best performance in two years – owing to iPod touch unit sales growth of 63% year-over-year, and the device’s higher ASP than classic iPod models.

The other key “yowza” from the earnings call was Apple retail, where Apple Stores continue to rock. Here, the company did $1.68B through the Apple Stores, versus 1.38B in the prior year’s quarter, but most importantly, they grew same-store sales to $5.9M per store from $5.5M in the prior year.  The same-store numbers represent the company’s best performance in six quarters.

As an old retail guy, I can tell you that same-store sales are a key indicator that a company is growing the right way (versus cannibalizing its pre-existing retail footprint by simply opening more stores).

All in all, it’s time for someone to say, “uncle,” but you just know they won’t.

Related Posts:

1. Ruminations on Apple Q1, 2010 Earnings Call and Investor “Dead Zones”
2. Holy Shit! Apple’s Halo Effect
3. Built-to-Thrive - The Standard Bearers: Apple, Google, Amazon

Unicorn Labs launches; Unicorn Shots is live in App Store (#23 in Photography)

Well, it was inevitable.  From the first post that I wrote back in January, 2008 on the iPod Touch to my follow-on analysis at the launch of the iPhone Platform in March, 2008, and the more than 30 posts that have come behind it, it was a given that I would launch a company in the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad native applications space.

After dabbling with a 'Mobile Video meets Twitter' web service by the name of Twiddeo and advising/assisting Square Connect, who makes an iPhone App-based Universal Remote Control solution (it recently launched in the App Store HERE), it's time to once again 'Eat My Own Dogfood.'

Thus, I am happy to announce the launch of Unicorn Labs (with my co-founder, Alex Mostoufi), which you can read about here:

Unicorn Labs was started by a small (and growing) team of serial entrepreneurs in San Francisco in January, 2010. We are driven by a deep passion for the iPhone (and its siblings, iPod Touch and iPad), gaming and the pursuit of all things social as the bedrock of mobile/mobility computing.  We work hard, play even harder, and are driven to win. Why settle for mediocrity, right?

Having worked together at me.com (sold to Apple in 2007), a community-building platform startup that drove social networking into thousands of niches and affinity groups, we asked ourselves what unique, engaging and fun could we bring to the social, mobile universe, and Unicorn Labs was born.

Our credo is to deliver a user experience that we'd be equally proud to share with friends and family, as to use ourselves, but to always be sufficiently humble to listen to what the technology – and our base of users– is telling us.  

Give our first product, Unicorn Shots, a try. Then, let us know if we're delivering the goods, and where you think we can do better.  We can ALWAYS do better. :-)

I Need Your Help

Now's the part of the post where I ask for a favor.  If you own an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, can you help me out by Taking a Unicorn Shot?

Unicorn Shots is a silly fun 'Zen Garden' that allows you to take your pictures and morph them into weird, weird stuff. It's free, really simple and rocketing up the Charts in App Store Popularity (currently #23 in Photography),

Specifically, I would love it if you could download Unicorn Shots, try it, and if you like it, tell your friends to do the same (especially if they have kids). Also, if you really like it, I'd love you to write a review and give it a good rating in App Store.

Here is a link to the Description & Download

Unicorn Shots: The Crazy Scene Maker featuring Eye Follow

Contest: Win a FREE iPad

To celebrate the launch, we are doing a low-key contest, whereby if you send us a fun picture that you've created in Unicorn Shots, we will enter you into a Drawing to Win a Free iPad.

Follow us on Twitter for more Details:

http://twitter.com/unicornlabs

Related Posts

1. iPod Touch: the first mainstream Wi-Fi mobile platform?
2. iPhone SDK: Mobile reasons for optimism
3. iPad First Impressions: The Good, the Not So Good and the Not Yet

Grumpy old men, the "Inmates" and margins (iPad, iPhone and the future of computing)

As the iPad descends upon us, it is fair to ask, "Is this the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning?" Depending upon whom you ask, the conclusions widely vary.

