Why Everyone Won’t Succeed

Most people in the daily drive to get the job done focus on what it take to succeed. So I was caught off guard when I was recently asked “Why will some efforts at mobile search fail?” Of course, most such efforts will fail. And they will fail despite being funded by VCs that hate to fail and that put a lot of effort into picking a high quality team that hates to fail. That team, in turn, will work very hard to succeed.

There are general answers: there isn’t room in the market for all the ventures that enter it to succeed; some will be undercapitalized, some will fail due to project risk. But those are unsatisfyingly unspecific answers. To provide a really good answer to why most attempts at mobile search will fail, the answer must, at least, carve out a slice of the problem space, and it must say how this kind of answer applies to mobile search, and how it does not apply to startups in general, or search in general. I find that there is a fairly clear and informative answer to why some people – and I aim to make sure this means “other people” will fail: Mobile search is a classic case of interdisciplinary development.

Unified messaging, the focus of a company I started many years ago, was also a case where mastery of two very different disciplines was required. Then, as now, however, the difficulty of integrating across two disciplines where you will seldom find experts in both is hard to measure, and is often not taken into account in measuring the ability of a venture to capture and defend a position in the market. That is, this is both a hidden danger and an underappreciated quality.

It is, of course, easy to enumerate the features of voice mail, and of email, but, as evidenced by the implementations, most attempts failed to integrate the two correctly. Successful implementation of the idea of unified messaging required insight into the direction – not just the current position – of voice processing and messaging systems, mainly in the area of emerging APIs and standard interfaces, and it required integrating this knowledge right through to the business model and business development strategies. Even Active Voice, which is widely regarded as the exemplary case in unified messaging for having the best integration to messaging standards, did not until fairly recently, when media gateway nodes displaced voice processing cards as the interface point, fully abstract hardware from the unified messaging system.

In hindsight is it fairly clear: unless you see where messaging and voice processing are going, you can’t position yourself correctly among your technology providers and channels. There is no obvious choke-point here – no way to deny a competitor who has figured this out access to the same partners and channels, so this isn’t widely seen as a differentiator. But the fact that so few entrants to the unified messaging field got this right means that interdisciplinary integration probably is a significant advantage that some ventures will wield with strong effect against their competitors. Not all ventures share this attribute, so there is probably something to be learned about building a venture where interdisciplinary integration is a requirement for success.

Mobile search is, if anything, a more difficult problem than unified messaging. At least three major distinctive areas of competency have to be integrated into a successful system: Mobile applications development; search; and IN (intelligent network) application development. These areas cannot integrate simply by gathering competent people in each. In fact, you will be hard-pressed to find compatible minds that have deep experience in each area, and that know how to reshape their own areas of expertise to fit with the others and extract the highest potential from the combination.

By “compatible minds” I mean people that can flex to fit the requirements of interdisciplinary innovation. Failure to flex means failure of the whole enterprise: mobile game coders will often fail to find the discipline to create an ambitious mobile application that works reliably. Symbian coders will fail to see that J2ME is an adequate platform, and that broad platform reach can be available through J2ME. Those steeped in search might fail to adapt to the limitations and opportunities of small-format presentation. And IN-experienced engineers can be too much in the telco mindset to integrate with anyone else with a more entrepreneurial world view. If the executive leadership of such an enterprise cannot encompass all that enough to evaluate if it is coming together or not, chances for success are diminished. If the participants reach only a minimal level of compatibility and fail to reach for ambitious goals in every distinct area of competency, the result will be easily matched and exceeded by competitors.

It can all be boiled down to four points:

• Only a small subset of ventures require innovation and audacity across multiple disciplines, so it isn’t a familiar problem.
• Apart from recognizing that some of these ventures are execution plays, VCs find the value of interdisciplinary innovation hard to measure.
• The participants in these ventures have to be inquisitive about each other’s domains of knowledge, and be able to seek innovation near those boundaries. The more dimensions to the problem, the less likely it is this will happen.
• The leadership, at the stages of founding, funding, and operating the enterprise have to be cognizant of their situation and act to make an interdisciplinary venture work.

