I was rushing into London the other day for one of the Windows Phone launch events. Normally I’d take the train but the car made a lot more sense given I had my camera equipment with me.

I should explain that I drive a Range Rover. With the exception of a summer zooming around the London Docklands in my brother’s Ford Ka, I have always driven a Range Rover. I like the driving position, I like the road presence, I like the comfort. Although I’m a careful driver (they don’t call me safety dad for nothing) I am well aware of the legions of idiots who populate Britain’s roads.

Generally speaking, most people recognise the bulk of the Range Rover long before you need them to. Most people adjust their driving plans accordingly. For example, the Range Rover is one of the only vehicles on the road beyond large lorries and vans that London’s taxi drivers voluntarily give way to. It’s rare to be cut up by an arse in a fast car too. They won’t want to be damaged.

Anyway.

Let’s get to the crash

There was a traffic jam ahead as the M40 split to allow traffic on to the M25. I continued into London on the M40 and came to a halt behind a queue of traffic on the left lane, next to the hard shoulder.

All was good until I looked in the mirror.

I saw a smallish Citroen van approaching in the distance.

I could only see part of the shoulders of the driver. The rest of his head and shoulders was hidden because he was reaching for something on the floor.

I watched as he drew nearer.

And then I thought, shit… he’s going to hit me.

Arse.

I watched as his van sped into the back of my car. His van hit with an almighty bang. I did the involuntary whiplash dance. In my rear mirror, I saw the van driver instantly pop his head and shoulders back up in alarm. I don’t think he’d found the pen he had been looking for.

I estimate he hit me at about 25-30 miles per hour. He hadn’t been looking at the front of the road for some time so the large smack came as a shock to him.

He put his hands over his face. I silently cursed. I was obviously going to be late for this launch. Both of us pulled over to the hard shoulder. I got out to inspect the damage.

As I rounded the back of the Range Rover I saw the total devastation of the Van’s entire front area. It was completely crumpled. Hardly any radiator left. At least a foot or so had crumpled away. The number-plate was hanging on by a single screw, the engine was exposed and some parts of it were also hanging off, or pushed back, damaged.

I turned to my Range Rover.

And I had to stifle a laugh. There was a small nick on the bumper’s paintwork. This is why I drive a Range Rover. If I’d been in any other car, I’d have been seriously shaken and the damage would have been particularly acute. (By the way, loads of people have been saying that’s not a van in the picture above… I know! I didn’t want to publish the actual pictures of the crash so I found that one online!)

The Mobile Comfort Blanket

The chap apologised immediately. He explained it wasn’t his van — he was working for the guy who owned it. He wrote his contact details on a piece of paper. I gave him a business card. But whilst he was writing down his details, I walked back to the car and got my phone. Now, I typically carry the following devices:

• BlackBerry Torch/Bold
• iPhone 4
• iPad
• BlackBerry Curve

Which one did I reach for in this situation?

Well, the first thing I thought I should do was to record the scene.

I reached for the iPhone. I wanted the immediate click-click of the camera and the HD video just in case I needed evidence for the insurance. I automatically processed the fact that any photos would automatically be marked with the GPS coordinates. So I began snapping a load. His van, my bumper, the road position, the chap himself, the car’s profile and so on .

Then I reached for the BlackBerry. I called my wife, explained what had happened and assured her that I was ok. (I should point out I was stationery on the hard shoulder and the engine was off.)

And then, on the side of the M40 as I prepared to drive off — I wondered if there was an app for that. My insurer is Direct Line. I tapped open the App Store on the iPhone and searched for ‘Direct Line’, silently praying for decent mobile data connectivity. If ever I needed a boost or priority button, it was then. My iPhone is powered by 3 — whose network is amongst the best I’ve experienced. A few results appeared within a second or so. I saw the Direct Line one and my heart jumped (iTunes link, free). In the midst of the confusion, stress, worry and excitement of experiencing a car crash, I am surprised by just how dependent I became on my phone. Or phones.

The Direct Line app downloaded in 4 seconds.

I remember silently thanking Steve Jobs for the flawless point-and-click delivery architecture of the iPhone platform. Thank you Steve. Again, I was surprised by how reassured I felt seeing the Direct Line logo appear on my phone. I tapped it.

Immediately I was presented with the option to fill in my policy number and contact information. This is the sort of thing I should have done ages ago. I didn’t bother with that. I wanted to see the other options.

