For various reasons, the next Unmethodical Analysis blog post is on blogspot instead of here on posterous. Dissection of a User Interface

What is BYOD?

On its own, BYO is an abbreviation for Bring Your Own. This was originally seen on student party invitations from young Americans in the phrase BYO Beer. More mature party-goers, with refined tastes, might themselves choose to bring their own beer, or wine. That’s BYO.

BYOD is an abbreviation for Bring Your Own Device. This doesn’t imply you’re invited to a party; Bring means bring to work. As to Device, that means a laptop, a mobile phone, or any other type of electronic equipment, including an iPad. (I could say “slate” but I’m not a manufacturer so I don’t need to pretend that the iPad is just another instance of a pre-existing type of device.)

BYOD is part of a blurring of the division between what is mine and what is my employer’s. That division does not only apply to hardware, but also to services, and even time. Here it is in a diagram:

Note the grey area shared by the Home and Work ellipses.

Home slash Work

You enter the grey area when you do any of the following:

·         Make a personal phone call at your desk

·         Order pizza using your work mobile

·         Write a personal letter on your work laptop

·         Play your own CD in your work desktop, while you work

·         Take a late work call at home

·         Work from home using your own broadband

·         Have stuff you bought on-line delivered to your office

I have done all of the above. Also, I don’t have a personal laptop and a work laptop, nor do I have a personal mobile phone. Beyond hardware and services, I don’t have separate work and home calendars, nor separate address books.

Well, as the song says, how did I get here?

How did I blur the thick black lines of the home-work distinction into a grey blur?

The answer lies in the psychology of the individual (Jeeves reference). There are a number of psychologies that can lead to the blurring of the division of home and work.

Psychology one: Job-lover

Only prostitutes do it for the money

The psychology of the job-lover is that of the motivational poster: Fascinated by your work? No? Then get different work. Don’t spend half your waking hours doing something you hate. If you despise your work, you despise yourself.

The job-lover doesn’t look forward to the end of the working day. They want to continue working after they leave the office, or lab. Hence they bring their work home and blur their work and home lives.

Psychology two: Guilt worker

The crime is salary; the sentence is work

Guilt can be a motivator: You browsed the internet a lot today, so you agree to take a late call tomorrow. You took your laptop home so that your daughter could do her homework on it this evening. You shouldn’t do that because it’s a work resource, so you feel guilty. Tonight, to expiate your guilt, you respond to some e-mails that you would otherwise have processed tomorrow. You hate your job but it pays the rent and puts food on the table.

The psychology of the guilt worker is one of constant shame that they are not working hard enough, or that they are abusing the facilities that their employer provides. Since they used their work time to do personal stuff, they now must let work stuff intrude into their personal time.

Psychology three: Engaged independent

A man’s best friend is his job

The guilt worker’s and job-lover’s relationships to their jobs are those of forced parasite and willing host, respectively. The relationship of the engaged independent takes the best of both; it is symbiotic. If you need a model, think of man and dog.

Humans and dogs have been living together for around 15,000 years. That’s a successful marriage by any standard. It worked because each brought something different to the relationship. Man needed a partner who could track by scent. Dog needed a partner who could shoot an arrow into prey at a distance. (These days, Dog needs its kidney medicine, and Man needs lessons in loyalty.)

There’s a deal going on. For example, suppose your employer pays your mobile phone bill. Their end of the deal is your colleagues calling you at any time. Your end is calling home to your dad when you’re on holiday abroad.

Engaged independents recognise that they bring some things to work, and also that work brings some things to them. When the two come together, there is a blurring like spinning cog wheels in an engine.

These are three possible psychologies of the individual. In analysing them, we are analysing the consumer in the market, which is essential for product design. But the BYOD market is not pure consumer.

Whatever their psychological compulsions, individual consumers could not have created the BYOD market on their own. Their employers, the enterprises, participated too.

Consumer slash Enterprise

Most products are sold to the consumer, or to the enterprise, but not to both. Even products that are sold to both have a different proposition in consumer and enterprise markets. But, in the BYOD market, both consumers and enterprise are represented. Either may buy your products, although in different ways, and for different reasons.

Consumers move fast

Consumers make decisions quicker than enterprises, and that includes purchasing decisions.

Individual consumers are already buying the latest iOS and Android devices. They are increasing their productivity by investing in superior tools to those provided by their employers, the enterprises.

Consumers buy on impulse

As any salesperson will tell you, it’s been shown by science that people make decisions emotionally and then reinforce with rational arguments a few seconds later.

A consumer sees an iPad and wants it, because it’s cool. They decide to buy it, then rationalise “I can use it for work.”