For example, RealNetworks' Rob Glaser forcefully argues that Apple's vertically integrated model "Must be stopped." He cautions: "If that's the way the industry plays out -- and there are a couple of vertical stovepipes that are closed -- A: we will have a much slower pace of innovation than we've ever had and B: there will be a tremendous loss in terms of value creation versus it being more horizontal."

Meanwhile, science fiction writer, blogger and tech activist, Cory Doctorow, recently made waves when he asserted in 'Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either)' that, "If you can't open it, you don't own it. Screws not glue." He concluded:

The real issue isn't the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it. If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn't for you. If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn't for you. If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you're going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn't for you.

And don't even get me started on the legions who dismiss Apple's end-to-end approach with an "Apple's Evil" slap, or more stridently, paint the story as "destined" to play out as things did in the PC Wars, with arrogant Apple racing to an early lead, only to get its head handed to it in the end.

I won't spend a lot of time bringing to the fore the masses that see the Apple model in more favorable terms, as the numbers speak for themselves across just about any metric that matters:

• 85 million iPhones/iPod Touches/iPads sold
• 185,000 applications built
• 100,000 developer ecosystem
• 4 billion application downloads
• 15 billion iTunes media sold
• JD Power Award for Customer Satisfaction
• Ungodly operating margins/cash flow

So how to reconcile the animus with the market's clear directional momentum? 

Read the full post @ O'Reilly Radar by clicking HERE.

Related:

• Innovation, Inevitability and Why R&D is So Hard
• The Chess Masters: Apple v. Google
• Open "ish": The meaning of open, according to Google
• Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best
• iPad First Impressions: The Good, the Not So Good and the Not Yet

iAds, Game Center and a Bunch of Filler (Quick Takes on the iPhone 4.0 OS Announcement)

A year ago at this time (March 17th to be exact), Apple was announcing iPhone 3.0, a release that I dubbed ‘Block the Kick,’ inasmuch as the depth of functionality incorporated into that release was indicative of a company (Apple) that had learned the lessons of the past, and wasn’t going to give the nascent competition any chance to catch their breadth, let alone make up ground on Apple's massive market lead.

Here we are a year later, and it should be clear to all, based upon today’s announcement, that the iPhone OS is rapidly reaching maturation; the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad Ecosystem is thriving; and Apple is now looking to consolidate their position (which I believe will lead to more form-factor derivatives in the next 18 months).

In consolidation phase, you fill your remaining gaps and polish the diamonds in the rough, but generally speaking, slow down the pace of pure innovation.

First some numbers:

• Apple has now sold 450K iPads
• Apple has sold 50M iPhones and 35M iPod Touches
• 4B Apps have been downloaded from App Store
• 185K Total Apps in App Store 

If you want the deep dive breakout of features in this release, Brad Stone of The New York Times has the consolidated version and gdgt has the verbose version, including the Q&A Session after the event with Steve Jobs.

My focus is on the standouts, of which there are a few. I divide these into 'Fill the Gaps' and 'Differentiators,' as the former are already incorporated on other mobile platforms, whereas the latter have the potential to push innovation in the mobile applications space.

Fill the Gaps:

• Multi-tasking: Apple’s approach here is to provide specific APIs for - A) Audio services to incorporate multi-tasking (think: Pandora playing music in the background while doing other things on your iPhone); B) Voice over IP (think: Skype receiving calls while in other apps); C) Background location (think: TomTom updating turn by turn directions even if you leave the app); D) Local Notifications, a server-less model that enables real-time location dependent social services (think: Loopt or Foursquare updating your location to tell you who’s nearby or to provide location-aware offers - In a nod to privacy concerns, a triangle-type of indicator in the iPhone’s status bar will notify users when this feature is being used by an app, and give granular controls to enable/disable on an app by app basis; E) Task completion allows tasks that take some time, such as uploading a photo to the Internet, to be pushed to the background when a user switches to another application; and finally, F) Fast App Switching, which enables users to leave or return to an app while preserving its last state.
• Folders: This is Apple’s solution to having page after page of scattered applications; pretty elegant and clean.
• Unified Mailbox: The current model is to have to toggle between multiple email accounts, which is especially heinous on the iPad.  Now you can manage one in-box, toggle between accounts, between threads, handle attachments, etc.
• Corporate/Enterprise Features: Better encryption and mobile device management, as well as more tools to deploy custom applications to employees.  More is good, but it's hard to get too excited until I see Apple making a concerted effort around verticals and specific corporate-focused applications.
• iBooks for iPhone: This is an extension of what was just added for iPad, and gains multi-device syncing capabilities, making it closer structurally to the Kindle application.

