Yes, hello, everything!

Long-term plans to watch

 

While more and more start-up coaches are promoting lean business validation, customer development through fast iterations, and making your mistakes quickly, it seems that there are still venture capitalists out there who want companies to do long-term business plans.

To demonstrate the difficulties of predicting consumer behavior, here is the story of my plans for TV watching at home during the past three years:

We have moved several times and renovated quite a bit lately. This has allowed me to redo the media facilities at home according to what I thought my family would need.

Three years ago, we were living in an apartment with a baby. The falling asleep by the TV then took place in the bedroom, where we had our only TV set. When we moved a little bit later, I logically thought that the bedroom is where we watch TV and decided to make place for a larger connected TV there.

When the renovation was ready, however, it turned out the only person watching live broadcast TV was my son, who wanted to watch the morning show for children. The ideal place for the new TV was as far from the bedroom as possible. Which was fine as we in the new house had an extra room for it. The carefully crafted sockets for the TV antenna and the Internet connection on the wall of the bedroom were never used.

Now, we have moved again and based on my previous learnings, I rewrote the media consumption plan. The TV for my son is now in the corner of the living room, and I have a Playstation connected to a projector in the guest room that allows watching TV shows and films from the Internet. Quite nice a setup actually, with cables hidden in the walls and all.

Too bad nobody’s using them. My son now refuses to watch the TV morning show and wants to watch his favorite series on an iPad instead. My wife and I still have very little time for media entertainment, but we sometimes watch downloaded TV shows – when the pad is free late in the evening. This takes place in the bedroom, where we have no TV. 

No wonder the TV manufacturers are struggling. If I can’t even predict my own media behavior in a year’s time, I imagine it is tough to create an Excel sheet that tells the exact truth about what potential TV customers think in 2015.

So my vote goes to agile learning and rewriting of plans.

To add a short epilogue: I just got a letter from the local health authorities who want to store my reckless behavior in their statistics. There were many funny questions, the relevance of which was at times difficult for me to grasp, but among other things they wanted to know how much TV I am watching.

It would be statistically correct for me to write down 0 hours and 0 minutes, but is it the relevant fact?

 

Who cares about apps?

Nokia is not doing very well right now. The future success and profits depend on the high-end phone sales, which is why the new Lumia Windows Phone range has been analyzed a lot.

I haven’t tested one, so this post won’t be for or against Nokia or Microsoft. It is about the strange application focus that many on the smartphone market seem to have.

Almost all Lumia reviews I have read list as a major fault that there are “only” 70 000 or so applications available for the Windows Phone platform, when iPhone and Android users could choose from about half a million.

Does it really matter? 

Firstly, most people don’t care much about apps.

I have been working with mobile phone technology for a long time and have used tens of smartphones, so I believe I know something about phones. Yet, I am not interested in the size of the app stores.

I only want a few things to work on my phones: uncomplicated access to all my email accounts, a good web browser, smooth Facebook and Twitter clients, an easy way to upload photos, something for short meeting notes and occasional video viewing, a little navigation, a music controller, and IP calls maybe. Ability to view work files would be nice, but I can do without editing on the go.

That’s it. I don’t need real-time pictures of public traffic in cities I'll never visit and I don’t want to know how many calories I drank last Friday. I don’t have any interest in fine-tuning the phone’s battery life with widgets, nor in bonding with the local McDonald’s. I don’t play games on my phones. I don’t even know what Instagram actually does.

For what I have seen and experienced, most smartphone apps are poorly written uninteresting crap (crapps?). A billion unnecessary low-quality apps in a store only makes it more difficult to find the few interesting ones that really add value to everyday life.

Secondly, a lot of people don’t care about apps at all. 

If the phone companies want to keep on selling smartphones at current pace, sooner or later they will have to sell one to my mother. I can tell you right now that she will never go to an app store. If the sales guys at the local phone joint will use the amount of compatible apps somewhere in the web as a sales argument, they have totally missed the point.

My father-in-law is a happy iPad user. He never goes to the App Store. The few apps he has on his device (a newspaper, a TV recording service and Skype for talking to grandkids) have been installed by the IT department. If he ever needs something more, he will probably ask me again, but I doubt he ever will. A web access device with a good screen is enough.

Thirdly, apps are a complex system for accessing simple web content.

Creating, testing and distributing several apps for various platforms is a pain and causes a lot of unnecessary work for developers. As a result of the divided efforts, most apps aren’t well-designed or optimized. Often, the user experience can’t compete with a good mobile web site. For example, Facebook’s mobile pages still beat many Facebook apps in speed, functionality and ease of use. 

Sure, there are some great applications that make life easier, but finding, downloading and installing the right apps requires time, interest and capabilities most users don’t have. I sincerely hope that the development of web standards will get us past this stage. Some new HTML5 implementations I have seen look promising.

What I would like to hear in a Lumia review is how quickly you can switch windows in the web browser, how easy it is to view photos, videos and comments in Facebook, or how well data connections and roaming can be controlled. I really don’t care about the apps.

Am I alone in thinking that most nerds who write reviews about smartphones have lost touch with the reality of the normal user and criticize phones for things only very few users would really be bothered about?

An appliance? Sounds good!

 

I have a wireless multi-room sound system at home. It is several years old now and it is still great.

It does not support photo sharing, you can’t view videos with it. It doesn’t have an alarm clock or a Facebook widget. It just plays music.

The basic UI looks like this:

To rock the house, you can use a PC or a smartphone. You select the room where you want to listen to music, pick the music (from a hard drive, Internet radio station or Spotify) and click play. Works like a dream.

And when I move, I just grab my boxes, plug them in and play again. The ones I have can be moved around as I please, and to add a room, all I need is a new box. The only issues I have had over the years are minor interference incidents when too many wireless devices try to use the same frequency range, and one over-protective PC firewall that wouldn’t allow a connection to the sound system. 

In a world where technology is getting more and more complicated, and user interfaces more and more cluttered, one feels happy with simple experiences like this. The design award of the week goes to Sonos and everybody else who have faith in focused appliances.

 

Crossing cultures

 

I am back in Sweden after a few weeks in France and I have a minor cultural shock. The weather was colder, but that is not what provoked the shock. It wasn’t the short lunch breaks either.

While we were gone, there was major water damage in the kindergarten. They had to evacuate the building and assemble a temporary one on the parking lot. The construction was delayed by a couple of weeks because they also had to build access for the disabled (of which there aren’t any) and a separate room for changing diapers, which can’t be maneuvered in the toilet for hygiene reasons.

Thinking about the electricity installations in the escalier of our building in France (the picture above), I felt that this might have been a time where nordic authorities could have loosened up a bit. But around here there aren’t any exceptions for temporary buildings, regardless of the urgency.

I had similar culture assimilation issues a couple of years ago, when I was working in the French sales office of a Finnish company. I remember us counting then that there were about two hours a day when the French actually were working at the same time with the headquarters in Finland.

When we came to the office after the rush hour in France, it was 11 o’clock in Finland, which is lunch time. The first joint working hour started when the Finns came back from lunch at 11.15. Then the French took lunch, and returned two hours later to the other joint hour, before the Finns stopped answering the phone at 15.30 local time. The French day was then really just starting.

That is what one hour of time difference and a spoonful of culture traditions mean in practice. Add bigger distances, stronger cultural asymmetry and a couple of time zones, and it makes one wonder it ever can be possible to build a smoothly functioning global organization. The cross-cultural challenge is to turn all this into an asset. 

Doesn’t that make the world a great place to probe?

Happy Easter to everybody! (In case that is something you tend to celebrate.)