Delight and confidence filled my heart as I read down the options:

• Live traffic update (nice, but not relevant to me)
• Journey Planner (cool, again not relevant at the moment)
• Pinpoint My Location — find out precisely I am to help the emergency services. Great idea.
• A Torch Screen facility — in case I found myself in the dark
• Insurance Quote facility (not relevant in this case)
• Claims Incident Guide — a step-by-step guide to documenting an accident, your location, the participants, the photographic evidence — and the ability to submit the claim wirelessly to Direct Line. Love it. Absolutely phenomenal.

I stepped through the incident guide screen filling out the details and attaching the photos. The guide was hugely comprehensive but split into simple, easy steps that you could come back to. For instance, it prompted me to fill in details of any witnesses, information about any injuries, the contact details of the other party(ies) and so on.

Luckily I didn’t need to make an insurance claim on account of the other chap accepting responsibility comprehensively.

Indeed, that same day I got a phone call from his insurance firm to step through the rigmarole. They’re coming to pick up the Range Rover to fix the scratch

My Reactions

I was quite surprised by my reactions. Why did I reach for the iPhone first when my primary device is the BlackBerry? In the back of my mind, I think I calculated that it would be a few seconds quicker to easily deploy the iPhone’s camera for photos and the HD video. I also swiftly calculated (unfortunately) that there was a 99% chance that a big brand such as Direct Line has already deployed an iPhone app, but that they most definitely wouldn’t have a BlackBerry app as yet. (I had a look and couldn’t find one later on). Despite having my iPhone in my hand, I actually put it down and picked up my BlackBerry to SMS my wife. Again, that was just quicker. Much quicker than arsing around with the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard. Indeed, all I need to do is type ‘c’ for compose and ‘h’ for Henrietta and I’m then ready to start typing my text. It’s that quick on the BlackBerry. Whilst this is going on I was also wondering why there wasn’t some kind of integrated ‘so, you’ve had an accident’ app that both me and the other driver could have activated.

The whole after-accident process has been a slight arse. It’s been well managed. But there’s been a lot of ‘touch’. A lot of phone calls that I have to answer. That is hugely annoying. I’ve had to fill in an accident report form for the other guy’s insurer to explain that, no, thanks to the Range Rover, I’ve got zero whiplash and that all I’d like to see is the scratch repaired. But I have to POST the PAPER form back to them. And I have to wait for a PHONE CALL from a nearby garage who will PHONE ME when they’re able to pick up the car.

PHONE PHONE PHONE. It’s all so inefficient.

Do you think that any time soon, this kind of organising will be swapped to the mobile and desktop platforms? How soon before we can get rid of paper and postage and people PHONING me. I don’t want to have to interact with folk in a synchronous manner about this kind of stuff. It’s all low level. I want to pick a day for the garage pick-up on my mobile app (or browser). I want to be able to change the appointment without having to phone up again and have to go through 5 different people. I want to be able to follow the status of the repairs from the device and be pushed updates as they’re posted by the garage and the insurance company. Surely this stuff isn’t too far away?

Surely we don’t have to wait another decade or so before this kind of workflow can be managed entirely via our mobile handset (or desktop, with a mobile browser interface)?

Tell me about your mobile & car crash experiences?

Have you used any mobile apps to report your car crash incidents? How has mobile helped you when you’ve been in a crash? Let me know.

[NB, I got the picture courtesy of Google Maps and Kent Online News]

There is nothing worse in this industry than a mobile operator that thinks it knows what it’s customers want.

Time and time again, the market keeps on having to correct the mobile operator’s misguided attempts at trying to evolve beyond a utility bit pipe.

In this post, I’m going to explore that issue, culminating in explaining why the idea of a jointly created mobile operating system is absolutely ridiculous (and yes, as I will explain, this is precisely what Vodafone, Orange and a few others are mulling right now). So this is coffee-and-a-biscuit read, I think. I’d very much welcome your opinion at the end.

Are you sitting comfortably? Right, come with me…

There is perhaps one more thing that’s worse than a mobile operator trying to innovate in unfamiliar markets: It’s another utility provider, such as your local electricity provider, trying to sell you entertainment services.

Now, this generally doesn’t happen because electricity providers understand that they know nothing about entertainment. Instead they leave that to companies like Channel4, Endemol, Fox and NBC. Those specialists produce and commission entertainment content that is delivered over a multi-layer infrastructure platform manufactured by an array of hardware specialists such as Samsung and Sony. The end-consumption device is the television. Consumers plug in their televisions (powered by the electricity provider’s output) and enjoy the resulting entertainment.

