Why Google will win: entrapment in the iPhone is a failing long-term strategy

The iPhone is a pretty walled garden

Entrapment can be an effective strategy when you are building up a business. Marketers tend to call that customer lock-in. From the perspective of the business this sounds like a great thing to do. Hook the customer to your business and dont let go. From the perspective of the customer it sounds exactly what it is, an entrapment.

There are many examples where entrapment has proven itself as a successful strategy. Think AOL, Facebook, any advertisement driven business, newspapers, banks, cable, insurance or telephone companies. Entrapment works because joining is easy and leaving is nearly impossible. But in most cases these companies haven’t read their history books. Entrapment is a short term winning strategy, but it’s bound to fail in the long term.

It’s human nature they are up against. Sure, we are all lazy, naive, and let things happen for a while. But in the end we don’t like to be trapped. We don’t like it when our freedom (choice!) is limited by the thing that entraps us. And this desire to be free is what drives competition in. Someone creates a monopoly? It’s bound to attract newcomers that blow up that business by doing things differently (remember the innovator’s dilemma?).

The most recent success story wrt entrapment is the iPhone. It revolutionized the mobile space. It showed that a market that was dominated by hardware manufacturers and operators couldn’t really innovate anymore. Apple proved that there were HUGE improvements possible in the user experience of a mobile device. And it has become a huge success.

With the iPhone came entrapment, a strategy Apple has mastered like no one else. Apple dictates every aspect of the iPhone. It has the sole power to decide what app makes it to its store and becomes successful. There are countless stories (here’s one) available by now of developers getting stuck in the horror and randomness of the Apple approval process for their app store.

It doesn’t end there. From the initial launch Apple has even dictates what carrier the end user has to call with. I’ve been using the same mobile operator for years and I am very satisfied with it. And Apple has the audacity to decide that I must change to another operator in order to be able to use their product? For me that was a bridge too far. I do not want to be restricted or entrapped. I want choice.

I’m writing this because I feel it is time to remind Apple of history. Entrapment may be a short term winning tactic, but it’s a long term failing strategy. You can already see the moles digging through this carefully constructed walled garden. Palm has changed it’s app store policy entirely, giving freedom to developers to publish apps. And now there is Android. Where Apple has focussed on building the perfect mobile device, luring people into their trap like sirens, Google has worked with the industry on a new open standard. Where the tech industry initially laughed at their first attempt, I think everyone will now fall silent with the ecology that Google and partners are now creating.

TechCrunch counts an avalanche of 24(!) new android phones in the market. The tech purist will now argue that none of these phone can match the awesomeness of the iPhone. I say BS. The awesomeness of the iPhone will be copied, changed, improved, matched/not matched. It doesn’t matter. Let me repeat that. It doesn’t matter!

The one thing that Apple can’t do and Google just did is offer choice. The empire Apple just started to build up using their dictatorial and proprietary strategy just got blown to pieces by choice. Who do you think will win this battle? Android will flood the mobile market with hundreds of new phones, thousands of apps to go along with it, and presence with every hardware manufacturer and mobile carrier.

Entrapment is great at start. It probably give a lot of adrenaline to dictate what the world looks like. But what Apple and so many others fail to realize is that it’s all short term tactics. In the long term the only winning strategy is a customer that wants to be with you, not one that is trapped into your service. And for that reason the iPhone will be marginalized by its competitors. History already taught us that.

On Apple, Facebook, Google, Whuffie and why customer lock-in sucks

What is the difference between customer lock-in and customer value It’s huge! Customer lock-in is a marketeers wet dream. It is a bonus received at the end of the year. It is an internally focused measurement. It is EGO. If your CEO, organization, or marketeer is talking about customer lock-in you can be sure of one thing. Making revenues is more important than bringing value to a customer.

Don’t get me wrong, every company has to make revenues. But think about this for a second. Which company would you rather work for, or buy products from? A company that is focused on revenue and sees customers as a byproduct of that revenue? Or a company that is focused on providing user value, and as a result of this earns a good living?