(An enterprise would never do that. An enterprise would survey the market and consider all options and costs. By the time they decide that WiFi iPads meet their requirements, all the users that would be getting a company unit have already bought their own 3G ones. Consumers move faster than enterprises, see above.)

The consumer’s impulsiveness is compounded by their need to justify their purchases to, at most, their spouse. An enterprise’s I.T. buyer will have a whole financial department dedicated to doubting their purchases.

Consumers can buy cheaper

Consumers don’t consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a purchase, and don’t worry about the complexity of cash-flow.

For many years, enterprises bought IBM PCs because of IBM’s leasing arrangements, not because of any technical benefit. At face value, they were paying more than a consumer buying equivalent hardware from another supplier. But all the consumer had to do was pay cash and take their computer home. The enterprise had to pay out of their revenue, had to support thousands of users, and didn’t want to end up with a worthless asset at the end of the computer’s shorter corporate life.

Consumers are poor

What’s that you say? Not all consumers are poor? Think about Bill Gates? OK, let’s do that.

For $50 billion I could apparently buy all the equity in Microsoft Corporation. The net worth of Bill Gates is apparently in excess of $50 billion, so he is less poor than Microsoft. But ask yourself: Whose phone bill is higher? Who bought more computers this year? Who spent more on software licenses? You get the point.

So consumers spend money now, perhaps unwisely, on stuff that they will simply own. Enterprises spend a lot more money, but only after a lot of consideration, and they may not be looking for simple ownership when they have spent their money.

This is how consumers and enterprises spend in the BYOD market. Next question is: What will they buy? Why, the winning products that my employer is launching.

Winning products that my employer is launching

Just kidding. Obviously I can’t share my winning product designs, since they’re super-secret company property and worth millions, probably. But I can share some guidelines and notes.

Don’t sub-divide the grey area

Suppose the user is going to have a single device with them at work and at home. Couldn’t they use that device to track how they divide their time between those activities? A time-tracker could ping to notify the user that they have completed 7.5 hours of work and should rest or eat now. It seems appealing to attempt to resolve the blurriness but I think it does not work to any of the user psychologies.

The job-lover doesn’t care about their home life. They also don’t recognise that spending more time at work is a bad thing.

The guilt worker doesn’t want to find out that they actually didn’t earn their salary this month. They will also disappear down a rabbit hole trying to classify their time correctly. What about that one-hour conference call that I took in the office? I didn’t say anything during the call and I spent half of it surfing the web for a film to see, and the other half IMing my buddies to organise the cinema trip.

The engaged independent is already comfortable with their work-life split. If their employer foists this kind of time-recording on them, they will put in whatever values are needed to get the foister out of their hair so that they can get on with their job and life.

(But couldn’t a time-tracker change the guilt worker into an engaged independent? No, changes like that take therapy.)

People are people

Consumer and enterprise users have different goals. But that doesn’t mean they want entirely different product features.

Consumers want Gmail and MSN hotmail on their phones. Enterprise users want Outlook-Exchange or Lotus-Domino. They both want mobile e-mail.

The consumer wants to receive a photo of his niece’s birthday party. The enterprise user wants to receive the new rates spreadsheet. They both want e-mail attachments.

The consumer has to remember to buy his girlfriend a birthday card. The enterprise user has to make the weekly sales call, wherever she happens to be. They both want a synchronised calendar on their phone.

The consumer wants to find out where all that money that was in their wallet went. The enterprise user wants to claim expenses. They both need to track where they were and what they spent.

My contacts, My calendar, My to-do list

I believe BYO Phone users will stop thinking in terms of “personal contacts” and “work contacts”. Instead they will only think of “my contacts”.

Suppose the user wants to call somebody. It could be a colleague or a personal contact. The user does not want to have to look up the name in several places. The number could be in their phone contacts, their synchronised contacts, or even in their enterprise’s global address list (GAL). What the user wants is to key in part of the name of the person, and have all the look-ups executed.

Similarly, BYO Phone users will stop thinking in terms of “work calendar” and “home calendar” and instead have a single calendar.

The single calendar is compelling because of a simple fact: you can only be in one place at a time*. You don’t want to book lunch with your nephew at the same time as you’re interviewing your next head engineer. But if you have separate personal and work calendars, it’s quite easy to make that mistake.

(*This doesn’t apply to Dr Manhattan from the Watchmen, since he actually can be in two places at one time. If you are Dr Manhattan then a: I’m pretty stoked that you read my blog, and b: sorry but you’re a user base of one, and a fictional one at that, so your needs are custom not productised.)

The BYOD user’s to-do list goes the same way: not split between tasks that work wants me to do, and tasks that my family and friends want me to do. Instead, it is all the tasks that I have to do.

