The Network Garden - Mark Sigal's Blog

Thoughts on 'Open Letter' to RIM's Senior Management, and RIM's Public Response

If you haven't heard, Apple and Android are beginning to suck the life out of RIM, makers of Blackberry, arguably the creators of the smartphone.

As a long-time (now, former) Blackberry owner, I blogged about the inevitably of such as outcome as early as 2009 and again, earlier this year.

Well, now the rank-and-file within RIM are beginning to get restless, and so it's no surprise that an anonymous employee wrote a public 'open letter' (published on BGR) asserting what ails the company.

It is well written, reasoned, constructive and actionable (i.e., worth a full read). Here is an excerpt:

We simply have to admit that Apple is nailing this and it is one of the reasons they have people lining up overnight at stores around the world, and products sold out for months. These people aren’t hypnotized zombies, they simply love beautifully designed products that are user centric and work how they are supposed to work. Android has a major weakness — it will always lack the simplicity and elegance that comes with end-to-end device software, middleware and hardware control. We really have a great opportunity to build something new and “uniquely BlackBerry” with the QNX platform.

It's also not surprising that RIM chose to respond publicly to the letter, for reasons that I will get to. Here's an excerpt:

It is obviously difficult to address anonymous commentary and it is particularly difficult to believe that a “high level employee” in good standing with the company would choose to anonymously publish a letter on the web rather than engage their fellow executives in a constructive manner, but regardless of whether the letter is real, fake, exaggerated or written with ulterior motivations, it is fair to say that the senior management team at RIM is nonetheless fully aware of and aggressively addressing both the company’s challenges and its opportunities.

My take? One, I feel for RIM in that the toughest part of responding to a letter like this is that you are damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Two, the incredulous tone only reinforces the wide market perception that RIM is tone deaf, either oblivious, defensive or in denial about the shift in market gravity from "feature phones" to "smart phones" to "app phones," and the company's weak position in that crucial latter bucket.

Case in point, marketing campaigns like "Amateur Hour is Over," which were launched in the face of deeply successful, well-reviewed and well supported (by developers) products like iPad, only accentuate the sense of an emperor wearing no clothes.

One suspects that until the company embraces a different narrative like, "we hear you, we get it and we are committed to working on it until we get it right," gravity won't become RIM's friend anytime soon.

That's the unfortunate truth for the good folks in Waterloo.

Related:

1. PlayBook: Confusing a Bag of Chicken Parts with a Living, Breathing Chicken
2. iPhone Killers, Blackberries and Chicken Parts (O'Reilly Radar Post)
3. Post-PC, Tablets and the iPad: BGC Investor Call Keynote (Podcast)

 

Google+ (Wake me up when I should care)

Dave Winer puts in best in 'Google Yawn,' deconstructing how efforts such as Google's new social project, Google+, are born.

They are the bastard child of seeing every successful competitor as a new front on a war for global domination, youth and sexiness, but instead, only result in mediocrity and sloth.

I would (and will) certainly try the service before reaching the hard conclusion that Dave does, but we've seen this film enough times, haven't we? 

More to the point, as I noted when Google launched it's once-ballyhooed Buzz project ('Google Buzz: Is it Project, Product or Platform?'), Google's track record of shipping the idea, fixing it, and iterating to a winnable finish line is very un-Microsoft like.

You see, Microsoft's lethal-ness back in the day was knowing that 1.0 would lead to 1.1, 2.0 and finally something reasonably compelling by 3.0. Once they were in, they were ALL IN.

By contrast, Google tends to ship the idea, be fuzzy about their intent, and if it doesn't work, they kill it, and start over again.

It's harder to win in categories with serious, disciplined competitors if you keep launching 1.0 solutions (Buzz, Wave, Froogle, Latitude), and then killing them when they fail to achieve liftoff.

I think that that's the folly of their labs mentality, and why folks like me that actually have something better to do than beta test, ignore the latest Google frosting until it's clear that there's some cake beneath it.

