User>Driven

The Wall Street Journal reports that "In February, U.S. retailers sold 335,000 Wiis, compared with 228,000 Xbox 360s and 127,000 PlayStation 3s, according to NPD Group Inc., a sales-tracking firm in Port Washington, N.Y." They also report that game developers are turning in droves to develop games for the Wii.

Just a year ago, the Nintendo GameCube was a distant third-place finisher to its higher-powered competitors made by Sony and Microsoft. What's changed?

Tim Buckley of Ctrl+Alt+Del (a Web comic and commentary site about video games and gamers) hit on it when he said, "I mean, anybody but a fanboy can plainly see that Nintendo rolled the dice here and opted for a gimmick over cutting-edge graphics, in an attempt to sell systems on the fun-factor."

It speaks volumes about the hard core gamer culture that a self-styled spokesperson feels that making games "fun" is a gimmick. He has the grace to admit later in the piece that the Wii has transcended gimmickry, but I still find it hilarious that he thinks the $600 cell-processor-powered, Blu-Ray enhanced PlayStation 3 is not gimmicky while games people might enjoy are.

Rather than concentrate on the relatively small (though rabid) hard-core gamer market, Nintendo decided to expand the market for game consoles by appealing to everyone with a TV and desire to have fun. That's a pretty broad market. And instead of trying to one-up the competition on features and graphics as Sony and Microsoft have been doing, Nintendo decided to concentrate on what would actually satisfy the customers they've targeted.

The motion-sensitive Nintendo remote is only a part of Nintendo's long-standing focus on fun and accessibility for casual gamers. Rather than focus on hyper-realistic war games, Nintendo has always been known for games you'll want to play over and over with your family. They were pioneers in multiplayer games where people can cooperate rather than simply try to obliterate each other, and they're well known for making games "easy to learn yet hard to master." Even their pricing (well below the other consoles) plays into this strategy.

Paul Young at Product Beautiful points out that "in a feature war, only the leader wins." Knowingly or not, Nintendo sidestepped the feature issue by knowing their market and giving them what they wanted. Fun is not a gimmick. It's what (most) people buy video games for.

Here are the details on my (eventually successful) attempts to purchase a Wii. Right now my wife and I are addicted to the tennis game in Wii Sports. I've got a score of 1801. 

There’s a battle for the handset being waged now among RIA development environments. I predict the winner of this battle will win on the desktop as well. Java on the handset has a commanding lead today, according to David Berlind of ZDNet, but it faces new and formidable foes in Adobe Apollo and Microsoft Silverlight.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) provide a more interactive, responsive and desktop-like user experience compared with traditional browser-based apps using html or even the new crop of javascript-driven Ajax applications like Gmail. Flash apps, for example, can run inside or outside of the browser, can quickly exchange data with the server without requiring a page load, and can support complex interactive forms (read commerce) and animations (read games).

A key advantage of RIA development environments like Apollo, though, is that they wrap Flash apps (and Ajax and other existing application types) in a layer that allows them to operate without a connection to the network and then allows them to sync up with the server when the network is available. This is critical for mobile apps where your signal may not always be available (like on parts of my commute home by train). Imagine trying to make a purchase or play a multi-player strategy game when your connection kicks out. Did your credit card number or your latest brilliant move go through?

I contend this ability to keep working when disconnected is also critical for desktop apps and that dominance in mobile app development tools will lead to dominance on the desktop as well. PCs are now mobile devices, too. Everywhere you go on trains and planes and in the backseats of cabs you see people on their laptops typing away. Laptop prices have come down so much, people just aren’t buying stationary desktops anymore. I personally think of my daily train ride as part of my work day. The only trouble is, most of us are stuck working on our laptops disconnected.

Worse, desktop apps that make no use of the Internet are quickly becoming a minority as Microsoft rolls out Office Live, Google apps gains traction, and people switch in droves to web-based email apps. A perfect example is Quicken – one of the most popular apps on the planet – which began as an offline checkbook balancing and check-printing utility and now downloads balances from your bank and credit cards and pays bills electronically.