BYO Phone users will have a single set of contacts, calendar and tasks. Or, more generally stated, they will have a single set of Personal Information Management data (PIM data). But where will users store their PIM data?

Will they choose Gmail? Will they choose MSN hotmail? Will they choose their corporate Outlook account? Will they choose their PC’s local thunderbird (or icedove)? The answer eventually is yes, yes, yes, yes. Users will eventually have all their PIM everywhere. (It might not be so much by choice as by default though.)

I pay and they pay

Here’s a real service I heard about quite a while ago, when I worked at a mobile phone operator.

There was a long-distance haulier company; I believe it may even have been the famous Eddie Stobbart. The enterprise wanted mobile phones, so that their truck drivers could be contacted wherever they were. The enterprise also recognised that giving every member of staff access to a mobile that was paid for by the company could lead to a very large phone bill.

Their solution was for the company to buy the handset and the contract, but allow prepaid top-ups to be purchased by the drivers themselves. (That’s the inverse of BYO Phone.)

Following is another example of both parties paying, although this one is not a product as such. I worked at a company that had a fairly standard book-buying process. You wanted the company to buy a book, you raised a request giving the reason you wanted it, the title, ISBN etc. (This is not the BYOD part BTW.) The result was that few books were ordered by anybody other than the chairman. Also, the company had one copy of each of Kernighan & Ritchie, Harbison & Steele and Plauger, which meant that you couldn’t keep a copy on your desk.

That company was bought by another company. Their process was different. You want a book, you buy it. Then the company pays you half the cost of the book. See how this cuts through any need to justify your purchase? You don’t argue for the book, you put your money where your mouth is. Also, the company doesn’t need to give somebody an admin task to buy the book. Instead, that task moves to the person who is actually motivated to do it, because they want the book.

(One caveat: since you would own the book afterwards, I guess there’s a tax implication.)

In the BYO Phone world, it’s already possible to have the enterprise’s chosen mobile e-mail service installed on the user’s own handheld. Ideally, you want the user to pay for the contract that includes the phone, then the enterprise to pay for the mobile data and the software license. That could challenge the operator’s billing system, and both user and enterprise would have to choose the same mobile network, but these are only I.T. hurdles, not legal or engineering barriers.

And if you’re BYO Phone, why not BYO laptop? The only thing stopping most enterprises from supporting this is that they downsized and outsourced their I.T. function so much that they are beyond arms-length, and in fact out-of-sight of the user.

Service the user, not the buyer

JCB is a well-known manufacturer of excavators and other heavy plant used in the building and agricultural trades. Part of their success is due, no doubt, to making technical innovations in their area and to selling equipment at the right price. Another part is that JCB had elements of what software developers call user-focus.

A while back, JCB put the operator in an enclosed cab, with a heated seat and a radio. At that time, their competitors’ vehicles were still open to the elements. As a result, when an operator moved on from one building site to a new job, he would request a JCB digger.

Now, it’s not the individual builder (user) that buys or hires the excavator. That decision will be made by the building company (enterprise). But I suppose that, given similar prices and capabilities, the buyer will go with the user’s recommendation.

Similar analysis has always applied to software sold to enterprises, or to service operators. Developers are good at doing whatever is necessary to get the deal. It’s the excitement of the sale, when the buyer is in the driving seat. But one year later, or even earlier, the users will be in charge. If they haven’t had a good experience of the service, it’ll get dropped.

In the BYOD market, there is an even stronger mandate to service the user instead of the buyer. Why? Because the user has more control over what software is installed on their device.

Suppose the enterprise I.T. director has been sold your mobile e-mail product. Suppose further that he has mandated it as the only approved mobile e-mail software within the enterprise, because it encrypts the e-mail on the phone. Great sale, guys. But suppose the product doesn’t give the end user what they need. The end user has no motivation to soldier on with, say, your difficult UI or limited HTML support. They didn’t buy the software, they will uninstall it.

(Can’t they be blocked from uninstalling? Maybe they could have when the enterprise bought a BlackBerry, and tied the user’s sciatic nerve through the lanyard grommet. But not now that the user bought a Nexus One themselves, with their own money. The I.T. director may issue whatever diktats they like, the user owns the device and will not clutter it with software that doesn’t work for them. And as to blocking other e-mail services, good luck. Users are ingenious. They find ways to get the data that they need for their jobs. They might find a process loophole, or a technical hack, or even persuade their local helpdesk to leak an access code or two.)

Anyway, suppose it’s now one year later. The I.T. director, possibly a different person by now, is reviewing the license spend. They check the e-mail server and find that hardly anybody is using your mobile e-mail service. Why aren’t you using it? the I.T. director asks the employees. It does on-device encryption. We don’t care about on-device encryption, say the end users. That was your requirement, not ours. Oh well, thinks the I.T. director, I may as well cancel our enterprise license.