So, Google, tell me when I should care.

Related:

1. Google Buzz: Is it Project, Product or Platform?
2. The Chess Masters: Apple versus Google
3. Open "ish": The meaning of open, according to Google

 

I enjoyed Joshua Topolsky's piece on iCloud and Apple's Truth but think it presents a False Dichotomy

via thisismynext.com

When it comes to Apple, it feels to me like the company views the web as a technology which undermines rather than enriches its products. It wants you to talk to the cloud, but only through its portals and its gateways, in closed loops and private networks. Is it possible that for the company Apple has become — the lock-in PC-maker, the gatekeeper, the retailer — there’s still a little too much Wild West in the web? Is Apple’s failure with or aversion to web services a byproduct of the desire for complete control over its ecosystem and products? Or is the gang in Cupertino just not that good at the internet?...Instead of pulling up the stakes here, Apple should be doubling down. The internet is not just going to go away.

XLNT piece by Topolsky, but I think that it presents a false dichotomy.  By his articulation, Apple is EITHER playing a zero-sum game to try and reinforce its Walled Garden; OR, it needs to embrace the Web browser as universal client, and invest aggressively in Web versions of its native apps. The truth, however, is more nuanced.

For almost 20 years, we have been promised that the Web will swallow up the PC, and yet PCs haven't quite gone away, most people aren't exclusively using Google Docs or Gmail, and the browser, as impressive as it is, kind of sucks.

Apple sees this, and is focused on delivering the best user experience, which in their world means native, integrated and a leveraged platform.  iCloud is a continuation of that truth. In parallel, they have delivered a very strong web experience, especially in their Post-PC devices.

I do think, however, that his larger question of whether there is a "gotcha" at the end of the rainbow is fair and reasoned, but I hold that same question front and center for Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, as none of these companies exist solely to make me happy.

They want my data, my dollar and my dedication, and use various means, fair and unfair, to lock me into giving it to them.

Four core takeaways from Apple's WWDC keynote (O'Reilly Radar)

The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote by Apple CEO Steve Jobs was pure "shock and awe," a showcase of the overwhelming power that has been assembled and orchestrated by Apple, the industry's emerging Post-PC gorilla.

Most impressively, the event and the specifics presented (iOS 5, iCloud, OS X Lion) during it were clearly staged to deliver an inspiring but chilling message: Whether you're a prospective customer, developer, channel partner, or competitor, "resistance is futile."

What follows are my four core takeaways from the keynote.

No. 1: The halo effect

Three years ago, I wrote that Apple had made, and was brilliantly executing on, a handful of trend bets that left it uniquely positioned within the marketplace.

These bets included:

1. Making the mobile Internet caveat-free.
2. Harnessing rich media as the "my stuff" bucket that matters.
3. Treating everything in their arsenal as an integrated platform (from PC to device to online service).
4. Leveraging and deriving core technologies from one product family to cross-pollinate another.

At the WWDC keynote, Jobs and company repeatedly asserted that "it just works" (the ultimate caveat-free mantra) when presenting this feature or that. They noted that no one else can assemble all of these pieces to deliver this type of solution.

Similarly, a heavy emphasis was placed on extending the utility, reach, and integration of:

• Personal media: Via camera enhancements, which use Apple's Core Image camera technology, and a new Photo Stream service, which will run on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Mac and the Apple TV.
• Personal documents: iWork now runs on everything from the iPhone and iPod Touch to the iPad and the Mac, and it'll soon be cloud-enabled via Documents in the Cloud.
• Messaging/scheduling/contacts: Via the new iCloud service, which revamps and subsumes the company's disappointing MobileMe service. The new iMessage offering is poised to disrupt the SMS business.
• Professional media: Via iTunes in the cloud and a new iTunes Match service; a new magazine and newspaper subscription service called Newsstand, which complements its iBookstore; and unique to Apple, liberal rights to use the same media now and into the future on multiple iOS devices.