How to you reach a status of customer lock-in? You can’t accomplish that by serving the customer value. Instead you focus on the costs involved to move away from your service. If the cost of leaving the service are high enough, your customer will not attempt to leave. Too much hassle. Examples? We see lots of businesses attempting some form of customer lock-in. Try leaving a mobile operator and taking your mobile phone number with you. Leave an Internet access carrier and then try to keep your data or e-mail address. Try switching banks making sure your monthly payments are still in order. The list is endless.

The online space isn’t any different. Web 1.0 thinking is essentially customer lock-in thinking. Web 1.0 business models force customer lock-in. It is their oxygen. Without customer lock-in, no revenues. It is the reason web 2.0 isn’t really a revolution but simply an evolution. Examples? The most obvious one is Facebook. Once you sign up your soul is sold and leaving again is impossible. Actually, that is not entirely true. If you simply quit, your account will not be deleted. But if you really want to get out, start acting against the terms of service and they will wipe your account faster than the speed of light. Facebook is a black hole that sucks you, your friends, your interactions and data in, but never lets it out again. It is the perfect customer lock-in platform.

Another example? The Apple iPhone. Apple builds great products but dictates everyone how to use it. I have an iPhone but I couldn’t buy it from the mobile operator I have been happy with for years. Instead of offering me choice, Apple has decided to make it exclusively available via a select set of operators. The reason is simple, it isn’t about customer value, but revenues. While the iPhone itself may be a great and user-friendly product, the Apple strategy is a lock-in strategy. Forcing me to buy the phone and jail breaking it. Sorry Apple, I don’t give a toss about your exclusive strategy, I want choice! Google’s g-phone? Exactly the same issue. Not because of the way they will distribute it. But because it needs a Google account to be useful.

Customer lock-in is a lucrative business. Corporations have tons of marketeers employed to build their customer lock-in strategy. The funny thing about it is that if you would get rid of all that overhead (yes, marketeers are idiots), you would not only save a whole lot of money unwisely spend, but you would also have the chance to work on customer value. It would make your customer, your employees much happier. It would generate profit and build you a strong business with loyal customers. You would not need a “Social Media strategy”  to “engage” with your customers. You would not need “loyalty”  programs. Note that these two “social” strategies become customer lock-in tools if applied within a customer lock-in organization. You would not need Tara Hunt to explain to you what the Whuffie factor is, as it would be in your genes. Having said that, you’d be crazy not to hire ten Tara Hunts and turn your company around form customer lock-in to customer value. A company build on customer value would be doing these things naturally, well before any consultant has thought of a new Powerpoint title called “Social media”. It is funny to realize that great developers tend to understand this much better than any marketeer ever can. It’s because a great developer does not take revenues into account. He looks at customers first.

There are many reasons thinkable why customer lock-in is dominant in company strategy, but that is big enough in itself to write another post about. Sufficient to say that if your company is using social media consultants to enter this exciting new web 2.0 world, you are in deep trouble

Mozilla enters the mobile arena with Apple and Google but we already know the winner!

I just watched the Mozilla video showing a demo of their first visions on what a mobile Firefox browser should look like. I love it already. Not because of the way it looks or the cool technology underneath. I love it because when listening to the screencast Aza Raskin talks about the user experience all the time.

Mozilla has clearly looked and thought about the current mobile browsing experience. It sucks on anything but the iPhone. Apple has set a totally new standard with their multi touch browsing experience. Mozilla takes that experience and adds two powerful features to it.

1. All input activities are taking into account that the user has relatively big fingers compared to the mobile touch screen. That means Mozilla will be spending an enormous amount of time thinking about the best possible input controls. In the demo we see bigger buttons, and neat tricks to avoid typing in letters if possible. Best of all, Mozilla is showing us that the entire screen can be used for content while there is still an intuitive way of finding the navigation buttons.
2. The browser will be open source developed. This is an incredibly powerful force Mozilla brings along. If anything, the mobile development phase we are entering now will be a fight over usability. Apple has set a new standard and others will add to that. But Mozilla has by far the most open development environment thinkable. It will attract a lot of smart people and experience to the browser development. They will be testing all kinds of usability schemes and doing that in the open will help them find the best possible user experience.