But even simplified to this degree, interdisciplinary ventures are more complicated, and therefore more risky, than simpler plays. They are all the rarer in that, even when they are recognized it may only be to avoid them.

Interfaces Again

Early in my career, I wrote a book on Macintosh programming. Having worked on LISP workstations, I had used, and coded, graphical user interface programs, on one of the earliest systems to put a lot of effort into providing the tools to create a visual user interface. I was drawn to the Mac by the fact that a $3,000 computer could do what a $100,000 workstation did, and provide a much nicer look and feel. It was the first instance where I had seen, in depth, the benefits of balancing the effort that went into a GUI toward providing a pleasing user experience. The Mac was also a marvel of design compromise and implementation expediency – if it hadn’t been, it would have cost like a LISP workstation. Few now remember that the Mac was Apple’s second try. The Lisa, uglier and costlier, came first.

“A ‘pleasing’ user experience? And compared to what?” At the time, those were novel questions. The desktop metaphor design pattern and underlying architecture of multiple graphical contexts were solidly in place by then, but Steve Jobs was the first to get it right. The Mac had an interface that was up to standards that could be analogized to professional print layout design, while retaining all the structure of the desktop metaphor and windowing graphics system.

Since that time, the desktop metaphor got deconstructed into something more like the rock and roll magazine metaphor, as Web hypertext interfaces became the dominant area of interface design activity (desktop productivity having been pretty much done to death). Meanwhile, Sun tried to turn Java into a multi-platform GUI system, and, as if to illustrate the difficulty, is only now getting to a satisfactory result with the latest version of Swing, which still has no substantial library of applications.

Today, we are replaying this phase of user interface evolution in miniature. The memory and processor resources of mass-market mobile phones are about the same as the early Mac systems. A cut-down version of Java has evolved, in its MIDP 2.0 form, a usable user interface system for the small-screen medium – something short of a windowing GUI system, but good enough if one takes a more free-form approach to UI presentation.

The commercial and design contexts of mobile user interface creation are very different from the coherent drive to a desktop metaphor productivity suite that propelled early desktop GUI efforts. Mobile handsets have terrible user interfaces. Many mass-market phones don’t even try to have a good UI. Nokia’s Series 60 and Symbian UIQ are in danger of becoming obsolete before they fully evolve, having developed on too-limited platforms, and lacking a modern garbage-collecting implementation language. Windows Mobile is a very credible effort, with a long life ahead of it, but it suffers from Microsoft’s failure to develop momentum for Windows Mobile and of the curious and persistent incompleteness of the .NET Compact Framework to encapsulate all the platform APIs and become the unequivocal choice for UI implementation on the Windows CE platform. BREW, like Symbian-platform UIs, is stuck with C++ and an API that is inferior to the mobile version of Java, but BREW, at least, has been explicitly targeted at providing a customized user experience in Qualcomm’s new UIOne initiative.

Any serious effort to create a widely used GUI on mobile handsets has to encompass Java, BREW, and Symbian, and it has to provide a road map to cover Windows Mobile, Palm, RIM, and Linux-based 3G and VoIP handsets. It has to be designed in the context of present realities in handset hardware content, likely new applications like mobile video, and one-handed operation where the thumb – the least dexterous digit – is made to do all the work.

The Web has influenced UI design again. This time it isn’t by deconstructing the UI into an interactive hypertext Web, but by being the place where user interface has evolved toward search being the starting point of interaction.

So this is the environment into which my current effort at creating an ambitious non-game mobile application is launched. Compared with desktop GUI applications, the evolutionary stage of mobile platforms makes things more challenging: more variation in the platform. More technologies to understand. A necessarily multi-platform implementation. Fewer design rules, and certainly no Steve Jobs and his salutary UI fascism, but in a world with a lot more interactive design sophistication.

Success requires remembering this evolutionary context and using the analogies it provides to navigate the new challenges. Those new challenges, and the solutions, will write a new chapter in UI design.

After Games

I am no longer working at a mobile game company. Not because I became disillusioned with mobile games – I’m still advising people and companies in the mobile games arena. But the mobile games train has left the station. The time for startups in mobile games – at least until some fundamental shift occurs – has passed, and acquisitions and consolidation are a big part of mobile game news these days. I look forward to Kayak more-fully realizing the potential of the products the Chasma team created.

