First Palm, then RIM and then Facebook?

You might ask what Facebook has to do with Palm or RIM. But at the end of the article you might get the point.

Palm was in the 90th the rising star. They came out in 1993 with their palm pilot and their innovative Palm OS. One of the best OS at its time. Palm in the time did reinvent hand writing rather than the palm pilot needs to learn the users writing, the user had to learn how to write as the palm can understand. At the time all others tried to build complex software for computers to understand different hand writing styles. It took me maybe three days to learn how to write on the palm and then it was just easy.




Palm eventually became big and hired a lot of people. Every year came a new model out, better faster etc, even with a color screen.
Palm allowed other companies to write application for the palm and users could choose from hundreds of extra apps to install on the palm.
The concept was similar to Apple. Palm developed hardware and OS.

Palm was on top and the leading company for handhelds, but their biggest problem was, that they had only one product. Instead of working on new products, besides handled, they focused too much on the handheld competition and lost the race. Palm is today a small devision of HP and only delivers the webOS which is Palm's latest OS based on Linux.


RIM (founded 1984) a Canadian company started in 1998 to sell Inter@ctive pager 950 which had two way paging and wireless e-mail network. About the size of a bar of soap, this device competed against the SkyTel two-way paging network developed by Motorola.

The big break through came 1999.
In 1999, the Blackberry wireless e-mail device, the BlackBerry 5790, was revealed along with the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) for Microsoft Exchange. The BES provided the conduit between the wireless handheld and the corporate Exchange mailbox, with contacts and calendar, putting current business e-mail in the hands of the mobile worker. New content updated in the mailbox was “pushed” out to the BlackBerry keeping the worker up-to-date. The first fully integrated phones were shipped with the 6200 series after the 5810 and 5820 provided phone functionality only with an external headset. RIM also expanded its network coverage from GSM to add CDMA.

At this time cooperations started to buy cellphones from RIM because they could not only send and receive emails but were easily to connect to Microsoft Exchange and the data transfer were encrypted. RIM grew and grew. RIM was second largest smartphone company in the world in 2008




In 2010 RIM did fall back to 3rd place.






RIM had even a much higher market share in companies. But many companies did start to switch Apple iPhone. Our company had only blackberries for our sales people in 2008, today our salesforce is using only iPhones. We are not big, but we have hundred or so sales people.
RIM lost their momentum because they tried to fight against Google Android and Apple iPhone. RIM announced that they will lay off 2000 people. They should have extend their business to other types of products, when they were still the rising star. Now it is almost too late and RIM can be soon history. A much bigger fall is actually Nokia. Once unreachable number one cell phone company with over 50% market share, did fall down to just 20% in 2011.

Let us look at Apple. Apple was almost bankrupt when Steve Jobs came back in 1997. He did the right thing, he throw all kind of products away and concentrated on building just a few but great products (similar like Palm and RIM), However when the success started for Apple again, he did not stop. Apple did build new products. The trick behind was, that they took time to make the products good.
They started with a revolutionary iMac.



Just one form factor. It got successful. In the meantime they started to work on the iPod but did not release the iPod before it was ready for the world in 2001. And then a few years later the next product came and so on. But different than other hardware companies, they did not just throw products on the market, they took time to build them.

Apple could have just stopped with the iMac and build every year new models and some more sizes. But they did not. They have one product with max two versions. As soon the product does get very successful they bring out something new.

This Apple concept is genius. And any company should learn from it.
Imagine Apple would have stayed just with the iMac or maybe just with the iPod? Apple would be a small company today.

Back to my headline. What does this has to do with Facebook?

Everything.

Facebook did grow tremendous in the last 3 years and grew from 20 million to 700 million users. This is amazing. However Facebook has still one flaw which will kill Facebook (I think FB is already dead, they just don't know it). FB has only one product. The product which gave them success. But instead of building new products they just stay with their social network. Google+ will not kill Facebook but FB will kill themselves. Everything they do is around their FB, new features, layout changes or like recently a business Facebook. Google is smarter, they extend their business with new products. If nobody searches anymore on google, then they have still their ad servers for other companies to serve ads, and they have Android etc.

Bottom line is, that having just one product is great to get big, because you can concentrate just on this and make it perfect and it is easier for marketing. However when a company reaches the point, where they are market leader then they need to have already a different product to redefine their market niche. Jack Welsh once said, it is easier to get to number 1 than staying to be number 1.

