Operating systems don’t matter

Yep, it’s true. Despite all the calls I get about Windows Mobile, Android, S60, Vista, Leopard, Linux etc… , the truth is, operating systems don’t matter. Well, that’s not true. They matter to me, they matter a lot to the folks who sell them and they matter to developers but as far as consumers go, operating systems don’t matter to them at all (even though they think they do).

So what does matter? Applications, of course. (and that’s why developers care about the OS). I’ve bought a lot of PCs in my day. I didn’t buy a PC because of DOS, I bought it to play Starflight, SkyFox, Zork and run WordPerfect and DBase. I didn’t get Macintosh to use Mac OS, I cared about MacWrite and MacPaint. There’s a reason we call operating systems platforms, that’s because they allow developers to build cool stuff that we can all use. No cool stuff… no market share. Period.

The head of Black and Decker once said, folks don’t buy our products because they want one inch drills, they buy our stuff because they want one inch holes. It’s all about the apps and that’s why the mobile OS platform is shaping up to become a real battleground

 

UPDATE. I’m told the quote is actually from Theodore Levitt.
"People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole." — Dr. Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School Professor emeritus

Can you help me define what a smartphone is?

Here’s a fun exercise. Do a search for analyst, smartphone, forecast. What you get back will likely be a wide mix of numbers with a huge variance. Now, analyst firms often will vary on numbers but usually not but such a wide margin. The reason I suspect is that not everyone seems to be counting the same things. Some firms insist current Palm OS devices are still really PDAs not smartphones. Others exclude RIM and Blackberry. In short, a term that used to be meaningful has really become useless as a measure. The reason is simple. Before you can count and forecast, you need to classify.

There’s simply no good definition of a Smartphone. Any definition is either going to exclude devices that clearly are part of the category or include devices that should be left off. In my last forecast at Jupiter Research I did not use the term at all and instead used a set of overlapping categories with hierarchal super-set of features. Smartphone, however is an industry term, so once again, I’m taking a crack at a definition. So dear reader, i’ll ask you, what’s your definition of a smartphone circa 2009-2010? Careful, it’s not a easy as you might think

(side note, as I’ve said before, the whole phone thing is a euphemism anyhow. let’s face it, an iPhone, G1 or Blackberry is really just a pocket sized computer that happens to have the ability to do telephony. hardly what I’d have called a phone in days gone by)

From lifestyle based technology to technology based lifestyles

Now that we’ve shifted our clocks for daylight savings time in the US, I’m once again amazed at our dependence on devices with integrated clocks  to manage our lives that all have software written to automate the change and the process that can’t be changed to reflect to the new rules we started with last year. Looking around my house, there are personal computers, handheld devices, DVRs and other gadgets that all needed to be told about the change many that still have not been updated. Here’s an exercise. Look around your home and office. See how many different things you own that have clocks in them, the number will surprise you.

It’s one of the pitfalls moving from lifestyle based technology to technology based lifestyles.