Differentiators:

• Game Center: With 50K games in the App Store, which Apple happily noted represents 10X the number of game and entertainment titles on rival mobile platforms from Sony and Nintendo, Apple is essentially co-opting the social gaming network platforms (think: OpenFeint and ngmoco’s Plus+) with this feature set, which enables creation of leaderboards, profiles, player-to-player challenges, cross-game discovery and the like.  This is a smart move for Apple to add this to the platform, as it can also funnel Genius functions (and a social graph in general), and while Apple was scarce on the details, it falls into the same bucket as In-App Purchasing; yet another tool to enable developers to engage, cross-pollinate, and thereby, better monetize. Sidebar: the release of Game Center is slated “slightly behind" the overall rollout of OS 4.0.
• iAds: This is the mobile advertising system that is being built into the core OS as a result of their acquisition of Quattro Wireless, and was arguably the most provocative, compelling aspect of the whole event.  Why? Well for one, with 185K apps out there, Apple has the kind of critical mass needed to affect a total reboot of the mobile advertising segment in the Apple image, and away from the Google search/display centric model (Sidebar: Apple estimates that they could serve up to 1B ad impressions a day under such a model).  By that, I mean ads which are more deeply integrated within the application, enabling either rich media extensions to the application or non-disruptive paths in, out and back into the mobile applications itself (i.e., so clicking on the ad doesn’t effectively kick you out of the application, a huge disincentive to click in the first place). In the demo, Apple showcased three different types of mobile ads, all of which can be created using HTML5 (goodbye, Flash).  The first example was an iAd for ‘Toy Story 3,’ which was an integrated media unit called a microsite, complete with a simple game, posters, video and audio clips from the movie. The second was a Nike ad that showcases the deep OS-level integration that enabled an ad to incorporate video and interactivity in the form of shaking the iPhone to switch to new video clips of basketball dunks over the years. The third and final ad was a Target ad of a dorm room, whereby a college student could accessorize the room by choosing different items. Left unspoken, unfortunately, was how exactly iAds are incorporated into the SDK. Is it a separate tool chain, part of the core toolset, or what?  And Apple didn't say peep one about their plans relative to campaign management, analytics and ad inventory management, and the like.  Of particular note, Apple is giving developers a 60-40 split, which is a noticeable departure from the 70-30 split within the App Store.  That said, at least they are providing transparency.  No one knows what cut Google shares with its publishers. The bottom line is that this represents yet another way for developers to monetize on the iPhone Platform, while giving Apple a feather in their quiver to approach Madison Avenue and cultivate iAd agency businesses in the same way that Google did with the Search and Display Ad Market.  

The developer preview of iPhone OS 4.0 is available today but users won't get the new OS until summer, and iPhone 3G and first and second gen iPod Touches will NOT support multi-tasking. iPad will get OS 4.0 in the fall, which will invariably be the unification release for iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads.

Related Posts:

1. ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy
2. iPad First Impressions: The Good, the Not So Good and the Not Yet
3. Check Mate: Understanding Apple's iPad
4. Apple, the Boomer Tablet and the Matrix

 

The iPad as Companion Device - Day 3

Okay, so I bought this thing on Saturday afternoon; didn't get to take it out of the box until Sunday evening late.  

Sunday Night, the iPad took the place of my iPod Touch (which was actually my kids' at this point).  The iPad was, simply put, a better kind of companion to my overall computing, media, gaming and communications activities. 