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

Related

Apple's Halo Effect

Apple's Segmentation Strategy (and the Folly of Conventional Wisdom)

Understanding Apple's iPad

Five reasons iPhone vs Android isn't Mac vs Windows

 

Kirkus Reviews gives Spot the Dot a Kirkus Star as a Book of Remarkable Merit

(via Kirkus Reviews)

Here's the review of 'Spot the Dot,' a play-based iPad eBook which was conceived by pop-up master David A. Carter ('One Red Dot' and 'Bugs in a Box' series), and produced by Unicorn Labs for Ruckus Media.

SPOT THE DOT (reviewed on July 1, 2011)

The Picasso of paper engineers (One Red Dot, 2005, etc.) displays a dab hand at concocting even more thoroughly interactive explorations of shape and color for touchscreens.

At a genial narrator’s invitation (followed by a hearty “Good Job!” after each successful poke), children spot and touch ten dots, each a different color, on as many screens. Said dots are concealed with increasing sophistication, from easy-peasy early ones placed on a checkered background or, Concentration style, under opaque covers. More difficult screens feature of movable “spotlight” illuminating shapes behind a black screen and tumbling arrays of circles, squares, stars and hearts of various size and hue. Spying the final, white, dot in a dazzling multi-screen maze of geometric forms will challenge the sharpest eyes, and should probably not be attempted by the easily irritated. The graphics are bright and simple, the pace is entirely controlled by the viewer, all of the dots will be in different places on subsequent visits to their respective pages, and all can also be hunted down in any order.

Clean of look, seamless in design: a delight even for the diapered crowd. (iPad game app. 1-6)

---

Pub Date: May 25th, 2011

Publisher: Ruckus Mobile Media

Related Posts

1. Rebooting the Book: One iPad at a Time
2. Anatomy of an eBook App
3. The Five Keys to a Successful eBook Production: The Story of Spot the Dot

Rebooting the Book, Part Two – Ruminations on Book Expo America

Back in Fall 2009, with anticipation running high that Apple would release a tablet computing device (they did; the iPad, in case you haven’t heard), I wrote a piece called ‘Rebooting the Book.’

In it, I theorized that the book business, and the book medium itself, was poised to undergo a massive transformation every bit as significant as when the ‘talkie’ usurped the silent film in the 1920’s.

The moral of the story from the film industry’s revolution was that such a cataclysmic event in the book industry would not only change the economics of the book business and the way books are made, but the very concept of what books are.

Since then, Borders, the second largest book store chain, has gone into bankruptcy, Barnes & Noble has put its entire business up for sale (its Nook eReader is widely perceived to be its greatest asset), Amazon has announced that they are now selling more digital eBooks via Kindle than hardcover and paperback print books – combined – and Apple’s iPad has become a runaway success, with books being the second most popular paid app category after games on the device (according to Nielsen).

Such is my backdrop for trying to making sense of Book Expo America, North America’s largest gathering of book trade professionals, which I attended last week in New York. What follows are the key takeaways:

1. Death of the Book Store: It was jarring how completely unprepared the book publishing folks seemed to be for the end of the ‘bricks and mortar’ book store. For example, the rumors that I hear are that Liberty Media, the company negotiating to buy Barnes & Noble, is doing it to get the Nook, and will shut down the bricks and mortar retail stores. If true, this presents a serious conundrum for publishers since, unlike manufacturers of other types of products, publishers today are at the total mercy of book stores for book marketing and book discovery. Yet, when I asked different execs at the show what their strategy would be if/when there are no bookstores, the response was akin to a deer in headlights. The silence was deafening. Barring a serious course correction, this suggests that they will be at the mercy of either Apple or Amazon in the long run, which is unfortunate.
2. There is no governing industry eBooks Philosophy: As the graphic below underscores, the term eBook can mean anything from a static, HTML-like Kindle book to something App-like that is animated, interactive, audio enhanced and which can respond to touch, tilt and shake. Unsurprisingly, there is no industry consensus on when, how and under what circumstances to deploy the various types of eBooks. Nor is there much consensus whether eBook creation is necessarily a core competency to be developed in-house or something to be outsourced. Part of this is stage of market, part of this is cost relative to return expectations and part of this is simply the DNA of the industry. 
   