Mobile games transformed my view of a new vehicle for applications delivery. And, while mobile games are now a battlefield for larger companies, new areas of non-game mobile applications are opening up. The same low-friction channels and staggering numbers of mobile customers will do for mobile search and rich forms of mobile media what they did for mobile games. In many ways, the landscape is like that of mobile games three years ago: the technologies and delivery vehicles are there, waiting to be adroitly exploited.

Even more exciting than the mobile games business, where m-commerce and billing-on-behalf-of were the keys to making large piles of money from simple products, the business model for new fields like mobile search is still malleable. Stunning breakthroughs is business strategy will unfold alongside what are likely to be the most sophisticated mobile applications ever created.

Mobile search holds the key to a shift in the mobile telephony user’s usage patterns that is far more powerful than features like push-to-talk that, up to now, form the basis for differentiation among mobile service offerings. It is an exciting time in mobile applications that will reverberate through the whole structure of the mobile network.

To take but one example: Mobile video will be used in ways fundamentally different from the way people consume broadcast video. Substantially all of mobile video will be an on-demand, time-shifted, TiVO-like experience. So the grid-like schedule table that is a staple of cable TV user interface will be inadequate for navigating mobile video. In an on-demand world with an infinite content library, search is likely to be the first step every user takes on the way to the video they want to see.

Google’s brilliantly simple user interface has conditioned people to the belief that search is simple, because it is simple to use and delivers the right results so reliably. This is, of course, a misconstruction of what is, in reality, a subtle, deep, and complex system that happens to work very well. Even more than Web search, mobile search will tie together information sources from the mobile network, the Web, and numerous structured, specialized feeds into a product that appears simple, but represents a new level of sophistication in search, as well as breaking new ground in mobile applications.

This is going to be interesting!

Content Networking by the Numbers

Google has indexed, as of the moment I write this, 8,058,044,651 pages. Google also indexes about 1 billion images and about 1 billion netnews postings. In a masterful piece of S-1 filing divination, Tristan Louis estimated the size of Google’s computer infrastructure: 719 racks; 63,272 machines; 126,544 CPUs; 253,088 Ghz of processing power; 126,544 Gb of RAM; 5,062 Tb of hard drive space. You can find his research on the topic here: http://www.tnl.net/blog/entry/How_many_Google_machines.

Pretty impressive. Google users evidently think that Google finds what they are looking for. So, not only is Google large, it has successfully found what most users want to find. Google has made meta-search an anachronism. Few now have the resources to catch Google.

Any flaws? Some people complain that Google can be gamed. Others complain that Google censors. But the real issue is that Google indexes only a tiny fraction of the Web. This analysis - http://www.brightplanet.com/technology/deepweb.asp - claims that fraction is somewhere between 1/120^th and 1/620^th.

An interesting aside in Bright Planet’s analysis is that original deep Web content now outstrips printed content. Yes, the Web is now bigger than the printed word.

Bright Planet’s analysis excludes images from the size measurement of the un-spidered “deep Web.” So where do we look to get a handle on the size of multimedia content in the Internet? In this case, we can look to measures of Internet traffic – specifically P2P traffic.

The numbers are stunning: CacheLogic, a maker of traffic management and network intelligence (deep packet inspection) gear, found that P2P traffic ranges from 55% to 80% of the bits traversing the Internet (http://www.cachelogic.com/research/slide12.php). The Web, which is 120 to 620 times larger than Google has indexed, is only 5% to 20% of Internet traffic. A single movie or TV show can significantly drive traffic levels in an ISP’s network. Boggling, but what does it all mean? Here we can turn to the Eight Fallacies.