On Monday, I brought the iPad to my meetings.  As, I don't generally take a computer with me to meetings, the net out was that the iPad replaced my Physical Notebook.  I am a heavy note-taker, and the premise of being able to have a really good notepad with me, that can readily take notes and doesn't then need to be transcoded back into digital form, is a winner for me.

So how did it do? Okay, but not incredible, but this is more of a software problem than a hardware problem so it is readily fixable, and I fully expect that it will be.

Today, I had a staff call with the full team on a project that I haven't really talked about yet, but suffice it to say that the team is geographically dispersed, and via Skype on iPad, we had a 90 minute voice conference call that was better than anything I've experienced using the same software on my Mac. 

Side Note: Sometimes, it is a network thing with Skype, and not a device thing, but I have done enough of these to say that this session was more than standout.  It was brilliant.

Back to blogging this right now, I reckon that this iPad is like having a really good chair. If personal comfort's your thing, the price is worth it.

iPad First Impressions: The Good, the Not So Good and the Not Yet

“Anyone who believes this thing is a game changer is a tool.” - Paul Thurrott (via Daring Fireball)

I broke with tradition and bought an iPad this weekend.  By tradition, I mean that while I am not adverse to being an Early Adopter of new technology, I am not one of those ‘gadget’ people who needs to be the first person on my block with the latest ‘it’ thingy. 

More to the point, I simply rarely feel compelled to make the buy decision on 1.0 products before the first tranche of consumer feedback has dribbled in.  Let others deal with the hiccups and bugaboos first.  

But, I felt compelled with iPad.  Why? Well, for one, I am a committed developer of iPhone Apps, and iPad is the same lineage.  Plus, underlying that is a general deep appreciation of the iPod touch as a consumer, so I sort of know what I am getting into with iPad.

No less, I am a believer that this next wave – mobile and mobility computing - comes down to successful execution of hardware, software and service platforms, and there can be little-to-no doubt that the iPhone Platform is the prototype for mobile success (to date) with:

• 75M iPhones/iPod Touches/iPad’s Sold

• 150K Applications Supported

• 100K Developer Ecosystem

• 4B Application Downloads

• 10B iTunes Media Sold

• Jaw-Dropping Operating Margins/Cash Flow Generation

• Unparalleled Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

Sure, some will lazily argue that consumers and developers are dumb or blindly loyal ‘fan boys,’ or more feebly, that iPhone developers are largely unhappy, and ready to shift their development resources elsewhere (read: Google’s Android). But, c‘mon, get real. The numbers, as measured quarter after quarter and in composite, don't lie.

Is iPad Really More than a Large iPod touch?

I threw in a teaser quote above to Paul Therrott’s  ‘Apple iPad Hands-On  First Impressions’ piece, as he writes the SuperSite for Windows blog and loves his iPhone, so he fits my litmus test of discerning skeptic not pre-disposed to all things Apple who nonetheless, is willing to love great products without caveat.  

While I disagree with his overall conclusion (I believe iPad is a game-changer), most, if not all, of his specific arguments are dead-on about the iPad (high design, some design quirks, and a non-essential device, given its somewhat fuzzy category), and if recent reports of Wi-Fi connectivity issues mirror my own direct experiences, there may be bumps ahead that the uninitiated are best to avoid until the iPad has a bit more seasoning.

And yet, I can’t help but feel that this is just the beginning of something big.

For one, the iPad is a surprisingly mature device, with a built-in platform of pre-existing apps, a thriving developer 'surround,' and equally important, the out-of-the box feel of the device does not disappoint.  After having spent a day in meetings with this as my computing device, calendar and note pad all rolled into one, it just feels right.

Plus, there are 75M owners of iPhones and iPod touches who automatically know how the iPad works and are favorably pre-disposed to it.  In fact, site unseen, my seven year old got up early so he could take the iPad for a test drive while I slept. Kids (engagement) don't lie.