3. Cost Sensitivity + Leverage: The two core takeaways I heard repeatedly were: A) show me how to take the cost per book down to a level where ROI (return on investment) is a no-brainer; AND B) show me a model where I can leverage technology to churn out a series of books rapidly as opposed to one book at a time, spread out over multiple months per book. In other words, this is an industry looking for about scale, leverage and return on investment.
4. Amazon is the Boogie Man: Not only did Amazon tout a new publishing solution at the show, but they recruited a big-name from the publishing world to go direct to authors and cut out publishers. Needless to say, this stirs incredible fear, uncertainty and doubt with publishers, who are deeply afraid of Amazon.  Later this year, when Amazon comes out with their much-rumored Android Kindle tablet this will only accelerate.
5. Publishing rights complicate greatly: The thing to remember is that each book has a contract with the author that defines what rights the publisher has to re-purpose the content. Mobile apps are a new category so it is very common for the publisher not to have rights to make an app, or if they do, then to be constrained by the level of interactivity before it is considered a movie or multimedia, which they may not have rights to. As such, the move to deeply interactive eBooks will be gated by such constraints.
6. EPUB 3: This is the new standard that is coming that will supposedly make books interactive. Also, it is based on HTML 5. In theory, such a standard could unify eBook standards and break down proprietary barriers. In practice, my experience is that these things take longer than predicted to take hold, and are often as much a blessing as a curse for proprietary approaches.

UPDATE: It looks like the other shoe has dropped, and Borders is now officially liquidating. The 400 remaining stores are closing, and 11,000 jobs are going away. WSJ has got a decent write up on this, as does paidContent. Any way that you slice it, there is no "lateral move" for the vast majority of people in middle-to-upper management at Borders, and with one of the two major remaining US book chains now gone, it also stands to reason that many of the folks that serviced these relationships on the publisher side of the fence risk being similarly affected. As to how this will affect authors, I guess the question is, "Is it easier or harder for new bands and new CDs to be discovered now that there aren't record stores anymore?" That's a somewhat comparable analog to books. And in the music industry, at least there is the blocking/tackling aspect of bands touring and playing gigs to build their audience and support themselves. Publishers and authors don't have this venue as readily, since book stores were a primary endpoint for book signings and book tours. Now, the short-term trend worth watching is whether this helps independent book stores to carve out profitable niches. I sure hope so.

Related Posts

1. Rebooting the Book: One iPad at a Time
2. Anatomy of an eBook App
3. The Five Keys to a Successful eBook Production: The Story of Spot the Dot

The Five Keys to a Successful eBook Production: The Story of Spot the Dot

One of my favorite axioms is, “If you want to see how it ends, look at how it begins.”

I think of this truth in trying to assess the recently launched ‘Spot the Dot,’ a visually mesmerizing, play-based children’s eBook that we produced in tandem with New York Times best-selling children’s author David A. Carter for Ruckus Media. 

For those who don’t know, Carter is a recognized master of the pop-up book, with over 6.5 million print books sold to date (fans of his ‘One Red Dot’ and ‘Bugs in a Box’ series are legion). 

But, this was the first time he’d be adapting his creative wizardry to the iPad, so there was always risk that in transitioning from a paper-based medium to a digital one something would get lost in translation.

Plus, ultimately this was a project being produced FOR someone else – Ruckus Media, in this case – so there was always the risk of conflicting agendas, miscommunication and a less than a sum of the parts end-product.

So how did it go? I am obviously biased, but I am super-happy with the results, which The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) frames as: 

"Spot the Dot is a fun mix of memory, visual discrimination and puzzles that will keep toddlers engaged. Most importantly, the game encourages adults to sit with the young player(s) and offer another level of engagement." 