To prevent this scenario, bear all users’ requirements in mind when designing the product. To close the sale, you need only meet the enterprise buyer’s requirements. But to keep the customer, you must also meet the end users’ requirements.

(If you think it’s not important to keep customers, ask a salesperson about the relative cost of acquiring new customers compared to selling to existing customers. Then ask them about the different success rates of referral and non-referral prospecting, i.e. getting your happy customers to give you more happy customers, as opposed to cold calling.)

Enable rediscovery

(TOTH the founder of flirtomatic for introducing me to this term, in a public talk recently.)

Remember the impulse-buying consumer in the above? They rationalised a gadget purchase by saying “I can use it for work.”

Later on, this same consumer may find themselves saying “Hey, I really can use it for work.”

For product designers, this means that rediscovery is important. Rediscovery also applies to the typical enterprise roll-out, as follows.

Suppose the enterprise purchases a mobilisation module for their corporate Instant Messaging (IM). They deploy it and announce the roll-out. Right at that moment, their users are busy doing their jobs and are not in immediate need of mobile IM.

Later, a user is alone with their phone in a situation that demands instant communication with a colleague. Rediscovery is the thing that happens in between now, and the user starting an IM conversation with that colleague. If the user fails to rediscover their enterprise’s mobile IM service, the service fails.

Rediscovery is important in all services, but especially where the end user did not install the software themselves.

Crossover look and feel, Crossover features

The iPhones I’ve seen had a lot of whizzy animated transitions. A lot? Well, at least more than I would expect in serious enterprise software. But the iPhone is usable as an enterprise tool.

The presence of whizzy animations is something of a challenge to my inner stereotype of how business software looks. It would be unsettling in a pure enterprise application. But in a BYO Phone it’s OK, because a BYO Phone is not purely for work.

Badges are a feature of some social networks. For example, users of plurk.com and blip.fm can earn badges by having a large number of friends on the site, or by being very active users. We don’t see badges on enterprise software, but maybe we should. How about a badge for somebody that has made over 100 edits on the corporate wiki? How about adding long-service badges to employees’ IM avatars, or GAL entries?

It’s kind of frivolous, sure, but there’s no reason product designers shouldn’t allow look & feel, and even features, to bleed over when users are in the BYOD grey area.

I think I saw a while ago that a Microsoft staffer had made some kind of add-on that tracked the user’s work in MS Word and awarded them points. Users could then compete against other users. I think I’d quite like somebody to create the Game of Work service, on-line. To play the Game of Work, I would set myself work goals, and then earn points for achieving them. I might choose to battle with other players (workers) for more points and badges, especially badges.

That sounds more like a party than work, which means we are back where we started.

Conclusion

If you’re a student who wants to have a party, but you can’t buy beer for everybody, you ask them: Bring Your Own

If you’re a guest at a dinner party, and you don’t want to drink the cheap plonk that your hosts will serve: Bring Your Own

Transposed to the BYOD market:

The BYOD enterprise is a party in a student flat. It cannot buy everything its users need, for reasons of affordability and practicality, but it still owns the game as a whole.

The BYOD consumer is a snob from the suburbs. It has varying control over which products it uses, and pays a varying portion of the costs.

There are products out there that meet both their requirements, and there will be more in future.

Copyright © Jim Hawkins, 2010

 

DevMob 2010
On 03feb2010 I went to the DevMob 2010 event, whose ning is here http://devmob2010.ning.com/
I learned some things, I asked some things, I answered some things, I was even interviewed at one point.

I learned that LPIA stands for Low Power Intel Architecture
I didn't learn all that much about LPIA, but that's reasonable as I am not an hardware engineer.
One point I did retain is that LPIA divides processor functions across two “complexes”: the North complex, and the South complex. These complexes can be powered up or not separately. A recent change is to put the audio processor down in the South complex, which also houses the I/O controller. That way you only need to power up the South complex to play music. Clever.

The point of LPIA in market terms, seems to me to be that Intel are on the march towards the Smart Phone. This market is currently held by ARM processors. This reminded me of an occasion, many years ago, when I was visiting a computer manufacturer.

For various reasons, I was working in the same room as a man who was specifying a machine for a customer. The spec included forty or so 486 processors, or they may have been Pentiums. Why is LPIA a reminder for that? Because that specification in that room was Intel marching on the minicomputer. At the time, that market was held by the likes of DEC and Data General. Remember DEC and DG? Neither do I, really. (I did enjoy the book Soul of a New Machine though, which follows a DG project.)

Anyway, Intel must have gone about as far as they can upwards. Nobody’s going to swap out their IBM mainframe for a PC farm, right? So now Intel are going downwards instead. It’s like the mammals have wiped out the dinosaurs and are going toe-to-toe with insects. We’ll see how it plays out.

