Aesthetics and eBooks

5 November 2009

My colleague Moe Kelley makes an incredibly important point in his recent post about the importance of aesthetics.

Yesterday I was teaching the E Ink case study in my New Technology Ventures program at London Business School. It involved a fascinating and lively discussion, about what were the key parameters that characterized the available technologies, and re-emphasized just how important the aesthetic of books is.

I love books. I have a house full of books. My wife worries about the load on the ceilings. There are stacks of them in our bedroom. And in lots of other places in the house. I have a clinical Amazon.com habit, going back more than 10 years to 10 September 1999 (my sister’s birthday), during which I have bought hundreds of books.

Nevertheless, the class almost unanimously recognized and embraced the elegance of the industrial design of the Kindle DX that I used to demonstrate what E Ink does. It’s a different aesthetic, but compelling nonetheless.

Kindle DX

Kindle DX

Although technology (hard factors) matter, even in high-tech we must never lose sight of the importance of soft factors, such as aesthetics.

One of the most interesting and insightful pieces of thesis work that I supervised at MIT involved a systematic exploration of the relationship between these hard factors (functions, performance) and soft factors (ease of use, aesthetics), and how their relative importance to customers evolves over the life cycle of a particular product type.

Getting this balance wrong the other way can, however, also be disastrous; much of Motorola’s current parlous position flows from it being seduced by the soft factors success of the RAZR:

Motorola RAZR V3

Motorola RAZR V3

It provides the user with a total sensory experience – from the innovative metallic finishes and use of materials to a truly revolutionary, chemically etched keypad created from a single sheet of nickel-plated copper alloy. The Motorola RAZR V3 is the ultimate, beautiful slim-phone.

Take time out to enjoy the feel, touch and finish of the model RAZR V3. The metal materials and finishes
create a smooth, easy-to-use phone that has real visual impact. The spun metal finish of the keypad is designed to gently reflect the light, whilst a blue electro-luminescence panel defines each character and key, creating an unmistakable RAZR V3 signature.

As a result, it lost sight of how technology was evolving, and was extremely late in responding to the transition to the app phone.

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Posted by Michael A M Davies

Smartphone surge shortfall

31 July 2009

One of our recent projects involved taking a very long term look at demand for wireless infrastructure in the United States – going out twenty years. A couple of really interesting things came out of it:

  • just how long it takes for technologies to move from the lab to having a significant market impact – something I’ll cover in another post
  • the balance between demand and supply for network capacity over the next few years

On the one hand, there’s a surge in smartphones, and smartphones that are powerful and easy to use drive significantly more data traffic. On the other hand, wireless network operators will soon be able to make use of the new spectrum that they have acquired in one form or another, and they will soon be able to start the transition to Long Term Evolution (LTE).

How do these play out?

  • how much increased demand does a smartphone put on a cellular network?
  • how much does new spectrum help?
  • what is the payoff from deploying LTE?
  • what does the relative timing look like?

For the first question, we are indebted to one of our specialist partners, who we worked with to cut their data so that we could figure out the differential load of diverse devices.

For the second and third questions, spectrum and LTE, we built a simple model that estimated the overall impact, taking into account the different circumstances of each of the major US network operators.

Although building out the network infrastructure is both challenging and capital intensive, it’s not enough, however. Getting the payoff also requires getting devices into the hands of customers; this is what constrains the benefits from more spectrum and new technology.

Smartphone surge and shortfall

Smartphone surge and shortfall

This picture shows in schematic form the smartphone surge, and the resulting shortfall in network capacity. As smartphones become widespread, they’re going to drive a nearly tenfold increase in demand. The payoff from new spectrum and LTE will be significant, but not enough to absorb all of this demand; over the next several years growth in demand outstrips growth in supply, and they don’t come back into balance until sometime around 2015 or beyond.