Mobile app development is all the rage, but frankly, my laptop spends less time connected than my Crackberry every day and I use it more for the kinds of things RIAs are good at. Moreover, RIAs are often self-downloading and self-updating like traditional webapps, making them much easier for Joe consumer (or Joe IT guy) to install and manage than traditional shrink-wrapped software. All of the advantages RIAs bring to phones play as well or even better on laptops, in my opinion.

So once one or more of these RIAs becomes fruitful and multiplies on mobile devices, enabling more fun, more interactivity and more commerce in that realm, I predict we will see them more and more on these other, lager mobile devices people use every day. The decision to use your laptop vs. your mobile will become less about the availability of a network signal than about whether you are standing or sitting and how much keyboard and screen real estate you need for a task.

The kicker for application providers, though, will be when they realize that not only can they leverage the skills their people learned for mobile device development on desktops, but that there is a demand for access to the same app on both platforms. Gmail is already on the web and on my Crackberry, for example, as is my access to Exchange email. How about letting me pay my bills on my mobile, Intuit? And can I have it in a familiar interface like Quicken?

My dream is that using the same development environment on multiple platforms will make seamless the use of these apps across those platforms. Compare this with the cranky, hard to maintain and hard to use integration between Exchange, Blackberry Enterprise Server and the four different clients I have to use to access content from the Exchange server. (Yes, four: 1 is Outlook 2003 on my laptop, 2 is Blackberry’s email client, 3 is Outlook webmail via IE – which is relatively full-featured - when I am using a PC other than my laptop, 4 is Outlook webmail via Safari or Firefox on my iMac – which is not very full-featured.)

Where can we see the beginnings of this trend? Check out Allurent. (Full disclosure: Allurent is a partner of my employer, ATG.) Their Flash-based eCommerce UIs “deliver rich interactions throughout the shopping lifecycle, from browsing to choosing to buying.” Imagine if you could shop your favorite online clothing store and use a rich UI that let you zoom in on individual items, look at close ups of fabric swatches, watch videos of models wearing the clothes, browse outfit configurators, and place your final order – all on your cell phone or laptop on your way home on the train or in your carpool.

I give the industry 12-18 months to start offering rich internet UIs for games and eCommerce sites that can operate with intermittent connections to the net. Virtual Ubiquity has announced their intention to release an Apollo-based word processor that can work online and off. Anyone know of examples out there already?

Recently a wrote a rant piece on excessive and hard to use product packaging. I complained that consumer product marketers concentrate on the product to the exclusion of the interests of the consumer of the product. It seem seems Annelena Lobb of the Wall Street Journal doesn't agree.

Actually, Annelena penned a piece in the WSJ containing a mix of information from New Scientist and comments from the packaging industry itself defending packaging. With no analysis, Annelena reports that packaging protects products from being damaged or spoiling (and ending up in landfills), that shipping products around the world may cause more environmental harm than the packaging does, and besides, more green materials are working their way into the packaging industry!

I'd like to have posted a comment on how none of these points addresses whether packaging is excessive (or usable) but after allowing one defensive comment from someone calling herself "JoAnn Hines Packaging Diva," the WSJ seems to have closed the article to further comment.

Rebuttal

1. I believe packaging is necessary to protect products but much of today's packaging is more extensive, wasteful, and difficult to use than is necessary to meet that goal. There are plenty of examples in my previous entry on this. (Some makers of blister packs do seem to have gotten the message, though. The HDMI cable I bought for my Apple TV recently actually had perforations on the back of the package making it easy to open even with one hand.)
2. The environmental cost of shipping products all around the world may be real but it is entirely beside the point. This is nothing but misdirection. There's no reason why these issues can't be tackled separately.
3. The fact that green materials are being used more often is another red herring, IMO, and I think the WSJ knows it. The last paragraph of the story points out that some people believe corn-derived plastics are worse for the environment than plastics derived from petroleum because more material is used in the manufacture of the former.