At no point did the electricity company interfere with the delivery, style, substance, production or hardware beyond specifying that all devices must conform to a 220v range.

And we’re good.

The electricity company knows nothing about entertainment. Or user interfaces for kettles, electric razors, or anything else that runs on their utility. They just sell electricity. They don’t even bother marketing their services. I don’t see advertisements encouraging me to use my television for an extra hour per day. I don’t even think about my electricity consumption beyond a) paying the bill at the end of the quarter and b) trying to be ‘green’ and not leaving lights on unnecessarily.

Interestingly, I will never receive a flyer with my electricity bill asking if I’d like to upgrade my television. The electricity firm doesn’t try and sell me an upgraded interface for my television. They don’t suggest I get HD — that’s left to the content providers and hardware vendors. They don’t try and produce their own version of ‘The Wire’ or ‘Big Brother’. They don’t hire a series of young actors and try and produce television dramas. Nor do they sell me toast to go in my toaster or lightbulbs, electric toothbrushes, toothpaste or doorbell buzzers.

In some circumstances, my electricity company will expand it’s utility presence to offer me gas. Or perhaps water.

But they never try and sell me a kettle ‘to go with my water’, an oven or some cookery books.

They just don’t bother.

They recognise their responsibility, their DNA and their fundamental limitations. Their job is to make sure their production and delivery network stays live on a 99.999% (“five nines”) basis, respond swiftly and effectively to any outages, invest next generation electricity delivery technologies to augment (for example, the effects of weather or disaster) and to take their well earned profits.

I want my utility providers to make a bucketload of money. I don’t want their Board of Directors panicking about trying to counter Sony’s new Playstation or worrying about how to make me buy more sport content on my television. I want the provider to be able to burn £10 notes. Figuratively. I need them to be well fed, well financed and I need their CFO to encourage massive investment into assuring the supply of one of the key utilities I rely on. I want the lights to stay on. I need the cash dispensers to keep on working so I can get money to buy some food in Sainsbury’s to feed my young child. And I want to be able to heat my house precisely as I wish. Further, I want the company to be able to invest sufficiently at scale so that it is able to offer me service at reasonable rates. I want everybody to be able to afford to purchase a basic amount of electricity without it costing the Earth.

And that’s it. That’s what I want from my utility provider.

There’s the odd exception but generally speaking, especially here in the West, the model works really nicely for all utility providers and their customers.

A mobile operator is a utility provider of telecommunications services. Are we agreed? Fundamentally, a mobile operator provides voice calls, messaging services and data connectivity services. Through their utility services, it is also possible for them to function as a transaction engine, initially offering revenue to content providers (premium rate SMS/voice) and more recently, by offering other companies (such as mobile developers) the ability to transact with the provider’s customers.

Now, let’s take a look back at the emergence of the mobile operator.

The Utility Exception: Mobile Operators

In the face of unprecedented demand for mobile services over the past 20 years, our mobile utility providers have grown dramatically. In their formative years, mobile utility providers competed against each other to deliver better and better utility. It was simply amazing to be able to take a taxi from one part of London to another and be able to continue a mobile telephone call.

Later, the utility providers recognised they’d deliver greater utility by enabling interconnectivity, so I could call a friend using a different network.

Everything was working nicely as the utility providers continued to upgrade and strengthen their networks. Data services were launched. Text messaging as a utility service was ‘discovered’ and the medium exploded.

Customers were provided with financing in the form of an annual contract to enable the supply of ever evolving mobile ‘terminals’ or handsets.

Device hardware manufacturers sought to produce better devices. Continued innovation delivered hardware with integrated FM radios, MP3 players and even cameras. Consumers who purchased a device with a camera were delighted to be able to use their GPRS data network to take a photo and then email it to their friends. Granted, the transmission speeds were slow and the method expensive and charged ‘per megabyte’ (or, more accurately, per kilobyte!) by the utility provider. Some kind of charging mechanism had to be introduced and ‘per meg’ was — well, it was at least usage based charging, like the per minute structure.

The First Utility Provider Screw-Up

And then it all went wrong. Mobile utility providers became mobile operators. They decided they knew what their customers wanted. They turned into the electricity company trying to sell us toasters.