I asked: What is the Linux Foundation?
Not quite as stupid a question as it sounds actually; there are a number of foundation-style organisations associated with open source software. Well, organisations many be overstating the situation. Many are no more than projects or, less, pieces of code that happen to be on git-hub.

Anyway, it turns out that the Linux Foundation is the non-profit that employs The Man himself, Linus Torvalds. So now I know.

I learned that Intel is one of the top three contributors to Linux
Their Moblin (Mobile Linux) project is hosted at the Linux foundation, or it was at the time of DevMob 2010. A matter of weeks later, at Mobile World Congress, it seems that Intel-only Moblin was replaced by an Intel-Nokia joint venture: MeeGo.

Moblin was Open Source like Android, and MeeGo is too. But, like Android, any real installation on a device is not wholly Open Source because the phone part will be closed by the device manufacturer.

Moblin started in 2007. Originally, it was based on whatever goes into Ubuntu. Now it is based on whatever goes into Fedora, apparently so they can use .rpm packages instead of Debian packages.

I asked: To whom would I pay my Moblin SDK license fee?
Right now, if I was developing software for HTC devices, I'd expect to have a license with HTC. But Intel seemed to have their own free and non-free tools for Moblin. (Same for MeeGo, I expect.) Would I license those from Intel, instead of licensing the device manufacturer's tools? Or would I need both licenses?

The answer may be that I would only need to license the Intel tools if I was a device manufacturer. As an application developer, I can get by with the free tools. But this may not give me access to the heavy-lifting APIs like power optimisation. I guess I’ll have to leave that to the device-driver developers.

I learned about a UI piece that Intel purchased and is now Open Source
It’s called Clutter and much was made of it at DevMob 2010. They said that it enables an iPhone-like user interface because it has built-in animation. They also said that there is the Moblin User Experience, which is written in Clutter, sitting on top of the Moblin User Interface. Well, I suppose somebody who thinks that the key to the iPhone's success is animation in the UI, might also think that “user experience” means “user interface but better”. Tut.

Since DevMob 2010, a new diagram has been published (Here, for example http://meego.com/developers/meego-architecture). This shoves Clutter and GTK+ well over to one side, leaving Qt in the dominant position. That’s from Nokia’s maemo, I bet.

Heresy alert: Do customers really care about another user interface? I’m especially thinking about phone customers. I saw some research recently that suggested most people look at the phone, pick it up and feel the buttons, and they’ve decided. UI isn’t something that drives their buying decision; it’s something they complain about later.

(Here’s that research http://www.telecoms.com/18383/application-brands-sway-handset-decisions)

I asked if Intel met enterprise requirements in their Moblin store
Suppose I'm an I.T. director. I've decided that all team leaders will have tiny laptops, such as Asus. I pick out a productivity suite that is compatible with these laptops and the infrastructure and enterprise applications that I’m already running. Every Moblin computer has access to the Moblin store. Can I, as I.T. director, use this store to distribute the applications that I identified for the productivity suite? The enterprise would be licensing these applications, and hence paying for them. The laptops themselves would be in the hands of end users. No, the end users would not have company credit cards. Neither would they have secretaries, nor access to a typing pool.

The answer was no, the store would not support the above scenario.
Since the Joint venture, the Moblin store may go West in favour of Nokia's Ovi.
I'm wondering if manufacturers, like Asus, will be getting a slice of Application revenue due to users of their Moblin / MeeGo devices? If the store on Moblin devices is Ovi, does that mean Nokia get a slice too?

My questions about The Slices started when I heard that O2 had to pay Apple a slice of call revenues in order to get their UK exclusive iPhone deal. Of course, Apple also gets a slice of application revenue, which they share with the mobile operator that sends the bills.

Then again, there's Google Android. That's an OS supplier sharing a slice of application revenue with a mobile operator.

With Moblin / MeeGo, Intel would be providing the OS and the processor. I suppose that entitles them to at least as much of a slice as Google get for supplying Android.

Maybe the ingredients of the pie will turn out to be more important than with whom it is shared. There was a game developer at DevMob who complained that the iPhone appstore gives him no information about who purchases his game, nor does it offer any way for him to contact his customers, nor is there any built-in system for his customers to raise support issues. If Intel, and Nokia, make a pie that provides those functions, they could literally build the pie higher (Bush-ism) and with it their revenues.

I learned how the Netbook started its life
Turns out there was a big batch of old Celeron processors going cheap. Some smart individual thought, yeah I could put one of those in a Speak & Spell chassis and sell it as a PC.

