The Apple AppStore has over 100,000 iPhone applications. Verizon’s Droid is a a few months old and Google just launched the Nexus One. Microsoft has Windows Mobile and the Palm has the hot new Palm Pre. The current king of Mobile Business is the Blackberry (RIM), but it is losing ground fast. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Palm, Verizon & RIM all going after the same market and that makes for great headlines.
The Hype
Articles are starting to appear talking about the mobile replacing desktop as a work environment. For the most part, this is bunk; A symptom of someone looking for a headline, but not thinking. When I see an interesting article about a controversial topic, I like to first look at the last 2-3 headlines by that author. If last week they were talking about global warming, the week before about cyber-crime and this week about mobile technology replacing the desktop; I classify them as “reporter”. Reporter does not equal expert. While reporters are absolutely essential to get a pulse on minor variations on trends, I prefer to seek the experts to get a deep understanding of a new technology. Even better is to immerse yourself and get first-hand experience. Most of the buzz today is reporter, not expert created.
Definitions
To better understand if/when/why mobile will or will not replace the desktop, definitions are in order: Desktop refers to the hardware, be it PC, Mac, Linux, either desktop or laptop. This desktop can be running any form of software including installed, Client-Server, SaaS and browser based. Mobile is the generally understood concept of a smart-phone like a Blackberry or iPhone.
Mobile vs. Desktop
So will “mobile” business application replace the “desktop”? Yes and No. The first Hurtle for Mobile to replace Desktop is CPU & Memory. Over the next decade, mobile form factor devices will have the processor and memory of today’s desktops. So throw out processing power as a differentiator. Mobile will catch up. In fact, most applications today, especially SaaS applications only take up a small amount of CPU and memory on the desktop.
What else constitutes a desktop environment? Input and output devices. This is the big one. I personally have both Mac and PC setups, each with a bunch of big monitors. Besides the large monitors, I use full size keyboards, and a laser mouse.
My Mac & PC workstations
Big ideas need big work spaces. When I first realized that my iPhone was actually a mobile computer, I tested the limits. Doing basic operations like reading email works fine. What about spreadsheets I thought?
Designing a spreadsheet on a mobile device is possible, but very, very inefficient. I tried it and it’s infuriating. However, using an already designed spreadsheet on mobile device is realistic. Reading email; easy. Writing email; possible, but not as easy as using a full size keyboard.
This is where I had my epiphany that would steer the mobile strategy for Broadlook.
Mobile Technology is an extension of and not a replacement for PC-based business applications.
Why? Desktop business applications have evolved over the years to take advantage of everything possible. Case in point, at Broadlook, we switched to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The default setup did not fit our selling model, so we modified Dynamics to fit our business process. Dynamics is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment; a base of CRM functionality which each business can build on. Our modifications to Dynamics CRM included data points that most companies don’t have access to (unless they are Broadlook customers). Simply put, the average screen was too small to get all the data on it that we needed. We could have created a system where everything was accessible in a drill-down fashion (click, click, click). However, this included too many clicks to be efficient. I can’t stand having to click 3-4 times to get to data that should be there. The answer: bigger monitors. Standard at Broadlook, we now have 24 inch monitors with 1920×1200 resolution. The things that most people have to click 2-3 extra times to get to their CRM, we have on the first screen. Simple things like having all the contact info points in the initial search grid.
Broadlook’s Leads Screen in MS Dynamics CRM on a 24 inch monitor. All info points are available so a sales rep can take action from the first screen. A typical implementation of SalesForce.com or MS CRM would require you to click 2-3 times to get at all the information on this screen.
As a side note. These monitors are about $250. Picking up 50 of these monitors was many many more times cheaper than wasting the time of a sales rep in click-click hell. In addition developing with the large monitors in mind is much more forgiving than having limited screen real estate and making a design decision that makes 1/2 the people happy and 1/2 ticked off.
How would this business process, which depends on “big hardware” translate to a 4 inch mobile screen?
It won’t.
No way, no how. This is why we won’t see CRM for mobile replacing CRM on the desktop/laptop. I’ve seen a few mobile “stand-alone” CRM’s on both the sales and recruiting sides. They are a joke. An absolute productivity waste. What works with mobile CRM is when it is used to enhance the desktop experience. Salesforce has done a good job of it, as have several others. If your mobile can access your CRM, you can look up a contact, review notes, or line up a few calls for when you are on the road or after hours. Mobile CRM as a value add to your CRM is an absolute must-have.
What about applications like social networking? LinkedIN is a good example. LinkedIN for iPhone is great, I’m looking forward to when LinkedIN or Facebook adds a practical proximity alert to your social network. That would be something that the desktop or even laptop would not be practical for. This leads me into the areas that mobile will dominate and why.
For those existing business applications that have evolved on the desktop, mobile will add additional value. However, for the new frontiers, areas that were birthed in mobile, those will be the areas where mobile can stand alone. It is the same concept which allowed desktop applications to evolve. You develop to the potential of the environment. CPU, memory, screen size, input devices, always on (yes/no), network connectivity, battery life. All of these are the factors that effect Darwinism on both the desktop and mobile device.