We can see the same thing happening with Google’s Android. Where Mozilla is the king of open source browsing, Google will try and become the king of mobile operating systems with Android. I think this is a very compelling move. Apple has build the “coolest” mobile handheld device so far. There isn’t one that can match that experience. But there are now a few strong competitors entering this domain. And where the Mobile handset manufacturers have mostly lost the capabilities to design a unique user experience, these new initiatives will provide us exactly that.

The interesting thing about this is that we can see a new era of mobile connectedness arise. Most business models in the mobile space currently fail due to huge barriers. Data plans by the operators put incredible strains on the cost factor for the user. But another issue is the overall usability. The mobile handset manufacturers such as Nokia, Samsung and their competitors have spend the last decade building more and more features into their handsets without a fundamental redesign of the user experience. They have chosen to ignore this issue. But the newcomers on the block have a totally different approach. Each of them has thrown the current design principles out of the window and started all over with the user experience in mind. See an earlier post I wrote about that topic called “The mobile web experience needs fundamental rethinking.”

The fight on the mobile platform will be a fight for usability. And already we know the clear winner. It will be the user.

Now all I can hope for is that these developments don’t forget that the mobile phone is primarily an interaction device. Next to this great browsing experience I still want to be able to make phone calls and send people messages. And yes, we do need to enter text there. That issue hasn’t been resolved yet, even though Apple took a good first shot at it. It’s why I wrote that the iPhone is probably one of the worst mobile phones I ever used. Not because of it’s browsing capabilities. But because it is really hard to use the thing as a phone when you are physically on the move. Try walking and typing at the same time, you’ll understand what I mean.

Now where can I get me one of those mobile Mozilla browsers

Why the iPhone is probably one of the worst mobile phones I have ever used

There is a lot of talk these days about the iPhone. You can’t open TechMeme without seeing yet another rumor about the next generation, 3G, whatever version of the iPhone Apple is about to release. As soon as any other mobile initiative is released it has to go through an iPhone comparison. Google is working with developers around the world to create a new mobile platform called Android. As soon as the first demo’s appear the tech blog community measures them up against the iPhone.

Well, sorry to say this, but the iPhone is probably one of the worst mobile phones I have seen in quite a while. Now, before you get all excited about that and state that I have gone mental, let me try to explain what I mean by that.

The iPhone, in my opinion, isn’t really a mobile phone. The iPhone is probably the most innovative handheld computer in the world. It has a unique feel to it, a nice operating system, a touch screen (which is old news in Japan and Europe really) and great usability. It provides us with a browsing experience unlike any other mobile device. It has a great display, a mediocre camera, it lets you play music, video, browse the web, anything a gadget lover might need. It just sucks as a phone. You can tell the iPhone was build by a computer manufacturer. It is a handled where someone decided to also add phone capabilities to. And it’s phone capabilities are worse than I had thought.

What are the two most important functions of a mobile phone (and no, I’m not talking to all you smartphone lovers out there)? Calling and SMS. It is as simple as that. This is an estimated 1 Trillion dollar business world wide! While the USA lags behind in SMS, the rest of the world produces 5-10 SMSes on average per user per day. SMS is a $ 100BLN business. A business larger than ALL social media and advertisement business on the entire web! Probably less than 5% of that big pile of revenues goes to data services. It will be growing for sure the coming years. But $ 1000 BLN is a really big number.

When we get all excited about the iPhone I’m sure we aren’t getting excited over it’s phone capabilities. We are excited about it’s ability to browse the web, to act like a small yet powerful handheld computer. And that is great. Apple surely did set a new standard there.

But have you ever tried to make a phone call on it. With all due respect, I could navigate my “old-fashioned” Nokia N95 way better than the iPhone. I’m estimating that using the N95 menu structures I can find and call a contact approximately 50% faster, and more importantly without making any errors. While the contact list on the iPhone looks flashy,  the touch screen controls create a lot of errors for me. I can’t search for a contact (Sorry if I can’t remember all 800 names in my contact list). Scrolling is great, but landing on the right name is difficult. How many times have you found the contact, clicked on it (expecting it to start making the call), clicked on it in the next screen (why for heavens sake), and then only found yourself to be in the “change details” screen instead of the calling screen.