There ought to be a word for turning old hardware into money. I once worked in the same building as a company whose business was buying old R.A.F. warehouses full of valves and selling them to the Third World. Then again there was the Ascom salesman who had a growing market for Telex machines: Eastern Europe. The old kit may not be sexy but it is still valuable in the right context. (Must remember that next time I’m looking for a job.)

I answered: Why apps, why not The Cloud?
People still want their apps on their computer, which they own. The P in PC stands for personal, something in-house helpdesks might do well to remember.

I’m also coming across a trend to diversity. People are using their own phones for work. People are bringing in their own laptops into the office and, shock horror, I.T. departments are actually supporting them. There is a blurring between work and personal hardware, and life.

Is this new, or quite old fashioned? Think about the princes of the industrial revolution. They had no work-personal boundary; why should you? If you are interested in what you do, you think about it out-of-hours. You might even write a blog post about it out-of-hours.

I learned that there is a four to ten inch niche
This is about screen size. There is a niche for handheld devices whose screens are between four and ten inches across the diagonal. It is quite ably filled by one Chippy Paine and the other contributors to the http://www.umpcportal.com/ site.

(By the way, that site is now on my weekly read list, along with the following:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/
http://www.Telecoms.com/
http://friendfeed.com/rooms/weloveapps
http://london-ia.ning.com/
No, I don’t do RSS.)
No brand owns this niche, hence there is a great deal of activity there. The technology is improving in all directions: energy consumption, screen quality, storage capacity, processing power and so on. (I maintain that convergence with the desktop is a misconception though, since the desktop is also improving just as fast.)

But these improvements do not fundamentally change what the user can do with the devices in this niche. These improvements do not make users’ hands bigger, so they still cannot hold a large tablet device in one hand and type with the other. Neither do they make users’ hands tinier, so they still cannot type fast on a “peck board” or “thumb board” keyboard. Neither do they give users’ tuneable microscopic eyesight, so they still cannot view quality photos on a two inch screen.

The use cases are summarised in a diagram here on the umpcportal site

Excellent, isn’t it?
To the left-most column I would add the following:
On-line social network messages and comments with zero content such as Facebook’s Poke, Like, and Unlike, or Twitter’s mark as Favourite

Barcode reading with the camera, which is already in use on some Android and iPhone applications
FM radio. Why not listen to internet radio? Because it takes wa-a-a-ay more data and battery. Same goes for DAB radio, at least w.r.t. battery

Breathalyser would require additional hardware, but would be valuable to some
Sound-level checking is something a semi-pro muso colleague of mine was able to do with one of his phones. I don’t know if that particular phone had a better microphone, or just happened to have built-in software.

As I see it, only some uses cases should extend to the right in the diagram. In other words, some use cases can only be done on the smaller, less powerful, platforms. Any in-pocket use case is in this category.

For example, I often listen to the music on my phone when I’m walking and the phone is in my pocket. Could I do that with a laptop? I’ve tried and the answer is no. First of all, I had to plug the headphones into the socket on my laptop, then put my still-powered-on laptop into my rucksack. That was OK kind of until I wanted to change the track. I had to get my laptop out, open it, and then click a button in the media player. That’s a much longer interaction than the phone equivalent.

For more on mobilised usage, see this earlier post of mine: http://post.ly/1Ssh

I learned that there is an approach called Hurry Up and Get Idle
The theory is that a higher-spec processor might consume less power than a lower-spec. This is because it does what it needs to do quickly then goes to sleep. Probably not applicable to telephony or music though.

I learned what they call the glass in a phone touch screen
Gorilla glass, and it isn’t cheap. It’s fun to look at phone BOM (Bill Of Materials) websites sometimes. The screen is often the most expensive component, even pricier than the chip.

In conclusion…
Mobile computing has come a long way since the Husky Hunter and the Zorba (try http://www.old-computers.com) but it still has a long way to go. Is it the passenger or the vehicle?

Copyright © Jim Hawkins, 2010

Funny video and picture classification tags
My mate Jeff is a great forwarder of amusing pictures, videos and slideshows. Whilst I do not wish this to reduce, and certainly not stop, I do wish he would use the following classification tags. These are emerging as a de facto standard, I feel, for the good reason that they enable easy and appropriate enjoyment of forwarded content.

Tags can be added in the subject line or body of the message to which the video or slideshow is attached.
No sound
Use this tag when the video or slideshow is silent. I’ll be happy to play it anywhere, but see NSFW, below.
Has sound
Avoid the deprecated tag “Has sound” in favour of one of the following.
Better with sound
or
Needs sound
Use the “Needs sound” tag to let me know that I must get my headphones out in order to enjoy your video, or wait until I'm somewhere that I can make sound. Either of those is a cost to me. As Ofcom and the OFT would probably say, the consumer must be made aware of costs prior to consumption.