Today, most of the successful mobile applications are consumer-based. As of this writing, none of the top 25 apps in the iPhone AppStore were business apps. Blackberry pundits: only 2 of the top 25 for Blackberry were business apps.
So where does this leave us?
For business applications that evolved on larger form factor systems such as CRM and Spreadsheets, mobile will be a value-add, but not a replacement. If someone is promising CRM on your mobile to replace your desktop, run like hell or carry a 12 year old with tiny fingers to type for you everywhere you go.
New and currently undiscovered business applications that are born and evolve on the mobile will rule the mobile.
2010 is going to be a fantastic year for mobile! I am excited and personally committed to developing on mobile.
Caveats: (1) When mobile becomes a conduit to work with outside peripherals such as an wall screens and video goggles, then mobile could replace the desktop, however, what is really being accomplished here is emulating the functions of a full form factor desktop & monitor. (2) Seamless voice recognition can get around the problems with small form factor keyboards. I have not seen voice recognition that is worth it’s salt. I tell my car “Radio Off” and it says “Please say the name of the street you want to navigate to”.
Steven Covey published The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and it was a great book.
When Dr. Covey came out with a new book, The 8th Habit, I was skeptical. Why didn’t he think up the 8th habit right from the start?
Now I understand it. Ideas evolve. We are the sum total of your experiences at any point in time. You create a set of rules that you believe are universal. In my case, I am the author of The Seven Laws of Internet Search.
The Original Laws …
1. Permutation
2. Completeness
3. Iteration
4. Frequency
5. Process
6. Taxonomy
7. Measurable Results
It has been about a year and a half and now, guess what? I came up with another Law of Internet Search. The 8th law could not have been created by me…unless I was able to observe people learning and implementing the first seven laws in their Internet search activity.
Here is what I observed: The Internet is “non-homogeneous”. The idea of homogeneity also resonated with me as I wrote the original seven laws. I played with the idea of a Law of Non-homogeneity. This means that the Internet exists in many different formats and there is no way to query everything, with a single method or game plan.
“Non-Homogeneous” sounds ugly. To define something with “non” in front of it…it would be like cheating. Each of the seven laws of Internet Search is meant to be a simple axiom of advice. I failed to get my concept of Homogeneity into the laws.
Why did I fail? It is simple. Each of the seven laws is a solution. Whereas “non-homogeneous” or “non-homogeneity” was talking about a problem.
What was I trying to get at? It is also simple. The Internet is not homogeneous, therefore, many different methods are needed to search it. It is those very search mechanisms that the 8th Law takes into account. The 8th law is The Law of Environment.
In fact, the 8th Law is so important, I have moved it the top spot in The Laws of Internet Search. It is now The 1st Law of Internet Search.
To understand the Law of Environment. Get your mind around the concept of the Internet having many modalities. Many sites, each with it’s own set of rules or search environment.
Next. There are some simple questions to ask. What is the access method? What are the sites restrictions? Etc
In addition to the simple questions about the environment, the more advanced Internet search may want to dive into further understand the full capabilities of the search environment.
Once the simple questions about the environment are answered, the Internet search can proceed with quantifiable expectations on what to expect from their chosen search medium.
For example, it is important to understand that Google will only give you a maximum of 1000 results from any search. Even if Google reports that their are 2450 results, you only have access to the first 1000. Understanding this is understanding the limitation of the environment.
Here are the The Laws of Internet Search, Reloaded
1. Environment
2. Permutation
3. Completeness
4. Iteration
5. Frequency
6. Process
7. Taxonomy
8. Measurable Results
Dr. Steven Covey, now I understand. Looking forward to the ninth law.
Semantic search is a fantastic technology, if used correctly. I am not talking about users of semantic search technology, I am talking about the technology vendors that make it part of a system
I was inspired to write this blog after reading Glen Cathey’s (The Boolean Black Belt) Article on Why Do So Many ATS Vendors Offer Poor Search Capability. The article made me think about search engines (google, yahoo, etc) and how semantic search is being used with them.
What is semantic search? To put is simple: semantic search can take, as input, a word like “Java” and offers up other related terms like “J2EE” or “Beans” (both are related to Java). This allows the user to type in a few terms but match many, many terms.
The matching terms are built into an “expert system” that is continually built over time. Many fancy names are given to these systems, based on how they are built, but basically they are sets of rules.
Semantic search is not AI (artificial intelligence). If you hear that, it probably started in a marketing department somewhere.
Companies that have built semantic search engines, while they have not created AI, have spent a tremendous amount of time and resources to build these sets of rules. The better engines can build rules on the fly from a new set of data, like resumes. This is very cool stuff.
Overall, I like semantic search. It has great potential, however, it has great weaknesses if used incorrectly. If built into the engine itself, semantic search can be very powerful, this is because semantic processing is done at the search engine side, without any limitations or constraints. However, if bolted onto a search engine, it can be more harmful than good.
Here is what I mean. I’ll try to keep my logic simple.