Interestingly, the URL for the WSJ story reads in part "consumer-packagings-environmental-upside" while the published title is "The Murky Math of Product Packaging." I wonder if a first draft under the more positive headline was amended to include the less positive information and an editor wisely changed the headline. 

I say it makes sense to rent TV shows and movies - and sometimes software - but not to rent music. It all comes down to how often and for what period of time you think you'll use those bits and bytes. 

Steve Johnson over at Pragmatic Marketing quotes Don Tapscott of Mercury News about music as a service. Don imagines a day when for a few dollars a month we could "get access anytime, on any device, anywhere, to any music ever recorded." He goes on to describe a kind of smart internet radio, where a variety of songs is played based on your preferences, ratings, mood, activities, etc. This idea has been around for a long time and is currently embodied in such services as Pandora and Yahoo Launchcast.

Given how close these services already are to the music nirvana Don describes, why aren't these services nearly as successful as the iPod? It might be just insecurity about access to the network. My iPod works wherever I am regardless of net access. But music phones have near-universal access to the network and they are still selling MP3s for download to the phone rather than charging a fee for listening. The iPhone has a hard drive. Even Mercora, a startup that streams music to your smartphone, does so from your personal MP3 library on your PC.

Netflix, on the other hand, is a highly successful bit-rental business. What's the difference? My theory is it has to do with permanence - with how often and for how long you expect to want access to the content. Netflix is great for watching whole seasons of TV shows I missed when they were broadcast or movies I didn't get to see in the theater. It has entirely stopped me buying DVDs because I recognize I won't watch them again. (The dusty shelf of pre-Netflix DVDs in your family room stands silent testament to the truth of this. Admit it to yourself.)

Music is completely different. I listen to the songs I buy on CD or through iTunes over and over again. I rate them and have my favorites and my playlists. If I were to lose my library of music built carefully since high school, I'd be devastated. I'm not sure I could organize and access music the same way with a service, but even if I could, the day my subscription lapsed or the service went out of business, I'd have nothing.

So I'm suggesting some bits are for renting and some are for owning. You rent the ones you think you'll only use once or for a short period of time. You own the ones you want to reuse many times or over a long period of time. It's a sort of hotel room vs. homestead argument. Let's test this theory on software. Most of us have been buying perpetual licenses to software for years but more and more the industry has been moving to monthly or annual fees for services. Why is that?

I contend that with rental software most of the time one is not so much renting bits as actually hiring a service. More and more corporations are outsourcing their entire IT efforts and paying fees to have their systems developed, hosted and managed by firms that specialize in that work. The bits are only a small part of what they are renting. The rest is the hardware, the expertise, and the bodies needed - the services related to the bits. (One proof of this is that many SaaS providers, including my employer ATG, offer a deal where you can buy a perpetual software license but pay monthly for the hosting service. Companies are hedging their bets on how long they will want what parts of the total package.)

This is part of a healthy move toward companies concentrating on their core strengths, but it's also a recognition that technologies (and the services they are part of) change so quickly, you may not want to keep them forever. Companies want to have the flexibility to change service providers if their business changes or if a better provider comes along. This is much more like my relationship with Netflix than my purchase of music.

It does make me wonder, though, how well Apple will fare with iTunes movies and TV shows. I think AppleTV sounds like a super-convenient way to access my bits (music, photos, home movies) from my TV. And I think downloading TV shows and movies sounds more convenient than waiting for them to come in the mail from NetFlix. But do I want to pay to own those bits and to store them on my hard drive forever the way I do my MP3 collection? Maybe Amazon Unbox on TiVo is a smarter solution.

What's your vote? Buy or rent bits? Post your comments with the Comments link below.