How about SMS? I use that function as least as often as I call. I might type 30-40 SMSes on any given day. But with the touchscreen keyboard of the iPhone this has become a real pain. I touch the wrong letter too often. Not only was typing on my Nokia without an actual keyboard faster, what is more important, it was way less error-prone. And honestly, the pre-iPhone interfaces weren’t that good either, but a hell of a lot more workable than the iPhone now. I have written before about the need to rethink the mobile experience fundamentally. Apple did it, only they forgot the current main use of a phone. They were thinking handheld computer when they designed the iPhone.

I tried using the headset provided with the iPhone. Worked fine for calling. I took it out, left home without the headset. And I found out the hard way that the rest of the day I couldn’t make a phone call because the iPhone for some reason assumed I still had the headset installed. Probably a “bug” or mishap, but not being able to call without using the external speaker all day is a real pain. Never had that happen to me before.

I hope Google’s Android will lead to developments that do not always match the iPhone. It has set a standard in it’s own, we don’t need others cloning that. I hope Android developers will think about a better integrated experience. Not just the “new world” of web browsing and media consumption. But also including being able to call and send messages (sending e-mail has the same obvious problems on the iPhone).

Touch screens are great, but we either need bigger ones, or I need to sharpen my fingers to hit the right letter on the tiny little keyboard. One thing I do like about the iPhone’s SMS capabilities is the way it displays successive SMSes as conversations. Perfect, because that is what they are!

I’ll end this with a small wish I have written about before in a post called “We need a revolution in Mobile U thinking”:

I’ll give away one idea for making things better. Why not get rid of the whole inbox-outbox messaging paradigm. It sucks on a mobile phone. Instead convert the entire paradigm into a life stream, similar to the way Twitter and Jaiku work. It fits human behavior much better. We don’t always want to look into or respond to every message we receive. Showing these messages as a constant stream allows me to look at it whenever I want to. It doesn’t call for my attention whenever a message arrives, but I get to decide when I wish to give the message my attention. It allows me to pick up things that are important, and it also provides me easy ways to respond to on ore more people. And it lets me ramble my thoughts to whoever is willing to listen to them.

And we could easily integrate calling behavior in that same life stream too.

The iPone may be the best handheld mobile computer there is right now, but it’s probably one of the worst mobile phones I have ever used.

Solving the mobile equation (yet again)

The past few days I have watched a lot of people writing about Mobile Internet.  Not surprising as one of the most important mobile conferences is taking place in Barcelona right now and a lot of companies are using that conference to launch their mobile initiatives. I am a bit disappointed to hear what seems to be happening there right now. What strikes me most is that mobile operators simply do not have a clue how to position themselves in the mobile Internet arena. They have taken a great beating from non-mobile companies like Yahoo and Google and still really don’t know what hit them exactly. According to a post in Ars Technica even the top executive Mr Sarin of the largest mobile operator worldwide, Vodafone, doesn’t know what to do.

Mobile carriers need to step up their game and make mobile services easier to use, says Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, lest they willingly hand over business to media giants like Google. Sarin made the comments when speaking to the press during this week’s Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, admitting that his industry has not traditionally done a good job in making new mobile services appealing to users. Not doing anything to fix that, will be the industry’s biggest mistake, he said.

And another quote from that article:

Mobile carriers have the experience and opportunity to keep these customers from slipping away. But in order to do so, they have to offer something up besides a means for other companies to transport data. “Customers want social networking, email, SMS, instant messaging, voice—you name it,” Sarin said. “Communication is our core business. We have to be in all of these spaces.”

Oh boy is he in trouble. Let’s see where he is coming from. Traditionally, Mobile operators have one advantage that other companies don’t have. They offer access to the mobile network. Mobile operators have the monopoly on that. They own the network and monetize users accessing it. There was never a need for the operators to even think about user experience or user services. No need to compete over services, just deliver access and use clever marketing techniques to make your mobile brand more interesting than the other mobile brands. And that is fine in a world where access and the ability to communicate anywhere is the most important user value.