You can decide for yourself by following the links to reviews of Spot the Dot at the bottom of this piece, or by downloading the FREE ‘lite’ version of the app, but my goal with the rest of this article is to share some “pattern recognition” of the five things that we did right in making Spot the Dot.

I see these items as cornerstones in helping us to successfully translate David A. Carter’s complex paper sculptures into interactive experiences for the touch screen – including ten discrete playspace experiences, such as “spotlight,” “popcorn,” “fractions” and “asteroids.”

The Five Keys to a Successful eBook Production

1. Clearly Articulated Storyboard: I give a lot of credit to Executive Producer Marc Cheshire for creating a storyboard structure that was both visual and specific, down to the level of desired voice-over sequences. The benefit of having a tangible document when decision paths were unclear, or we were at loggerheads about implementation details, was key to getting everyone synced up.
2. Documenting of Process and Progress via Basecamp: When you have three companies working across five different geographic locations, there are endless opportunities for key details to disappear into the ether. Similarly, there is the perpetual risk of losing hours or days chasing down a resource, such as an image or audio file, that was previously provided. Like any project management methodology, Basecamp is not perfect, but it was the junction point and corporate memory mechanism for a whole lot of composition that would likely have otherwise not been synergized.
3. Frequent (Weekly) Builds to keep things Tactile: There is no substitute for See-Touch-Feel. You can discuss implementation details, workflows and user experience until you are blue in the face, but when every sees it and experiences it firsthand on their own device, it’s a lot easier to separate the wheat (and the heat) from the chaff. Similarly, we timed weekly builds to a weekly thirty-minute “alignment” call, and the combination was very purposeful.
4. Sound is Core to the eBook Experience: A revelation fairly early in the project is the power that really good sound can bring to an eBook. Think voice-over, ambient sounds and audio effects. Just as Spielberg and Lucas harness great sound in breathing an extra dimension into their productions (think: 'Jaws,' 'Star Wars' and 'Indiana Jones'), so did we, and so should you.
5. Leverage of a Proven App Foundation: Everyone has their favorite programming methodologies and toolsets for development, so let me acknowledge fully that I am biased and that your mileage may vary. That stated, we leveraged Ansca’s Corona framework and our own eBook engine, Unicorn Engine for eBooks, for rapid application development.  What did that gain us? Number one, it allowed us to build ten mini-applications (i.e., the playspaces) into one master eBook app in about 90 days, probably half the time it would have taken us if we had to hand code. Two, it enabled the client to spend their “custom currency” on differentiating features instead of table stakes. Three, it gave us a straight path to come out with iPhone and Android versions of Spot the Dot, owing to the multi-device, multi-OS nature of these technologies. 

You may be thinking that very little of this is earth-shattering, and that’s the point.

Through a combination of good process, clear communication, systems-based leverage and keeping things hands-on, the path to building a compelling eBook experience is defined by what you establish at the start of the project as much as what you do throughout the project's lifecycle.

Check out this short video, which is David A. Carter’s assessment of the make process.

Spot the Dot Reviews

1. How a Children's iPad App is Made: Spot the Dot by Ruckus (WIRED)
2. Spot the Dot for iPad is a Fun, Simple Children's Game (TUAW)
3. Kirkus Star recipient, Spot the Dot (Kirkus Reviews) 
4. Spot the Dot Review (Teachers with Apps)
5. Spot The Dot - Latest Fun Educational App for Toddler and Pre-schoolers (FEA)
6. The Educational Components of Spot the Dot (applicable2u)
7. Spot the Dot — iPad App Review (Pad Gadget)
8. 10 Apps You and Your Kids Will Love (The Twin Coach)

Related Posts

1. Anatomy of an eBook App (O'Reilly Radar)
2. Creating a Top 10 eBook with Corona (Ansca Website)
3. Rebooting the Book: One iPad at a Time (O'Reilly Radar)
4. Ruminations on last week's Book Expo America: What it means for the Book Biz (The Network Garden)