Topically, the Eight Fallacies were formulated by Bill Joy, Dave Lyon, Peter Deutsch, and James Gosling – some of the brightest of Sun’s luminaries – as Sun was formulating its approach to the mobile computing market. If you don’t pay attention to the numbers, you can fall into one or more of the Eight Fallacies:

• The network is reliable
• Latency is zero
• Bandwidth is infinite
• The network is secure
• There's a single administrator
• The topology won't change
• Transport cost is zero
• The network is homogeneous

It could take a book chapter to fully elucidate the meaning of each of the Eight Fallacies in the context of content networking. But the main point is that content is so big that the Internet will be designed around moving content. The Web is just the literate scum floating on top of an Internet that is rapidly evolving toward the post-literate masses. Never thought you anyone need those monster petabit routers? Think again. Asymmetrical last mile OK? Maybe not. Many other apple carts will be overturned.

What category of application will drive the next big shift in Internet traffic? Content networking will probably be a big part of that next killer app.

Not Exactly TV

DVB-H and MediaFLO are the two leading technologies used in digital mobile TV. Before we delve into these technologies, we will first address the fact that “Mobile TV” is an idea that spawns many questions. The more skeptical are quick to ask “Why would anyone want it?” A reasonable question, especially for the next few years. Ordinary broadcast television works in cars and on inexpensive handheld LCD TVs. Mobile digital TV starts by offering a replacement for something that is free to access with cheap devices, and for which there seems to be no consumer clamor for improvement.

Further increasing the challenge, mobile devices using DVB-H and MediaFLO will have to compete with the relatively high quality and low cost of portable and car-mounted DVD players. Owning a movie on DVD is simple, and DVD prices are reasonable – especially compared with recorded music on CDs. So both the product and the sales model are up against existing models that work well and where, again, there appears to be no popular revolt against the status quo.

Delving some way into the technology, there are further challenges: Both DVB-H and MediaFLO are “forward link only” technologies, hence the “FLO.” The return channel for control, m-commerce, interactive content, etc. is provided by mobile Internet capability in mobile handsets. This is a relatively complex arrangement compared with IP networks without such triangular paths. Augmenting the Internet by broadcasting content has never succeeded in other implementations, and mobile digital TV is, in both systems, relatively complex compared to other data broadcasting systems.

By now you may be ready to join the skeptics and ask “What are they thinking?!” Mobile digital broadcasting does solve some problems: For one, there isn’t enough bandwidth in 2.5G systems to deliver content to mobile handsets if, in fact, they become the primary device for accessing music and small-screen video.

There is also reason to think that datacasting will become part of the Internet, this time, for sure (well, likely, anyway): All of digital video broadcasting looks to become IP datacasting, and, as the name implies, DVB-H is a subset of the overall DVB standard, which has versions for terrestrial and satellite broadcasting. DVB-H could succeed by being an east-to-implement add-on to terrestrial digital TV broadcasting.

Then there is the fact that Qualcomm has taken the lessons learned from BREW and applied them to MediaFLO: MediaFLO will be sold as a turn-key solution for content delivery to mobile handsets. With BREW, Qualcomm learned that mobile network operators can succeed in spite of their often lumbering pace if a new value driver is handed to them on a silver platter. For CDMA technology users, Qualcomm controls the technology of MediaFLO end-to-end: from the transmitters to the chips to the software to the m-commerce environment (BREW, by the way). All that Sprint or Verizon need do is make the decision, and Qualcomm will control the pace of implementation.

The technology differences between DVB-H and MediaFLO are interesting, but unlikely to be conclusive in determining success. Qualcomm has also taken full advantage of end-to-end control in product formulation: MediaFLO is built with a bias toward providing the right solution, which is the delivery of media for time-shifted use. MediaFLO-enabled handsets will be equipped with enough storage to make time-shifted media use the norm. DVB-H, like most telecom standards, is oriented around providing all the abstraction layers and interfaces the members of the standards body desire. Product formulation is up to the implementers, and the implementers may be spread across multiple elements of the value chain.

So we have two technologies that can be the means to pour large amounts of mostly passive media content into mobile handsets. We also have a common motivation across all mobile network operators: to become an economic gatekeeper – to stand astride more transactions, and passive media consumption is a potentially large source of transactions that are paid for and consumed through the MNOs networks. These factors are up against the inertia of current approaches to consuming passive content that are accepted by apparently content consumers.

Why go to all this trouble? The problem for the telecom industry is that subscription voice service is an economic giant that makes media industries look small by comparison. To make data a significant part of the mobile telecom economy, MNOs and their technology providers will have to eat photography, games, music, a bug hunk of TV, and other media types for it all to add up to even 25% of the revenue from voice calls.