Why is it bad to have just one product? First of all other can learn from your product and after a while they can make it better, because they saw the mistakes, the things which are missing and have more fresh ideas. Second, consumers needs are changing. Social is big today, but maybe not anymore tomorrow. I think social will not go away, however there will be no need in the future for one big social network because it will be a part of our online life. It is like the internet. AOL got big, because we needed an access point for Internet and there was AOL which offered it for us, but then when Internet got big, AOL was not anymore needed we suddenly could go to the internet without AOL.

Palm, RIM, Nokia, myspace, AOL were once the stars, now their light is out of fading.

And all ends that Palm, RIM and Facebook are so different but similar.


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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

We are almost there -Cellphone is a game changer

In 2002 I got my first cell phone with camera. It was an external camera.






Since then I had always discussions with my friends if we want to have only device, or if we need multiple devices like camera, cell phone, organizer, computer.
The first there are now one device. iPhone uploads to flickr are now more than any pocket most SLR camera only the Nikon D90 has more uploads.



There almost no music players on to buy on the market. Most people use their smart phone for music. Organizers like HP or Palm ore even not anymore produced.
We are only two years away to use our smart phone as a computer. Already today there is the Motorola Atrix 4G which can dock into a screen and keyboard.




But it goes further. Google just released their latest phone with NFC and digital wallet. Which will eventually replace the credit cards. In Europe and Japan are consumers already used to pay the train or tickets with their cell phone.
The smart phone will eventually replace even cash. You can already download the Starbucks app on your phone to pay electronically your coffee in any Starbucks.





Electronic payments via phone are very common in poor countries with bad Internet connections like certain countries in Africa.
An article in July 2009 wrote:
..... From the pitiful national tele-density status of just about 0.7 per cent in 2000, Ghanaians’ access to telephones rapidly soared to 5.5 per cent by the end of 2003; at the close of 2008 Ghana’s tele-density had sky rocketed to the region of 50 per cent.

National Communications Authority (NCA) figures point to an exponential growth in the number of mobile phone subscribers from 7,604,053 at the beginning of 2008 to 11,302,647 subscribers by December 2008.

This literally means that at least a whopping 11 million people, out of Ghana?s population of 22 million, now carry and use cellular or mobile phones.

The availability, accessibility, simplicity and the sheer convenience of this revolutionary medium of direct inter-personal communication has removed not only geographical barriers but also the prohibitive barriers of poverty and illiteracy from the communication chain.

That alone should explain why today one can find the business executive, the fishmonger, the student, the lawyer, the herdsman, the farmer and the street hawker all using mobile phones.

The “txtNpay” (pronounced text-n-pay) Platform

One incredibly innovative application of the mobile phone technology is its use for the provision of financial services – a potential which Afric Xpress, has exploited and incorporated into its high-tech electronic payment system and which the company says is about to turn every mobile phone user’s handset into an -electronic wallet”.

The same website http://mobilemoneyafrica.com/?p=3598 estimates in 2015 709 million mobile money subscribers in emerging markets.

According to a new research report by Berg Insight, the number of mobile money subscribers in emerging markets is forecasted to grow from 133 million users in 2010 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40 percent to reach 709 million users in 2015.


What does all this mean?

I believe in less than ten years we will not have anymore paper or coin money as common used currency. We will still collect coins but many stores will not anymore accept cash. We will not anymore use our plastic credit cards. We might have them as backups in case our phone lost power.

This sounds all great but the impact is big. As an example because cell phones can tape videos, flip camera which was the hit 3 years ago does not exist anymore. Minolta camera devision got sold to Sony.

There are over 350,000 ATM's across the USA. Bank of America has over 16,000 by itself. All these ATMs will go away in less than 10 years. This will wipe out a whole industry.

Around 640 million credit cards are in circulation in the United States with about $750 Billion and $800 Billion in credit card balances based upon Federal Reserve figures (source cardratings.com).

Multiple thousand people who are involved in producing credit cards will lose their job.

Most of the leading PC makers are not leading smart phone makers.
Top ten smart phone manufactures:




Top 5 PC manufactures 2009:




Only Apple is in the both lists, and NEC is the other Compnay which plays in both groups a role.

Acer and Toshiba might not exist anymore in the year 2020.