The same thing happened when the Internet grew big in the 90’s. People all went to Internet access providers because they needed access. That was fine for a while, but then other companies realised that once people were on-line there was a much bigger revenue stream available to those that provided the user value in services. There isn’t a single Internet access company that has successfully made the switch from access to user value services.You still get charged for access, but you probably don’t use their e-mail service or spam filters or whatever service any more. E-mail is free and with more storage you can imagine. Other companies filled the gap with anti-virus, spam, and content services. And the Internet access companies are stuck to do what they do best, provide access. They have all tried to create their own content services and failed. They have tried to build advertisement platforms but others moved much faster. It is the penalty for a company that provides nothing more than a pretty expensive plumbing system underlying our on-line experiences.

So Mr Sarin and all other mobile operator executives can try to become user value service providers but they will fail at it. Google, Yahoo, and many other companies have already taken up that part of the revenue stream. They couldn’t be bothered by mobile networks, access technology and the like. They concentrate on what matters in the end. The user experience. Marginalising the role of the Mobile operator to what it does best, providing access.

And then I read this article which talks about a panel discussion between user experience and technology experts during the Mobile World congress. A quote from the article:

The panel, whose title was It’s the User Experience, Stupid agreed that iPhone represents a model for mobile operators to follow, but they reached little agreement on how to follow.

One direction, advocated by Lucia Predolin, international marketing and communications director for Buongirono S.p.A. of Milan, Italy, is to manipulate users by identifying their “need states” — including such compulsions as “killing time,” and “making the most of it” — and fulfilling them subliminally.

Adobe’s Murarka proposed a more technological approach to improving the user experience, satisfying the mobile phone subscriber through better interface design. Sarah Lipman, co-founder and R&D director for Power2B, suggested an almost mystical solution, somehow tapping into users’ “neural networks” to navigate a mobile phone interface “using touch and pre-touch input.”

Never, never trust an International Marketing and Communications director that wants to “manipulate” users. Or someone that wants to “tap into users neural networks”. These people do not have a clue. If this is the innovating power from the mobile industry we will remain in a mobile stone age for a bit longer.

Apple understood that usability, status, and the ability to show of yet another cool device where the first step into improving the mobile experience with their launch of the iPhone. Before the iPhone usability sucks on almost any mobile device. And I’m not the only one that feels that way. It turns out that Apple iPhone users perform 50 times more search requests than other mobile phone users. What is interesting to me, which isn’t mentioned in the source, is whether the searches are performed using the mobile network or a WiFi network. Big difference in my opinion, as the first one costs the uer money, while the second option simply turns the iPhone into a small handheld computer.

In another article it is even suggested that within a few years the number of mobile search requests will overtake fixed Internet searches. Which is true, but sort of obvious. Already here are more mobile devices on the planet than there are fixed Internet computers. If we marginally decrease the complexity to be able to access the web mobile, then people are bound to start using search engines. Good news for Google? They think so.

I do not necessarily agree with that. While more search suggest more advertisement revenues I can’t help but think that we don’t need more search. We need an entire different information access paradigm that is build upon the foundation of a small mobile device. Instead of the current “let’s copy our laptop web experience and cram it on a device with a screen no larger than a few inches and pretty unusable input interfaces”. We definitely need to improve the usability of mobile devices, but before that we need a revolution in mobile UI thinking.

Is Yahoo’s announcement of their new mobile service OneConnect the answer to this? Not sure about that. I saw a demo video of the new service that is to launch in the third quarter of this year and although it combines all kinds of social networks into a single portal, it seems rather complex and technical to me.  Sure, it’s cool they can connect all major social networks and track people on them, but in itself that is a technical solution to a problem I haven’t experienced yet.  What underlying user value has lead to this service other than “lets make sure we can connect to all these cool services so that we can get lots of users and a big market share. Can you imagine trying to set up that service on your mobile phone and actually make it work with a single button press? Now that would be a cool trick. Honestly, I did ask for such a service last year already, I still wonder if Yahoo has been reading up on my blog. They got me one thing I asked for, but forgot the other great ideas I mentioned in that post

Mobile is considered the most important growth market. Forget the Internet, mobile is where the action will be the coming years. Maybe that’s why Microsoft has replaced its entire management team on Mobile. With massive markets waiting to be unlocked in India, China, Africa, there is more money to be made on the mobile web than the fixed web. But if we have to wait for these 10 most important trends from the Mobile World congress I would say dream on. There are lots of little, currently unknown companies out there that understand human behaviour, mobile technology and user needs on the move. These companies will come with services not thought of before. And some of them will become as big as Google and Yahoo now are on the Web.

