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Ian Austen has an interesting interview in the NYT with the Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, authors of "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry," that offers details about the emotional and business turmoil surrounding the collapse of the once-dominant smartphone maker's fall into near market obscurity. Most interesting is BlackBerry's initial reaction to the iPhone. "It was an interesting contrast to the team at Google, which was working on smartphones at the time. Google seemed to realize immediately that the world had changed and scrapped its keyboard plans. At BlackBerry, they sort of dismissed the need to do anything about it in the short term," says McNish. "One thing that they misunderstood is how the game had changed when AT&T announced its deal with Apple," added Silcoff. "BlackBerry had built its whole business model on offering carriers products that worked efficiently on their networks. The first thing Mike Lazaridis said when he saw an iPhone at home is that this will never work, the network can't sustain it. What they misunderstood is that the consumer demand would make carriers invest in their networks."
"One of the big reveals for us in the book was the enormous power wielded by carriers in the smartphone race," says McNish. "In the wake of Apple's ascendency, carriers have seen their clout and economic value significantly diminished as customers spend more of their smartphone money on Apple phones, apps and other content than they do on carrier bills. It is one of the greatest wealth transfers in our generation."
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday May 29 2015, @04:01AM
there were lots of mobile applications before the iphone existed; Regan worked on a traffic jam warning system that ran on wap phones, quite a long time before the advent of the iphone.
She regards the key to the iphone's success as being due to the app store. Before that it was quite difficult for naive users to find applications for their phones. Commonly users were completely unaware they could install apps at all.
While I agree with Regan that the app store enabled the iphones success, my complaint is that distributing my product through apple's website promotes the SEO of apple's website and not mine. If you put a "get it at the app store" graphic link on your website, how many referrals do you receive FROM the app store, as opposed to those you send TO the app store?
Before the advent of the app store and google play, there were many other ways to sell software; Working Software was quite successful with direct mail for Mac OS productivity products for example.
Selling a product yourself, as opposed through the app store or google play, also means that you determine your own destiny.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by arslan on Friday May 29 2015, @04:23AM
You think in terms of yourself and what is good for you and your business, which is good but does not necessarily translate to maximizing profits - which most business would want (maybe not yours sure). In that sense, the best way to maximize profit is to maximize your customer base and pander to their requirements, not yours. Most consumers couldn't care, if they even understand, your point about SEO. What they do understand is how easy it is to get apps with the iPhone app store and the big void before Apple came along.
Btw, what is the size of the market Working Software was able to target? Success is relative, greed is not. If someone can profit at a global level and market to a target audience of more than a billion, why would they want to do direct mail distribution and target millions, especially when the logistical cost difference isn't all the big?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday May 29 2015, @05:34AM
the app store as a whole has a billion, yes, but very few individual apps reach that many potential customers.
Working Software grossed $3M one year that I was there. The largest drop that I know about was 250,000 pieces.
Consider that our business model worked really well for us, in that we earned much of our money by renting our list to our direct competitors. They rented their list too. While we depended on Apple to sell Macintoshes, we didn't have to ask Apple for permission to sell our products to end-users.
We also had unlimited free technical support. How many app store apps earn enough to pay for that?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by davester666 on Friday May 29 2015, @05:13AM
Do you really remember before the iPhone?
If you were a developer, it REALLY sucked. If you were a small developer [couple people], it REALLY REALLY REALLY sucked.
Most phones had a single version of firmware, the one it shipped with. Bugs didn't get fixed unless it made the antennae automatically come out and poke the user in the eye.
And every phone had a slightly different version of Java, with a unique bundle of libraries, along with a large variety of screen sizes and phone capabilities. Makes QA'ing a Android app look easy. Oh, yeah, the same physical phone will have completely different firmware and capabilities depending on which carrier you bought it from [at least in North America].
If you got lucky, the carrier would bundle your app on the phone. You generally got pennies per unit for this [and they weren't moving units like the iPhone now].
If you tried to sell through the carriers "app store", you were lucky to get a 70/30 split [70 for them]. 90/10 wasn't unusual. Same with third-party app stores [there were a couple].
You could sell it directly, of course, taking online payments was ridiculously expensive for small developers, as well as being ridiculously difficult to get people to even know your app existed. And then, someone wanting your app would have to hope it actually worked on their phone.
And then you needed tech support to help customers actually get your app onto their phone. They might need a special cable for their phone, or maybe create some method to download OTA [which of course costs the customer a bunch of money, and they expect it back if you can't get the app working on their phone].
Apple's app store revenue probably eclipsed all previous mobile revenue for apps within a couple of months.