Their marketing teams went into overdrive and their technology teams introduced MMS (“Multimedia message service”). The idea? Duplicate the success of text messaging by taking the burgeoning send-photo-by-email facility and screwing it up. Instead of working out a global standard to send photos (and perhaps video later on), the utility teams over complicated it, over priced it and delivered an utterly shit service to their end users. Handset manufacturers struggled to work out the best way of integrating with ‘MMS’ and in the end, had to do their best to make their devices work with it. The result was a complete disaster with consumers being charged for messages that never arrived, or — even worse — did arrive but the size of a postage stamp (because the network ‘optimised’ the photo for the user’s handset). The medium never recovered until Apple arrived with an iPhone UI that made sending photos (and video) easy… By email.

So the same feature that some of us were experimenting with a decade ago is reintroduced by Apple to a hail of amazement. We didn’t reckon on the mobile utility provider’s ability to make an arse of the whole process.

The Second Utility Provider Screw-Up

The mobile utility providers were just getting started though. Can you imagine your electricity provider demanding that you only purchase a Sony television — and ‘locking’ the TV so that it cannot be viewed by your neighbours if they pop in for a coffee? Witness then, the utility provider deciding to buy millions of handsets from Nokia to offer to customers — but insisting that the VOIP facilities in the devices are deactivated (Here’s a link to a 2007 The Register article about this issue). The worry? Utility providers might lose a bit of revenue. Fast forward two years and the same utility providers are screaming for their customers to offload any and all possible data usage to WiFi.

The Third Utility Provider Screw-Up

It wasn’t long before the utility providers decided to launch all sorts of services for their consumers, simultaneously restricting them from using services delivered by competent specialists (e.g. MSN messenger). Witness, for example Orange insisting that all their Windows Mobile devices have Pocket MSN Messenger removed so that users can install Orange’s own sub-standard, useless and rubbish instant messenger service. Obviously no one bothered to use the Orange IM service and — from memory — the service was dumped quickly, in favour of the shiny MSN logo.

Almost every third party service introduced by a mobile utility provider goes nowhere.

It gets worse though.

The Fourth Utility Provider Screw-Up

It gets MUCH worse.

Now and again, ageing executives read inspiring articles in American business magazines and decide that, somehow, even though they’re a utility provider, they should reach beyond that function. They look at other fun companies operating in the technology space and think they can do the same.

Vodafone 360 is perhaps the best example — ever — of what happens when a utility provider thinks it can ‘do-an-Apple’.

In the same way that it’s ludicrous to consider my electricity provider supplying me a toaster along with weekly deliveries of bread to use within the toaster, it’s entirely unnatural for a mobile operator to reach beyond a basic transaction-led service oriented architecture.

In the case of Vodafone 360, the operator controlled every facet of the service, from specifying the Samsung hardware, operating system, handset user interface to the application layer. What happened? They produced a ‘service’ that simply didn’t work to spec. It was utterly shocking to see — a global billion dollar company, humbled and brought to its knees because of a functional inability to deliver beyond the company’s utility mandate. The people paying the price? The small number of customers duped into spunking their money on 18 or 24 months of 360 misery.

Like all utility provider experiments, 360 was hugely expensive, completely misaligned, poorly executed and woefully managed by a totally ineffectual team of senior executives. And, of course, it was quietly sidelined.

Yet another gazillion dollars down the pan funded by profits I willingly paid for their utility service.

The Fifth Utility Provider Screw-Up

Systemic structural change arrived recently to the world’s economy masquerading as ‘the financial crisis’. Not one of the utility providers saw a dramatic decrease in overall revenues. (Oh, revenues went down, but not in the same way they disappeared for, say, estate agents). Most mobile utility providers have actually done very, very well in terms of revenues recently. This, despite trying their best to innovate rubbish, irrelevant and totally misguided products and services in an attempt ‘to stay relevant’ and ‘beat Apple/Google/etc’.

Toward the tail end of 2010, the utility providers are still in rude health in the context of delivering utility.

Meanwhile as utility provider executive teams delight over huge sales of devices such as iPhones, they continue to obsess with what they see as the horrors of becoming ‘a bit pipe’ without seeming to notice that they’ve always been a bit-pipe utility provider that continues to make ridiculous amounts of money.

The fifth screw-up then, was the continual obsession of becoming something they are not and should not be.

The Sixth Utility Provider Screw-Up

It’s just about to happen, if reporting is to be believed — which brings me (finally) to the subject of this missive.

Telecompaper published a little article this week titled, “Orange to discuss joint mobile OS with Vodafone, others”.