In other words, even if you reduce the iPad story down to it being a really big iPod touch (i.e., 512% more screen real estate than an iPod touch and iPhone), it’s a good story, and there really is no other story out there that makes me go, “I want that instead.”

At the same time, I’d be less than honest if I didn't acknowledge that there is something rote about buying the next size up of your Apple 'iP' Nested Doll Set (iPhone, iPod touch, iPad). 

Some of this is the inevitable flow of Apple new product launches, perfected first with the original iPod, and then with iPhone. 

First comes delivering Device Integrity, and here Apple delivers long battery life (10 hours plus – it’s crazy good), computational peppiness, solid video, a decent physical footprint and the ability to be functionally used in 360 degree orientations – portrait or landscape, sitting in lap, upright as digital frame and/or tilted upside down. 

The bottom line is that Touch and Tilt is a great paradigm, and in this form-factor, it’s even better, which affirms why so many of the early adopters of iPad will be iPhone and iPod touch owners.  They are already sold on the user experience.

But, it’s the next stage – Software Differentiation – that I believe will be the point when iPad starts to find it’s ‘sea legs,’ just as the iPod touch did once iPhone SDK materialized; and for a number of reasons that I spell out HERE, the iPad is its own distinct derivative of the iPhone Platform branch, not merely a larger version of the same device. 

As such, we will see developer events and a specific set of features to take advantage of its native attributes.  With Thursday’s event putting the spotlight on iPhone OS 4.0, one wonders what iPad specific goodies will be in that grab bag.

Want to be a Fortune Teller?

This brings me to a story.  Long ago, I was in the real estate business.  My business partner and I went from operating in the LA Market to creating a presence in the Bay Area Market.  

Everyone assumed that we would be at a disadvantage moving into a new market, but as it turned out, lady luck was on our side. 

The LA Market happened to be further in the Boom and Bust Cycle than the Bay Area, and as a result we could see what was going to play out in the market in the coming months, and turn it to our advantage.  Markets that evolve cyclically are like that.

I feel that something similar is happening relative to the advent of the iPod touch, and so we know how this story is likely to play out.  I reckon that if I were to simply change the references from iPod touch to iPad in the post that I wrote over two years ago when that device was just launching – it’s called ‘iPod touch: the first mainstream Wi-Fi mobile platform? – I would have a respectable straw man of how iPad growth percolates.

The difference is that the iPod touch was pretty much sitting invisible behind the iPhone freight train, and also because the legacy iPod numbers were so big.  Hence, nobody really paid attention to iPod touch until it measured in the millions of devices sold.

Here, however, the external expectation is that iPad be judged on iPhone relativistic terms – a very clear segment - smartphones - where Apple was able to attack woeful competitors with an innovative value chain re-think.

With iPad, it’s going to be a slow burn, as people take time to discover the use cases where they’d feel envious if they didn’t have one, tied in part to the iPad-specific software catching up.  

In this regards, today’s news that Apple sold more iPads on the first day of sales than they did on iPhone's first day, will likely be cited as Exhibit A of the device’s 'failure' once it is unable to maintain pace with the iPhone in the days and weeks ahead, as it almost assuredly will (lines pretty much evaporated from my local Apple store by late Saturday afternoon).

As an investor, that will probably be a good time to find a better entry point into the stock.  By contrast, consumers will instinctively know when the iPad starts speaking to them.  For developers, I suspect this will all be background noise, and in the big picture, the device will sell plenty over the long-haul.

Related Posts

1. iPod touch: the first mainstream Wi-Fi mobile platform?
2. Check Mate: Understanding Apple's iPad
3. Rebooting the Book: One Apple iPad Tablet at a Time
4. It's in the Bag! The Apple Tablet Computing Device

The Tiger’s Stripes: Why the Lakers Will Not Repeat as NBA Champions

There is a saying that “A tiger doesn’t change its stripes,” which basically means that you shouldn’t expect tomorrow to be materially different than today is and yesterday was.