The smart phone changes a lot, not only that we carry less things with us, but other things will go away which are small things but can have big impact. Cars will not have anymore locks. Doors to apartments and houses will use the smart phone instead of a key and lock. Many in this industry will go away.

ATT, Verizon, Orange etc will not sell anymore minutes only data plans, they might even not offer even data plans because wifi is everywhere. They might be now wifi providers and nit anymore cell phone carriers.

No newspaper will have printed coupons. All coupons will be digital and personalized to our needs. In 2009 were almost 360 billion coupons in circulation. A whole paper and printer industry will go away.
In the last two years Americans bought 20% printers than in the years before. With the smart phone on hand there is no need to print something out. Most of the smart phones have GPS which is better than any street map printed. Eventual we will have almost no printers.

Garmin report end of 2010
The continued decline in consumers buying GPS navigational devices for their cars and trucks led Garmin Ltd. to miss Wall Street expectations for the third quarter and lower its financial expectations for the full year.
Garmin sold 19% less devices than the prior year.

Smart phones are killing GPS devices. In three years we will not have commercial GPS devices in our stores.

Smart phones are game changers for me, they kill many industries and I hope all this companies are aware of it, that they can rethink their business. I would not prefer to see hundred of thousands people unemployed because nobody did see the smart phone period come.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Kinect 4th generation input device

The German company Telefunken did sell as the first company their computers with a mouse in 1970. Xerox offered a mouse with their computers in 1981. But the mouse got never mainstream till Apple sold their Macintosh with mouse. A lot of people are believing that Apple did invent the mouse, but the reality is that they made the mouse famous. Three years ago Apple introduced their first phone (iPhone 2G) with touch screen. Many people think Apple invented the touch screen smart phone but i can remember that i had in 2002 a handspring Treo 180g which was a touch screen smart phone (handheld with phone) based on the palm OS.




Apple had in 1983 a touch phone, but it was everything than a smart phone (if the story is true)




However Apple did do a good marketing and we have to admit that the iPhone is a beautiful device with a great OS and usability, even if their OS does look very similar to old Palm OS screen ( image palm tungsten)





Later on, Apple did revolutionize the mobile devices by inventing a new type of mobile device: The iPad. Bigger and lighter than netbooks, smarter than ebook readers and better to work with than phones.
But again it was not really new. Many years PC manufactures did try to sell touch devices like the iPad, the only mistake they did that they tried to have a full keyboard and a full PC OS with it. Apple was just arrogant enough to leave the keyboard out and to offer the iPad with a mobile OS instead of a full MacOsX.

We know that Apple is arrogant, but this is good. Without Apple, we might still have a floppy drive or still have CD drives (I forgot most of us have still CD or DVD drive, but not anymore longer). Apple stops to put these devices into their hardware and other will follow, because leaving a device out saves money to produce. No keyboard on phone makes a phone cheaper and less hardware problems to deal with.

Apple did a lot this decade, but the biggest yet invention comes from Microsoft. They invented the real new pointing device: The kinect.
The kinect is a device without being a device :). You install the kinect on your xbox and it will scan you and the room and uses your movements as device.
It can recognize multiple people and it is just awesome and fun to play games without holding any device. It is the Wii on steroids.

We heard how well the iPhone and how fast the iPad are selling, but the kinect as cool it is, it is selling even better (sure one reason is, it is much cheaper than the iPad)

The iPad was crowned the fastest-adopted consumer electronic device ever last month, stealing the title from the once-coveted DVD player. Records are made to be broken, though, and the Microsoft Kinect has already come out of the gate twice as fast.

25 days after its launch, Microsoft said today that it has sold 2.5 million motion-detecting Kinect devices. Granted, that includes sales over the Black Friday shopping holiday, but reviews of the device have been positive. Apple took twice as long to sell its 2 millionth iPad. These seem to be the days of the radically new interface.

And the kinect is a radical interface, hackers are working on cool things like connecting the kinect to your PC. No mouse or keyboard needed to type or point. Just using your fingers in the air.

I see the kinect just as the beginning for device less pointing and input device in the household. You want to switch the TV channel, just swipe your hand in the air from left to right.

You want to change the timer of your microwave while being in the living room. Just point your finger to your hand watch and move the finger from 3 to 6 to extend the timer by 15 minutes.

In the mood to play drums? Just get your sticks, sit on a chair and start playing air drums and your speakers will produce Dolby surround drum sounds.

The limit is the sky.

Hurra to Microsoft.


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