What if mobile media flops? What if consumers resist subscriptions for passive content, and resist DRM, and what if ownership of content on tangible media remains the preferred means of consuming? It could happen. All of mobile games and other mobile media are just an appetizer on the way to the main course: MNOs want all transactions. Media and games are attractive because they can be both paid for and delivered on MNOs’ networks, which enables the transaction fee to be larger. If it comes to it, MNOs will skip the appetizer and take their cutlery directly to the target: the credit card companies.

Mobile Entertainment: the Current Landscape

Some entertainment media are cast in stone: Cinema, television, game consoles, CDs, are all standardized media. Most of these media have no element of person to person communication. “P2P” is almost an epithet among content publishers. Viewed in this light, mobile handsets are clearly different: They are created to enable person to person communication, which is sold as a subscription service.

It is tempting, based on JAMDAT’s success, to view mobile games as games for little Game Boy screens, and to focus on the advantages 24/7 mobile commerce availability, OTA delivery, a staggeringly large market, and billing-on-behalf-of (BOBO – one of my favorite acronyms) confer on mobile games.

These are the simpler concepts, and the impact of m-commerce and BOBO is hard to exaggerate. However, leaving connectedness, the unique architecture of the mobile Internet, and the desires and motives of the mobile customer off the table is to ignore that mobile games are games for a communications device.

An overwhelming desire to communicate is what made the mobile network. IMTS, the immediate predecessor of cellular telephony, accommodated about 550 customers in New York City in 1976. A few thousand were on the waiting list for IMTS mobile radio telephones. The business plan for cellular telephony called for clearing out the backlog of orders and some upside beyond that. Nobody envisioned anything as grand as making the mobile handset something every human on the planet who can afford one will have.

The desire to communicate is the driver in mobile telephony that turned it into a business that benefited from hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in mobile telecom infrastructure, propelling it a thousand-fold past expectations. Forgetting to harness that force in mobile entertainment misses the essence of the mobile handset, and misses the core of customer motivation.

These are the elements of the current landscape:

• Mobile commerce systems that enable all mobile customers, creditworthy or not (i.e. postpaid and prepaid), to easily buy and pay for entertainment products at the push of a button. While the effectiveness of m-commerce user interfaces varies widely, they are in place in every developed and most emerging economies on Earth, and no mobile entertainment provider need worry that the lack of m-commerce stands in their way.

• Handset hardware platforms that are less capable than most handheld game consoles in graphics, processor power, and storage, but universally capable in anytime/anyplace Internet connectivity.

• Handset software platforms that have stabilized around two platform types: BREW and J2ME – three if you count Symbian – a manageable number, but that are still wildly fragmented into variants with different displays, memory, and audio, plus a variety of m-commerce APIs.

• Hundreds of millions of customers accessible through a relatively small number of channels. Some, like Vodafone and Verizon, have achieved Wal-Mart-like domination of m-commerce in their territories. But, overall, the advantage is with content providers. The terms for mobile commerce are most favorable in the most mature markets.

• Hundreds of millions of new handsets each year that both expand the number of customers and upgrade older customers into a mobile networkthat includes mobile commerce and entertainment platforms.

• An Internet that is at once populous and fast-growing, and limited in speed and capacity, and one with unique nodes for charging, routing, and delivering the last mile.

It is also worth mentioning something this landscape excludes: Entertainment servers. Ericsson does not sell game servers. They are not an infrastructure node. There will be no 3GPP standard for game servers. To the extent that mobile game technology differs form Internet game technology, it is due to the unique nodes, the unique architecture, the unique capabilities and limitations of handsets, and the unique user preferences of the mobile environment. Mobile game technology is different: One need only consider that the mobile Internet experience is not centered around the Web browser to see that the difference is very large. But mobile game technology is not telecom technology. Mobile game technology belongs to game publishers, not the MNOs, and it comes wrapped in products, not exposed through APIs.

Now that we see the landscape, the next step is to find sources of value.

This blog is about mobile entertainment and other mobile media.