1. The Google search engine has a limit in how many terms can be submitted to it.
2. Semantic search, by it’s nature, creates permutations upon given terms. For example:
“Senior VP of Sales” can be “SVP Sales” or “Senior Vice President of Sales”
to translate that into a boolean expression you get
“senior vp of sales” OR “SVP sales” OR “senior vice president of sales”
3. After creating permutations upon several concepts, you are out of search terms.
I’m a big believe in laws (maybe not speed-limit laws), but more the “laws of the universe” type stuff. I like to understand and deconstruct the rules and see if each one stands alone, or, do I need to recheck my premises. In this spirit, just before the first sourceCon conference, I developed the Seven Laws of Internet Research. I felt there was too much emphasis on memorizing search strings and the latest search engines or sites, but not enough fundamental thought leadership on how to think about searching the Internet.
The first two laws are
1. The Law of Permutation
2. The Law of Completeness
The Law of Permutation simply states that when searching the Internet, as it is not a homogeneous source of data, you must describe what you are looking for in the language of the many vs. the language of the one. (YES, this is what Semantic search is doing).
The Law of Completeness states you must strive for completeness of search engine results in order to have the superior outcome
Big Question: What happens if semantic search is applied before you reach completeness of results?
Answer: Missing data. Competitors eat your lunch. If you are a sales person, it means missed sales leads, if you are a recruiter, it means missed resumes or passive candidates.
Does this mean that I am anti-semantic search? No way. I think it has great potential.
Here are my take-aways:
-Semantic search should be inside the search engine for optimal results
-Semantic search bolted onto a standard search engine is severely limited.
-Semantic search will cause data to be missed if applied before reaching completeness of possible results
-When combining a standard search engine and semantic search, it is best to apply the semantic processing AFTER completeness of data has been reached. In reality, this would not be semantic search, but semantic filtering.
The definition and very nature of contact information is changing.
Why is this important? If you are not able to connect with people, you cannot sell to them, you cannot recruit them, you cannot market to them. As I talked about in the video intro, things are changing. If there was a contact information historian, it would be me.
What gets me irritated is when something gets reported as the “next best thing”, when in reality, it is simply, the next, extremely predictable innovation in a continuum. In this blog, I’m going to play part historian, part reporter and part futurist as it relates to contact information. When the “next big thing” happens, and I’m including social networks, you probably won’t be surprised.
First, a definition is in order. What is Contact Information? I define it as:
“an information venue that facilitates communication with a person”
Why am I spending my time doing this? My day job is steering the ship at Broadlook Technologies. Broadlook provides technology that empowers sales and recruiting professionals with contacts at corporations. To stay ahead, we must innovate. To innovate, we must research. To research we must watch, listen, learn, explore and dream a little.
One interesting aspect about contact information is that very rarely does a new form replace an old form. For example, with the advent of SMS (or texting) people are still using email; perhaps not as much, but they are using both. Even faxes have not been fully replaced by email. In some cases, legal wants the paperwork. Take it a step farther and faxes are not enough and good old paper mail is still being used. What does that mean?
1. The nature of new venues of contact information is additive.
2. New venues lead to more specialized usage of existing venues.
3. The nature of contact information must be part of system design.
Why is this stuff, in turn, important? Example: If you are designing a CRM for holding contact information and you “hard code” (design something inflexible) to store phone, fax, email and that’s it…big problem. Each time a new type of contact information is created, a hard-coded CRM would have to be updated and reprogrammed. Some may think that a SaaS model overcomes this, but it does not. A good CRM will have the changing nature of contact information built into it’s design and not solve it with revisions.
“A good CRM will take into account the changing nature of contact information and design for that nature from the start and not solve it with revisions.”
What happened today is about 1 chance in 84 Billion. Here is what happened.
I was using the URL shortening service http:\\tr.im. This service takes a long URL and shortens it into something manageable. The utility of the service is that you get a short URL which can be used on venues such as Twitter, where every character counts.
In fact, I was going to tweet about a new product, Contact Capture for the iPhone. The latest iPhone is the 3GS. I typed in the long URL, as shown in the picture below.
Next, I pressed the [TR.IM] button and got the following:
If you haven’t picked it up, the iPhone is the 3Gs, the trimmed URL is “x3Gs”
Now for the fuzzy (very fuzzy math)
There are approximately 96 usable ASCII characters. ASCII is the characters on your keyboard plus a few more (A-Z, a-z and 0-9, etc) . There are about 96 usable ones that the TR.IM service can use.
With 4 unique characters in the URL, that means there are 96 * 96 * 96 *96 combinations or 84,934,656 combinations.
This itself is interesting, but the fact that the URL was for an iPhone 3Gs we have to look at this question: Of all trimmed URL’s, what percentage are for iPhone related content? I am going to be conservative and sale 1 in 1000.
So 84 million multiplied by 1000 is one in 84 billion.
The bottom line is that this was a coincidence, it made me smile and I thought I would share it.
If the Blackberry link included something like a Blackberry model number, I would be heading out to buy a lottery ticket…no such luck.
This all made me think about Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers. One of the concepts I gathered was, basically, when opportunity knocks, you need to take advantage of it. Sometimes an opportunity is one in 84 billion.
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