Now this analysis focused on smartphones; it doesn’t take into account a couple of other things:

  • laptops with data cards – not as numerous but can drive several times as much demand – or devices like Verizon’s incredibly cool MiFi which provide the same capability (and which I’m using to post this from here)
  • other mobile devices or appliances, such as Amazon’s Kindle™, where we may see a lot of innovation through programs such as Verizon’s

These may also have a significant impact, depending on just how many people adopt them, and how their usage patterns evolve. But that’s a topic for another day…

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Posted by Michael A M Davies

Evaluate on ‘edge cases’ and ecosystem

30 June 2009

Computerworld is publishing the results of its mobile deathmatch between the iPhone and the Pre (Mobile deathmatch: Can the Pre knock out the iPhone) on Monday (6 July) and is asking for feedback on what to evaluate the devices on. FWIW, The Register has a good comparison as well.

I’ve been using both intensely since the Pre was launched (along with an N97, and less intensely a Storm, a G1, a Bold and an X1), and the Pre does come closest to the iPhone.

There are two key criteria which differentiate all of these devices:

  • user experience (UX)
  • ecosystem (apps and content)

And when you dig deeper, ease of use is not so much about any individual app, it’s about the ‘edge cases’. They’re all pretty much the same for an individual stand-alone task, except where the hardware lets them down (like the resistive touch screen on the N97 and WinMo devices, and the Storm’s horrible hybrid).

The big difference is if the job that you want to get done is an ‘edge case’:

  • forward something from an SMS as an e-mail
  • take a video and post it
  • get information from a search and use it to navigate
  • pick up a e-book for casual reading for a few minutes
  • watch the second half of a movie on a smartphone that you started on the big screen TV last night
  • search for and get directions to the nearest Starbucks (certified caffeine addict)

This is where the iPhone (particularly now it’s got cut-and-paste) excels. Easy to switch apps; lots of them.

They play nice together; take the integration of Where with Google Maps:

  1. Swipe to the screen with Where on
  2. Tap on Where
  3. Tap on Starbucks
  4. Tap on the nearest icon
  5. Tap on Get Directions

Five taps, because there’s a nice little app, and good interworking; 17 seconds.

I just checked, on my big desktop it takes three times longer – ~50 seconds:

  1. Mouse to the search field in Safari
  2. Type ’starbucks’ into the field, hit return
  3. Mouse over to and click on ‘Store Locator‘
  4. Mouse over to the ‘Postal Code’ field and click in it
  5. Type my ZIP code ‘01742′ into the field
  6. Mouse over to and click on the ’submit’ button
  7. Mouse over to and click on the nearest store
  8. Mouse over to and click on ‘Driving Directions’
  9. Type in my street address: about thirty characters and four tabs between fields
  10. Mouse to and click on the ’submit’ button

Seven (7) mouse movements, about forty characters of typing.

Worth noting as well, with the app, Google sees much less; how will this affect its economics over the long-term?

Or the amazing Kindle app, which syncs to the last page read in the book that I’m reading.

For messaging and communication tasks, the BlackBerry (except the Storm) is better at mixing and matching modes than anything else.

The Pre’s pretty good as well. Where it falls short is in the complementary ‘cloud services’ and in the apps. The user interface is very elegant, and has some nice touches (pun intended), but it falls so far short on the apps side. The sync with iTunes does, at least for the moment, work surprisingly well.

There’re now a slew of apps on the Phone, like Where and At Bat (Red Sox fan, no zeal like that of the convert) and SugarSync and WordPress on which I depend. The Pre and WebOS has Where, but none of the others.

Without the strong support of either or both a major global network operator (Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile or Telefonica) or licensing to and working with one or more of the top tier ‘independent’ device vendors (Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, HTC or Motorola) Palm won’t get the market momentum it needs to build an installed base to enroll developers. Shipping the SDK so late and expanding the developer program so slowly doesn’t exactly help, either.

So, evaluate smartphones on ease of use for edge cases, and their supporting ecosystem.

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Posted by Michael A M Davies