We need a revolution in Mobile UI thinking

A few days ago I was fiddling around with my mobile phone (a Nokia N95) and it occurred to me (yet again) that the current mobile phone user interface just doesn’t work for me. Yes, the screens have become much bigger, it has impressive functionalities, a camera which is almost as good as a regular digital camera, it has HSDPA, WiFi you name it. But it just doesn’t work. The mobile phone interface is a phone interface with some application extra’s. It isn’t really a USER centric interface.

Just take the most basic mobile functionality you can think of (no it is not calling), messaging. I have several (technical) options to send a message to another person. But the phone forces me to resolve the technical details. I have to think about whether I want to send an SMS, e-mail or MMS (yes, I am one of those users that actually use MMS). People will obviously SMS most of the time, but with our physical and Internet world becoming connected in so many ways this will not remain to be the obvious choice. Once I have made a choice I need to wade through several menu’s in order to enter the message content, select the receiver and finally send the message away. It gets worse when I receive messages. Not only do I have several different types of inboxes (SMS, e-mail, MMS), but the notification mechanisms really suck. An SMS or MMS alert draws all my attention away from the thing I was doing. E-mail isn’t noted at all. If you don’t think this is a problem I recommend you try out Twitter and get it to send your tweets to your mobile phone for an hour or so. You see instantly why this messaging mechanisms doesn’t work. It floods my inbox and it distracts me constantly. I have to perform too many actions to read all the messages and then delete them again.

Nokia and other manufacturers are constantly working on their user interface. But they are simply improving on an old concept. Wiht the increased graphics and computing power I hoped they would not improve, but thoroughly redesign the user interface. It isn’t a phone anymore. It is my remote control of life. It needs a user centric interface where not the mobile phone functionality takes the central place in design, but the way I want to use that functionality! I want freedom, instead of being trapped into a user interface that limits my options. But they haven’t. And that is one of the main reasons I think mobile Internet will not break through to the masses yet.

I haven’t mentioned the iPhone up to this point. I don’t own one and only played with it a few times so it wouldn’t be fair to draw conclusions about it based upon a few observations. I can say that based upon first impressions Apple has done a great job in providing us with a totally new UI element when they introduced the touch screen. They have put great effort into usability. But I can’t help but think that even on the iPhone, the UI paradigms haven’t been as disruptive as I would have liked them to be, even if it stimulates mobile internet usage.

Readwrite web reports today that the mobile phone penetration worldwide increases even more than predicted, with currently over 3.3 Bln mobile phone subscriptions. I’m not surprised at that. With more and more strong developing countries now being covered by mobile networks, people in China, India, Africa and South America people fall for the very same being connected trap we all fell for. The mobile phone makes it possible to connect and be connected whenever and where ever we want.

In the article Richard McManus points us to a recent study by Nielsen that reveals that 35% of US teens (8-12 yr) now own a mobile phone and that 5% sometimes uses it for Internet. Richard feels that this is enough evidence to show that the mobile Internet is finally ready to take off.

I’m not so sure about it. The breakthrough of mobile Internet has been predicted many times. But it isn’t there yet. The most important indicator to me that it isn’t there yet is the ever increasing SMS traffic. Why use such an outdated and cumbersome messaging protocol instead of using the possibilities the web has to offer? It isn’t just price, although that is a major barrier to be resolved. I think a lot has to do with usability. Sending an SMS has become easy for people to use (even with the flaws mentioned above). Firing up the Internet anywhere (and I don’t mean just in places near a WiFi point) isn’t simple. And once on-line we are limited within the technical barriers of the mobile phone. Browsing the web doesn’t work on such a small screen.

