I’m sure all of us in the mobile industry will have noticed a big change in attitudes in the last year or so. Much of this is, of course, the iPhone effect which is a global extension of the well-documented Steve Jobs reality distortion field. I’ve come to sum this up as being a move from total ignorance to complete confusion. Used to be that folks didn’t believe that their phones could do all this neat stuff even when you showed them how. Now they think that they have to have special devices to do it. A great example of this is the success of the Facebook Phone from INQ.

Maximum kudos to INQ for this achievement; we built a demo multi-site social networking app back in 2006 which was much loved by teenagers but was beyond the comprehension of the people in social media itself. They believed that they had to have an operator on board to “do mobile” – despite the obvious limitations of restricting your audience to those on one network.

This operator envy has now moved on to device fixation. In a strange mirror of the US market, those looking at mobile now believe that a smartphone is essential to do anything. By smartphone they don’t mean what we used to mean – largely Symbian devices – they mean iPhone, BlackBerry and, if they are feeling generous, Windows Mobile. You can demonstrate that all the other mass-market devices can do all the same things, albeit on a smaller screen, but there is a strange mental block about doing this on a wider scale.

This is because the technology adoption curve has been turned into a rollercoaster ride by the Apple hype machine. Like one of the modern linear-motor accelerator rides that blast you onto the coaster from a standing start, mobile has been blasted up to the top of the curve, sitting between early and late majority adoption while the reality of mobile is till back in early adopters. This creates quite strong cognitive dissonances which need constant reassurance about making the right technology choices. That’s why there is a barrage of advertising and PR that makes iPhone the aspirational personal device, BlackBerry the perceived ideal business device, and INQ the teenage-kicks-in-a-box device.

Interestingly these adverts are about adding to your lifestyle in some form or other. This is in contrast to Nokia’s expensive 3D billboards last year promoting maps or this year’s 5800 best-selling music device campaign, both which are feature driven. The latter example does, of course, come with heavy iPod envy.

All this confusion changes the business territory substantially. It’s certainly raised awareness of mobile amongst those that were previously unfamiliar with it, but not necessarily informed people of what is really possible.

As all of us in the app space will know, that translates into constant demands for iPhone apps. Patiently explaining that there are 950,000 iPhones in the UK compared to 43 million Java-enabled devices often just leaves them puzzled. We had a classic example of this confusion a few weeks ago. The night before the launch of a Java ME app the client asked if we could convert it to an iPhone app for following day. We had to explain gentle that it was not only completely different technically, but more importantly the route to market would involve a delay of at least a week for Apple approval.

And of course, the huge numbers of iPhone apps has lead to a belief that it’s easy to reach people via the App Store. As anybody who has looked into it will know, for any topic, no matter how abstruse, there are a dozen competing apps ranging in price from free to several pounds and ranging in quality from dire to poor. With the occasional professionally-produced app standing out as a beacon of what it is possible.

Popular stories of hobbyists making money from trivial applications only leads to people over estimating the value of iPhone apps while under estimating the cost of building them. The average marketer already had difficulty understanding the complexity of building powerful apps, as well as the importance of software quality. Yet another message for us to get over when pitching.
I was searching around for a historical equivalent to see if there was anything we could learn. The best match I found was the opening up of the US west coast. Initially only well-off professionals could join the gold rush. It was expensive, difficult and extremely demanding; you had to be well prepared. There were only two punishing routes – overland through the Anzo Barago badlands or a long journey by boat with a transit through the mosquito-infested marshes of Panama. Those that survived those ordeals had to grub it out in the dirt with no certainty of hitting gold. A lucky few could make good money if they could find a route to get their material out.
Then the railroads opened. The first was the Transcontinental Railroad, quickly followed by the Santa Fe  and Great Northern Railway changed everything. Now anyone who could scrape together the price of a third-class rail ticket could head out and seek their fortune.

Sound familiar? There are clear analogies with the iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile app stores. Conveniently the Great Northern Railway even terminated in Seattle.  Now we all know who made the most money out of the gold rush – the people who built the first railroads, followed by the suppliers to the mining industry. Luckily for the people of the time, nobody had invented open-source picks and shovels. The railways that opened later never made the same money of the first ones, a model reflected in railway development throughout Europe. First mover advantage is not new.

Clearly the people with the railroads now control the frontier, but what opportunities does this present to the mobile community? People contemplating opening their own app store should reflect on the aftermath of Victorian railway development – you’ll never make any money unless you have a community of people at either end of the railway who want to travel back and forth, and you have to let them know that they can travel. And it the process of travel has to be easy and affordable.

In the past application and content developers have struggled to reach the mobile market because of lack of awareness amongst users and an absence of route to market. Now we are facing different challenges: a plethora of incomplete routes to market coupled with customers that have been bewitched into desiring space in a crowded minority channel.

The end problem remains the same – how to get more people using mobile. Curiously I don’t think the solution has changed: brand. Brand solves the problem of discovery. Most people gravitate automatically to known, and where relevant, trusted brands. It works in news, music and video. It works in console games. It will come to mobile applications too – where existing brands will extend their reach, and maybe joined by a few new entrants.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.