Mobile

The Unbundling of Mobile

February 27, 2017 Leave a Comment

I happily pay Ben Thompson to read his daily thoughts on Stratechery. Not only do I enjoy seeing his thought process unfold, but I also have a really soft spot for someone who has been able to get direct to his customers, finding a niche that allows him to just do his thing, and be successful along the way. This is one of the great enablers of the Internet era. Because we have broken many of the borders, or distribution friction, we are able to see niche areas go deep and do well. This unbundling is fantastic for diversity. Without this we need to aggregate and then popularism naturally forces the hand on what content gets shared the most and touches people.

Ben talks a lot about this topic itself, and often points to Marc Andreessen’s old chestnut that there are “only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is unbundle”. The pendulum swings, and those who get to the other side quickly can benefit from that momentum.

We are currently witnessing the unbundling of mobile, and it is fascinating to see people try to understand how deeply the pendulum will swing and where to get ready to add value to the ecosystem. I feel like a broken record when I remind myself and others how long mobile took to take off. It was The Big Thing tm at JavaOne for many years before it was.

You remember when…

the networks were slow and atrocious (and WAP? nuff said)
screens were tiny and low quality (and when we got to touch screens they were far from feeling like they do today)
input was often painful (as great as T9 was for those who assimilated it, and as great as hardware keyboards were).

We could keep going on, but man, it was bad. It just took time for all of the evolution to get good enough, and when it did, it clicked.

I really enjoyed seeing yet another view of just how big it was, and is. Just compare it to the other revolutions in computing:

Mobile is up up up up up and to the right

We bundled computing, communications (phone, texting => social), entertainment (media) and the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy (The Web) all together. You can carry it all around in your pocket with a usable screen and input that keeps getting better.

This is a popular bundle and it is still growing. We are also seeing attempts to unbundle again, in a phased way.

Remember when the desktop was the “digital hub” in the home? iTunes on a computer was the source of truth, and other devices could tether and untether. This has now been taken over by either mobile devices or the cloud itself. The most literal example here is with watches. The first version of watches required your mobile device, and over time this changed (NOTE: Wear 2.0 just launched!) This is critical. One of the great uses of wearables is fitness, and you don’t want to have to run with a watch AND your device.

So, what are we unbundling here?

Compute: it makes sense to have a system that can do “enough” itself, but can also use compute from other parts of the system (watch using mobile, mobile using desktop, everything using cloud 🙂 A really important part of this is bringing the power of ML to where you need it to be. As our best experiences all use ML somewhere, we need progressive ML enhancement, including being able to run some of this offline (e.g. TensorFlow crunching in the cloud => run detection locally on device)
Network: not having to go through your mobile device only, and also using the power of P2P (you see amazing examples of this in areas of the world with really weak and expensive networks)
Input and Output: This is huge. We are breaking out of touch screens of a certain size and virtual keyboards to include voice (including ambient), wearables, and optimized form factors.

After platforms have done the heavy lifting to break the bundle apart it unleashes even more opportunities. As you build product, your constraints are changed and the levels of context compound to let you do amazing things. Sometimes this comes via quick access for power:

“Hey Google, if you notice that I fall asleep can you pause my media?”
“… please reset my ad id once a month”
“… make sure my garage door is closed after 10pm”
“… how often did Wendy come over in February?”

At other times it is joining multiple modes together (I have talked about this in the past) and being able to naturally morph between voice and screen access. We do tend to use our senses together. One of my complaints about some voice UI is that it forces me to close my eyes and put my hands behind my back, and surely we will be able to do better.

The platforms need to be broken up to allow for this, and this brings us to hardware and software…

Hardware Unbundling

How do we enable breaking up the phone into various pieces, and also allow bundling up those packages? This is where IoT comes to play. With Android Things I get to see teams morph and bundle in front of my very eyes, and it is exciting to see when they stick. I know that it is early days, but this is an area that in aggregate will clearly scale massively on the Internet.

Software Unbundling

https://twitter.com/maxlynch/status/835541439513772032

We talk about unbundling and bundling in software all the time. With the desktop Web we bundled experience delivery where one web app could reach a massive audience. But then, when it came to unbundling with mobile, many companies didn’t have nice APIs with the web clients sitting in front. This allowed for translation engines such as usablenet and moovweb to come in to offer the quick fix to get you going with mobile. This allowed many of us to have a beer and laugh about the old times…. “do you remember when we went in and had to hack a layer of Struts Actions to output JSON instead of HTML? Man that was a brittle POS!” There was a lot of pain and a lot of money to be made as the industry tried to turn a tight corner as quickly as possible, and the long tail is probably only half way through that corner!

As we lean into the unbundling, do you have the right pieces in place to enable high quality experiences to be built for your users in short order? Do you know your business and use cases well enough to know which context are king for you, and how to best reach them all?

We may not know the exact details of the future graph. How large will the overall ecosystems become? It is hard to compare to mobile, but your niche may still be a massive opportunity. It is also humbling to realize that on one side the numbers that we considered to be massive hits were tiny back in the day (millions vs. billions) and on the other, global mobile growth is still far from done.

Flexibility brought to you by P, W, and A!