And instead of thinking about entirely new metaphores for mobile Internet we start moving around this issue and develop solutions that aren’t really solving the problem. One way is to redefine the ENTIRE web (yeah right), by creating special mobile pages. These pages are smaller, need less data transfer and are basically optimised for the mobile phone browser. While this might sound like a good solution it really doesn’t work. First of all, it would take an impossible effort to rebuild the entire web to make it usable for the mobile phone, and secondly, it leaves the user with the task of solving complexity. Do I go to www.flickr.com (which I can remember), or do I need to try m.flickr.com. And how do I upload my picture there?

Another option is to develop a touch screen and really cool zooming and moving around functionality to handle these big pages. Apple did just that with their iPhone. They are providing us with a intuitive solution to handle big amounts of data, but they aren’t fundamentally solving the problem.

In my opinion we need a revolution in mobile phone UI thinking. A revolution that puts the user and his intentions central in user interface development. We need to understand what users do with their mobile phones. We shouldn’t be thinking in terms of releasing technical functionalities with nice graphical interfaces. We need to think in terms of the remote control of life, supporting the user in his interaction needs. If we let go of the current UI and browsing paradigms who knows what becomes possible. Let’s not rebuild the entire web to make it mobile, let’s not even come up with even better alternatives for the iPhone touch screen. Let’s first think about what the user wants to do with his phone, and then come up with an interface and a mobile web concept that supports his actions, regardless of the technology.

I’ll give away one idea for making things better. Why not get rid of the whole inbox-outbox messaging paradigm. It sucks on a mobile phone. Instead convert the entire paradigm into a life stream, similar to the way Twitter and Jaiku work. It fits human behavior much better. We don’t always want to look into or respond to every message we receive. Showing these messages as a constant stream allows me to look at it whenever I want to. It doesn’t call for my attention whenever a message arrives, but I get to decide when I wish to give the message my attention. It allows me to pick up things that are important, and it also provides me easy ways to respond to on ore more people. And it lets me ramble my thoughts to whoever is willing to listen to them. Maybe I’ll ask Chris Messina to create some designs for this particular idea. He does a pretty cool job designing nice interfaces.

We need to let go of current paradigms, and ask ourselves, what is a user going to do with his phone in this social networking age?  It opens a new world of possibilites, a world without mobile web browsing, a world of freedom for the user. So who is going to free me from the limitations of the mobile phone and give me my remote control of life? Or maybe I should start something myself, anyone interested to join?

Who will free the iPhone customer?

What is the deal with Steve Jobs, who is protecting his iPhone from being used the way users really like it, their own way? Apple not only launches it exclusively with certain partners, telling all you morons that don’t happen to have a mobile subscription there to hop over, but it also doesn’t like it when people try to open it up themselves.

Hacks are reported on a daily basis for the iPhone. I wonder how long it will take Apple to understand that these hacks aren’t just a protest against our savior Steve.

The hacks are coming from two emotions: the techies that just love to prove that “it can’t be hacked!” isn’t true, and the  user that disagrees with the “you have no choice” mantra.  If someone tells you that you only have one choice (his), what do you do? Well, I remember getting these sort of speeches at home when I was a child. Didn’t like it then, don’t like them now.

The iPhone may just be the invention of the year. Apple, just may have proved that mobile communications can be redesigned and evolved into a new user experience. But, having said that, they also ignore a basic need of their customers called “freedom”.  Making it an exclusive phone that is only within reach of a few proves to be an excellent short term revenue strategy. It is already the most talked about market entry strategy in the mobile world. But I cannot help but think it is also a very arrogant strategy towards the customer. If we are to make mobile Internet successful, and let the iPhone be one of its drivers, then  Apple better start thinking about opening up their platform.

If not, then Apple will definitely have a great niche on its hands and make a great living on it. But the mass will most likely choose something that works on all carriers and handsets.

And the mobile operators better rethink their strategy as well. As long as they determine who can get on their network and who cannot, they will remain hijacked to the Apple mantra. Forcing them to pay loads of money to Apple for every iPhone they sell.

It is freedom that sells in the end. Freedom will help customers (re-) discover the Internet on their mobile phones. Freedom is the ticket to increase in ARPU, the thing Mobile carriers need so desperately. Google is trying to jump on the bandwagon of freedom with their recent Android announcements. We will have to wait and see if that will be taking of. In the meantime the question remains. Who will free the customer?