Here’s a quick summary. Before you read, prepare yourself for the’ what-the-hell’ battering your neurons are about to receive:

France Telecom-Orange CEO Stephane Richard has invited the heads of Vodafone, Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile) to Paris on 8 October to discuss the possible development of a common operating system for mobile devices. He told Le Figaro that mobile operating systems were the Trojan horse used by Google and Apple to establish their own relationships with mobile service customers.

Utterly preposterous. We don’t see electricity companies getting really, really REALLY frustrated by BSkyB or DirecTV for establishing a relationship with their customers. For good reason. It’s not their business.

Yet mobile utility providers seem unable to accept that they are .. well, utility providers. Instead of innovating utility to deliver a plethora of ways to enable services for Google, Apple and the rest of the market, they’re obsessing about competing with them.

The Telecompaper post goes on to explain that France Telecom’s CEO, Stephane reckons that since the four operators mentioned have almost a billion customers combined, they have the capacity to influence the industry.

They do.

But not in the way they think.

Network As A Service?

Can you imagine the potential of a mobile operator working WITH Google, Yahoo and an array of (reliable, well financed) startups to deliver network-as-a-service facilities such as advanced, ubiquitous location services? Can you imagine being able to track every piece of hardware you own thanks to your mobile utility provider? Can you imagine being able to switch on your car’s heating from your bed in the morning on a cold day, thanks to a combination of services from your mobile utility provider, Apple, Nokia, and goodness knows how many other companies in between? Wouldn’t it be brilliant to simply wave our mobile handset at the taxi and hit ‘confirm’ to pay for the fare? Wouldn’t be even better if Vodafone had deployed LTE Advanced to give us <6ms latency for a network-as-a-service real time taxi service auction the moment I come out of my city meeting?

It’d be great, but…

No.

Unfortunately our utility providers are far too busy obsessing with irrelevant nonsense.

Time for some dodgy-but-workable-fag-packet calculations.

Assume that Vodafone’s 18 million customers each spend on average 25,000 pounds a year on all sorts of things — from meals to shoes to clothes to cinema tickets to food to rent. Work with me on this. 18 million people x £25,000 = £450,000,000,000 (that’s 450 billion). A year. Now assume that Vodafone can get 100% of their customers to spend that money via their Vodafone account with an NFC-enabled handset (work with me, here).

Now assume that Vodafone takes a workable 3.5% of revenue as a service charge. That’s £15.75 billion in revenue. To put this in perspective, that’s 35% of the Vodafone Group’s annual £44.5 billion in worldwide revenue last year. I know these numbers are made-up but they do indicate one possible future revenue growth possibility that involves transaction management (something mobile utility providers already excel at) and doesn’t involve arsing around with non-core things like device operating systems.

But no.

They’re off dicking about with operating systems, application stores and developer outreach programmes that reach nobody.

Meanwhile, in every mobile operator, there’s a small collection of forgotten Business-As-Usual departments working away feverishly trying to do their best with diminishing budgets. They’re trying to reduce network failures, sleepy cell towers and data speed delays. They’re trying — with limited senior management attention — to stick to the knitting and evolve their utility service as best they can.

I understand a heck of a lot of work is spent on business as usual activities within a mobile operator. But if only senior management time and the huge ‘innovation’ budgets were better aligned to delivering better utility…

I Dreamed A Dream

I often wonder what it would be like to be a customer of a mobile operator that invested heavily and singularly in providing really, really, REALLY good utility services.

What might that look like?

- They’d have ‘network-as-a-service’ API access to every part of their infrastructure
- Whilst every other provider was stuck on “3G+” speeds, our fictional operator would have already launched super fast Advanced LTE. But they’d have time to make it backward compatible.
- They’d have innovated their billing structures to eliminate customer confusion
- They’d have introduced support for 3 different NFC payment standards, before deciding on a clear-market-winner
- They’d enable me to pay for anything with my NFC-enabled handset so I’d start to pay people via my operator account and adopt the operator as my primary current account
- They’d have broken the silly standard network limitations with mobile numbers and devices, enabling me to have 10+ devices running the same phone number. And when I call out from each device, they’d all use the same phone number.
- They’d let people call my Twitter ID (by resolving that to my chosen device)
- They’d provide Google and Facebook super-API access into their network allowing their users to do amazingly cool things — and control their security absolutely and precisely. This kind of open can-do attitude would prompt most of the operator’s users to purchase multiple devices and additional service plan offerings (Yes, I would like a 10″ Facebook Gallery Frame running on my operator’s data network for an extra £4 per month. In fact, I’ll have three please.)
- They’d let me use my service plan(s) anywhere — absolutely anywhere. I’d pay a simple easy roaming charge integrated into my monthly bill — and I’d pay it monthly whether I went abroad or not. But when I’m abroad, it’s like the Kindle’s data connection: It works anywhere without any stupid bills.
- The operator would quickly become my trusted gateway to the planet, enabling me to easily and clearly manage my privacy settings.
- They’d have fixed or been close to fixing the ‘status’ issue, working closely with handset manufacturers and other third parties to continually innovate an interface and set of standards

But no.