January 19, 2017 Leave a Comment

As I reflect on 2016, one of the highlights was working with companies who were reinvesting in the Web. I got to hear a lot of stories about their business and their technology stacks as they wrestled through how to get from here to there. It is one thing to understand that there are exciting new capabilities, but the reality is that websites are at varied stages of evolutions and there are practical constraints to work through.

You can look at this in a negative way, but you can also recognize that this is often a good problem to have. Dealing with a legacy system that runs a substantial business is a good problem indeed. It is vital to take care as you change a ship that is on an important journey, but fortunately the Web is very well suited to the job. Thanks to the loose architecture of URLs coupled with the fact that you can ship down code at will means that the logical representation of the business is very much abstracted from the physical.

Evolving your experience is similar to evolving your codebase. You make many choices that have trade offs. For example, at companies such as Google they have often taken an interesting approach of keeping One Large Codebase where everyone works as close to master as possible. What happens if you are are all evolving the same codebase together? It means that if you fix a bug in your SSL library it can be rolled out to all of your services in record time. It also means that you need to be vigilant at keeping up to date all the time, with is definitely a tax, especially if you don’t have tools to handle this.

In general it is good practice to have a strong master. I often look at the source tree and map it to a real tree. You want a strong trunk that is always growing enough to handle the branches that come off of it. You don’t want the opposite, a weak trunk with heavy branches that eventually makes the tree fall over.

How do you keep complexity down, and try to make sure that person A isn’t causing problems for person B in another part of the codebase?

One solution is small modules that can be easily composed. We see this in areas such as UNIX, node, and React. The key is the composition of the pieces, which is different to separate units that can’t be reused. Composition not solely isolation.

Native has been around long enough now that all of this has come up too. How do you handle a large codebase? What about once you have multiple apps? What do you want to share between them? There are many techniques to help here, but none are quite as flexible as the URL + Web delivery.

Speaking of which, let’s get back to evolving your Web app in 2017

After talking to many developers and companies, three patterns emerged for the journey, and I will force them into the same acronym as the latest Web revolution itself, just to be confusing:

Piece

Take one user journey, or sub-site, and make it a PWA. For example, Air Berlin did this by creating a post-purchase experience that keeps your boarding pass offline and ready for you. This then feels like a mini app, akin to early mobile apps that focus on one use case and do a good job. One of the under-explored areas of PWAs is the fact that you can mint them in any way that makes sense for your service. For example, HBO could have an overarching app for their service, but you could also choose to just have a launcher into a particular show, all in a natural way that doesn’t need multiple entries in a store if not desired.

Whole

You could take on the whole enchilada. This is ideal if you are looking to do a re-think of your experience any way. Let’s say that you haven’t done that responsive design re-do yet and have separate “mobile” and “desktop” sites? Maybe you were thinking about trying one of those shiny new frameworks that you were hearing about? Maybe your product and design team were feeling the itch anyway? Well, the water has never been warmer. If you have the buy off from the business to do this you can look at rolling out a spanking clean, offline first, super fast reliable experience that works progressively. You lucky pup!

API

Maybe there is a particular new capability that would be impactful for your business. A PM comes running in with a glint in their eye as they tell you how fantastic it would be to bump up re-engagement via push notifications. This is exactly where The Weather Channel started their journey. Once you get the infrastructure in place (e.g. make sure to get onto https) you can add a feature like push without large changes to the web app.

There are many ways to skin the cat, to start your journey to an ideal web experience, and as always, the key is to get started.

Sorry, I just need to push you away

November 21, 2016 Leave a Comment

This is a tale of two pushes. The difference between opt-in and opt-out.

In the blue corner we have push notifications with iOS. Over time I have been trained to say “nope” when an app asks permission to send me notifications unless everything lines up:

I trust them and their brand
I don’t think they will get annoying
There is a clear reason for them to reach out to me vs. spam.

The problem is that there are often many unknowns. I don’t always know before hand if there will be value, nor will I necessarily know if there will be push notification settings that will allow me to tweak the push experience (the better apps tell the story before asking for the permission of course).

The nail in the coffin is that when the messages start coming in, it is a pain to turn them off. I long to be able to act on the message itself. When an annoying message comes in, let me get right into the settings and give me the ability to toggle off the permission itself please!

This leads us to the red corner and Android. Here push notifications can already be opted in, which sounds presumptuous, but it is baked up with the fact that you can long hold the annoying notification to quickly revoke. As an app developer you get the chance to shine and show the value of notifications. If your first one is gratuitous you may be turned away. You should be aware of this and slowly turn up the gas. Since it is so easy to be revoked, the incentives should be there for the developer to keep doing a good job (although in practice you obviously often see abuse).

Not all notifications are equal. I really like apps that allow me to tweak and personalize the notifications that I get, and I hope that we start to see this occur more and more to a point that we start to expect some conventions around it.

Paul Lewis experimented with this via the web push support for Chrome Dev Summit a couple weeks back. The Web doesn’t have conventions here yet, but I hope they start to appear, both in UI within web apps, and within the push notification UI itself.

Push has been critical for re-engagement. It is a way for services to reach your pocket. This connection needs to be respected, and if trust can be garnered the effects are huge. I look forward to seeing how we evolve push and the types of UI we can deliver within push itself.