Use the tag better with sound to let me know that I could mute my computer and watch now, but with lesser enjoyment. This tag also gives me the alternative to delay watching, for greater gratification later.

NSFW
This tag originally derives from an abbreviation of Not Safe For Work but now has a wider meaning. The jocular re-working Not Safe For Wife has of course no place on my politically correct personal computer.

What NSFW implies now is the following:

I believe that you will not be offended by this material, although you may be amused, aroused or disgusted. However, I believe that you may not wish to be seen enjoying this type of material. Also, I cannot vouch that others will not be offended. To be safe, watch when alone.

Personally, I am tending to use more detailed classifications such as now appear on video games. For example: Sweary, Adult themes, or Sexual content.

Work-safe
Use this tag on material that is not NSFW. I prefer not to have this tag assumed and implicit, thank you.

Copyright © Jim Hawkins, 2010

Operator Opprobrium part three
For an introduction, see Operator Opprobrium part one.
For a dictionary definition, see Operator Opprobrium part two.
This time, I’m looking at cash, the final frontier.
I can imagine that somebody somewhere is right now writing a blog post, titled Customer Criticism, about how cheap mobile phone users are become. “If they want good customer service,” reads the post’s conclusion, “they should be good customers.” Specifically, they should fulfil the obligations of their contracts, without complaint. More on that story later, but first let’s look at some more general opprobrium.

Opprobrium: They charge me far too much!
People do like to complain about the overall cost of everything related to their mobile phone. When I hear that particular moan, I’m reminded of what Will Self said when he was on the BBC’s Room 101 show.

Self said that airline pilots ought to sound a lot more excited when they take off. They actually sound quite bored, something like “This is your captain speaking. We will be travelling at an altitude of blah blah.” What they should say, with an exhilarated tone, is: “Holy cow, we’re flying. We’re actually flying; all of us. Just now, we were in London; when we stop flying, we’ll be in New York. Wheee!”

Why am I reminded of that? Because, guys, where’s your sense of wonder? You switch your phone on and you can talk to anybody in the world, from wherever you are in the world. Isn’t that amazing?

Isn’t that a bit gushy? Well, yes. Also, it’s only half the picture.
In the full picture, price is determined by supply and demand. The above is the demand side, and demand is clearly less hungry than it was when the mobile phone first appeared. What about supply?

Supply here means a mobile operator. I used to be employed by a mobile operator, whom I won’t name, so I can outline some of their costs.

Physical network means cell sites, aerials, microwave dishes and all that Real Engineering hardware. When I started work at the operator, I had a round of induction presentations. In one of these, I was told that the company was spending £1,000,000 a day on improving their network. Yes, one million pounds, every day. By the time I left, I think they were up to £2,000,000 per day. The average cost of a cell site is around £250,000 apparently.

Core network means the switches, Base Station Controllers (BSC), Home Location Registers (HLR), Visitor Location Registers (VLR) and a lot more gubbins besides. It’s all necessary, if you want the physical radio network to actually route calls.

Here, it’s not so much the hardware itself that costs the money. It’s the support costs and licensing fees. The actual amounts are guarded pretty closely but I do have an interesting snippet.

As well as everything else, the HLR vendor of my ex-employer charged the operator a fee per customer, per month. A customer here means an allocated HLR entry. So the “customer” might not be active, but the operator still had to pay. Suppose the fee was £1. On a £20 per month contract, that’s an immediate 5% of revenue that the operator never even sees.

I.T. Infrastructure means network management, rating, billing, customer care, provisioning, and possibly prepaid platforms. This is in the same category as core network. It’s a necessary cost, if you want the physical radio network to be useable.

Another snippet: a database vendor was at one time rumoured to be suing my employer over what they reckoned to be a very large number of unlicensed end-users. The database vendor argument went something like this:

A prepay customer of yours can query their balance at any time. That results in a query on the database you buy from us. So every prepaid customer is an end user and requires a license.

I guess the operator had about one thousand times as many prepay customers as they had staff, so those license fees would have been quite a hit. The operator had to settle because the company was being sold.

On a side note, unlike the physical network, the core network and I.T. infrastructure are not assets. In two years, all those cell sites will still be worth something; they could be sold. But in two years, the core network components and the I.T. infrastructure will be a big pile of two-year old computers. We all know what those are worth.

License to operate a mobile network. Licenses to operate are issued by that paragon of efficiency: The State. Licenses are not cheap.

As I recall, one operator paid £5bn for their 3G license. Not long after, the company was sold for £10bn. In other words, they paid half the value of their company for a piece of paper.