In the real world, this means that we become by virtue of manifesting and executing a daily practice, such that the journey is a consistent buildup to the destination that we desire to reach. 

This truth leads me to conclude – painfully and reluctantly; for I am a dedicated Lakers fan – that the Los Angeles Lakers will not repeat as NBA Champions this year.

By contrast, the very same assessment that I am making now – that a tiger does not change its stripes – is what gave me unwavering confidence that the Lakers would prevail last year (see HERE).

In a nutshell, last year when it got to crunch time in the playoffs - the Houston, Denver and Orlando series all were marked by Serious Challenges - I just knew that the Lakers would get it done.  And they did, delivering Catalytic Moments when it counted.

How was this know-able? The bottom line is that last year, when it counted, down the stretch, second half, and most importantly, in Big Games across the board - Home and Road - they rose to the occasion.

This year, they have not proven that they are better than a .500 team in big games, and they are especially unreliable on the road.

Last year, they exhibited something that I came to call an Anaconda Squeeze, which was a decisive point in the second-half of games where they squeezed the life out of the competition through a combination of offensively-disruptive defense and an offensive stampede on the other side of the ball.  

Beyond the point differential such a run would manifest, it was demoralizing to the competition and gave the Lakers a sense that they could and would deliver a knockout punch.

This year, I truly could pick the team apart on a number of levels, including lack of chemistry, injuries, the absence of a productive point guard, a bench that simply didn’t show up, not being hungry enough, failing to bring it every night, an up and down year for Kobe, etc.

But the bottom line is that a tiger doesn’t change its stripes.  

Last year, this truth was Success Incarnate.  This year, unfortunately, the opposite is true.

Related Posts

1. The Anaconda Squeeze: Why the Lakers Will Beat the Magic
2. Lakers-Celts and the Sporting Metaphor
3. NBA Basketball as Opera

Flurry (Mobile Analytics) New Project Starts and what they say about Apple, Android and RIM

Mobile analytics firm, Flurry, has been tracking (and making transparent) a wide variety of mobile analytics data for some time now so they pass the "sniff test" of credibility for observation and inference in my opinion (although, a caveat is that less clear is Flurry's market position in non-Apple segments, as that alone could fuel some degree of sampling bias).

In this latest infographic, they compare New Project Starts over the past 60 days to New Project Starts for all of 2009 so as to gauge both absolute and relative growth of Android, Blackberry, iPhone and now, iPad, respectively.

So what does the data reveal, and what conclusions or questions does it raise?

1. First and foremost, iPad, from a platform perspective, minimally is seeing serious "halo" effects as a result of its kinship to iPhone, with iPad alone jumping ahead of Android in terms of new project starts during this period.
2. The composite of iPhone, iPod Touch and  iPad affirm the veracity of my thesis that "It's the Platform, Stupid!"  Namely, that for all of Android's success in signing up handset OEMs, that has yet to translate to a mindshare shift with developers.  Quite the opposite. iPhone and its siblins have more mindshare than ever.
3. Related to #2 above, given the significant amount of Android App Starts in terms of raw numbers, it seems somewhat of a "tell" that there is yet to be one breakout (or especially noteworthy) Android app that HASN'T been released by Google, whereas we can name lots of apps and segments where iPhone Apps are unqualified hits.  
4. While Android is losing out in the market SHARE game with developers, it's not losing in absolute terms, as the overall pie is growing.  In other words, it's just garnering the proverbial smaller slice of a larger pie.
5. Relative support for RIM's Blackberry continues to diminish, with Flurry calculating 1% share for Blackberry in terms of New Project Starts over the last 60 days, down from 4% for the whole of 2009.  For RIM, this raises a difficult question. Can they succeed in the long run when their platform ambitions are failing so fully, and if not, what are they going to do about it?   

In any event, you can read the full post by Flurry Analytics HERE.

Related Posts:  

1. Check Mate: Understanding Apple's iPad 
2. Android’s ‘Inevitability’ and the Missing Leg
3. Holy Sh-t! Apple's Halo Effect