That piece of paper didn’t magically give them a 3G network either. They still had to build that. Could they re-use their 2G physical network? To some extent yes, but the technology has significant differences. In particular, 3G cells’ coverage shrinks when they get busy. This means that more cell sites are required, and that cell planning has to be done all over again. See above under Physical network for an idea of what that costs.

I think I’ve now painted the supply half of the picture. It’s a portrait of the physical network, core network, I.T. infrastructure and operator license formed into a lumbering colossus of cost and debt.

Apart from that analysis, there is also evidence to consider. Are mobile phone operators actually making massive profits? T-Mobile and Orange aren’t. That’s why they’re merging their UK operations.

So next time you find yourself wondering why the operator sets contract rates so high, don’t look at the buttony candy bar that they’re pressing into your hand. Look over their shoulder at the lumbering colossus of costs and debt that stalks them.

Opprobrium: They charge me for early termination!
Yes, if you sign a 12-month contract, and then cancel after 6 months, you have to pay an early termination fee. You might have to pay what is known as minimum term billing which is the monthly rate multiplied by the number of months left on your contract. This is not a punitive charge, by the way, and you can avoid it quite simply in one of two ways.

The first way to avoid any early termination fee is to buy an unsubsidised and unlocked phone. There, simple.
But wait, you say, they cost way more. No, they cost the same; it just seems like more because you’re paying it all at once.

You see, the price you pay for your phone is initially reduced by a handset subsidy. The operator pays the subsidy to the manufacturer, and then charges it to you over the course of your contract.

Handset subsidy is like the operator lending you the money to buy your phone. When you terminate early, you still owe them whatever is left to pay. The phone is at least yours by then; it’s not like when you default on your car payments and they take away your wheels.

In the early days, so I was told, the operators came up with a creative and in no way dishonest approach to accounting for handset subsidy. They told the auditor that a happy customer is an asset.

Happy customers, they said, spread goodwill and induce non-customers to take our service. By doing this, happy customers actually increase the value of our business. Ergo happy customers are an asset. Expending the subsidy money increases our customers’ happiness. It is therefore an investment in the happy-customer asset. They even got away with it for a few years.

Then the auditors realised that customers are not assets but, well, customers. You can sell your assets; you can’t sell your customers (not legally anyway, T-Mobile UK staff take note please). Ergo the handset subsidy is not an investment but money you threw away, unless you get it back from the customer.

The operators said that their business model didn’t work if they did that. The auditor said: yeah not our problem.
And so the handset subsidy became the customer’s problem.
The second way to avoid an early termination fee is to wait 12 months, probably. Back when I was employed by an operator, the legal advice was that early termination fees for contracts over 12 months could not be enforced, although that may have changed.

OK, it’s obvious that you can avoid early termination fees by not terminating early. The operator’s point of view may be less obvious, and is really where I’m going with the second way of avoidance and indeed with this whole piece.

Customers that have just signed a contract provide a guaranteed steady monthly income, with a possible bonus if they exceed their allowances. As soon as a customer’s contract expires, they are a line-of-business (LOB) that could stop at any moment. More precisely, they could give notice to stop at any moment, when customer subscriptions are charged in advance.

In that respect, the operator is at a disadvantage compared to the customer. But the operator has the upper hand in another respect. The value of this LOB is now known to them, with standard caveats about the past twelve months not necessarily being indicative of the next twelve.

Back to your point-of-view now.
Once the signed-up period of your phone contract has expired, you qualify as Out Of Contract (OOC). Up until that point the operator could menace you with the entirely fair early termination fee. But now they are disarmed. This means that you can take your time.

Find the best competing offer, then call to terminate. You’ll be put through to the retention team, or whatever your particular operator calls it. They have the authority to make better offers than are in the shops, and will do so. There’s a caveat…

Before offering, the retention team will make a calculation of your likely Customer Lifetime Contribution (CLC). That’s your value to the operator, as a LOB. If your CLC is low, well, don’t expect a free iPhone and unlimited texts. But even then, you might still be worth an accessory or two so try and don’t be shy.

If your CLC is high, then you’ll probably get a better deal than you could have by switching. You certainly won’t have to go through the pain of porting, and you certainly will have avoided the early termination fee.

The retention team will probably try to get you to accept a new phone. Why? At some point, and possibly currently, the law considered that a new deal without any new hardware was not considered an upgrade as such. The customer has not received anything substantial, so the customer cannot be tied into a new contract. By contrast, a new phone means a new handset subsidy. A new subsidy means a new loan to you, hence a new contract with an early termination fee. And now you’re back to being a guaranteed steady LOB.

The second method boils down to: be valuable. The first boils down to: don’t be cheap.
Instead of complaining about early termination, count yourself lucky that the operator lent you the money to buy the handset that you now own.

Next time: DevMob2010 report