Our mobile utility providers are off arsing around trying to do it all themselves. Badly. Again, again and again.

What do you think? Have I missed out some key screw-up stages? What do you think Vodafone or Orange might look like if they’d invested 90% of their expenditure on steady evolution of their utility service, rather than spunking it up the wall on stuff that simply doesn’t work? And what do you think of a 4-way mobile operator defined handset operating system?

I’ve had it with chip & PIN payments. I simply can’t stand it any more.

First, though, let me explain.

A few years ago, the United Kingdom financial institutions, tired of the ridiculous amount of credit card fraud that they — ultimately — had to pay for, decided to implement chip & PIN credit and debit cards. The concept being that during a transaction, you place your card complete with ‘on board chip’ into a card reader. You then have to type in your PIN number to identify yourself. All well and good, right? With millions of people used to just signing their name, a bit of a change in mindset was needed. I worried about my parents remembering their PIN numbers but within a month or so, all the user-issues had sorted themselves out.

It’s fine at big retailers

Paying in this manner is perfectly straight forward at high street chains, leading retailers and so on. The sales person will total up the amount you owe, you hand your card over — or place it in the reader in front of you. One moment later, they will ask you type in your PIN. Another brief moment and boom, that’s it. And the transaction is completed. You can go about your business. It’s perhaps a 3-5 second overhead which is entirely acceptable.

Silly pub credit card machines

It all goes pear-shaped when you go to other establishments without their own directly-connected always-on authorisation system — pubs, bars and almost any independent shop or establishment. So, for example, when I’ve had a nice dinner in a restaurant, the waiter has to come and stare at me for at least 30-seconds, often longer. It is one of the most frustrating things I have to endure on a daily basis.

Delay after delay

Here’s what happens in a restaurant:

1. I ask for the bill
2. The waiter brings the bill
3. I look at it and make sure I am content
4. The waiter and I then jointly enter the brief abyss that is GPRS authorisation hell….
5. He takes my card and sticks it in the outsided ‘mobile’ credit card machine
6. He types in the amount due
7. He then hands me the card machine and theatrically turns away so as to avoid seeing me enter my PIN number
8. At this point, I’d like to be clear perhaps 5-10 seconds of arsing around has taken place already. For instance, the waiter has had to lean over and find out how much the bill is and then type it into the machine then hand it to me.
9. I check the amount and then type in my PIN. In some rather rude establishments, I’m asked if I’d like to add a tip for the management. No. I invariably try and give cash.
10. Now I hand back the machine.
11. And my guest and I just stare at each other. This is because the waiter is standing at my table staring into space.
12. We wait.
13. And we wait.
14. The machine uses its GPRS connection to negotiate a session with whatever clearing house is providing the back-end transaction processing
15. The machine will proudly announce a CONNECTION MADE statement on screen shortly
16. There are people around us trying to get the attention of the waiter as he simply stands over us — the hustle and bustle of the restaurant continues around us
17. The machine limps through its procedure sending details of the transaction and then briefly waiting for the result
18. The machine then displays APPROVED and displays an authorisation code (for some inane reason — why do we need a sodding authorisation code in this day and age?)
19. Finally, the transaction nominally complete, the waiter comes to life, poised and waiting for the first receipt to print
20. The machine slowly pukes out the first transaction receipt
21. Sometimes this receipt is handed to me with my card, other times I have to wait for the second receipt to come out — this seems to depend on the waiting staff
22. The waiter says thank you and the transaction is finally complete

This whole production is then repeated for almost every other table in the restaurant.

It’s worse in bars

It’s a total nightmare in any establishment where there’s a big queue of people waiting to be served… and where EVERYONE is paying by card.

If the waiter is particularly efficient and there are no technical delays, we can get this whole debacle complete in a reasonably brief 10-15 seconds. But mostly, it takes 20-30 seconds of faffing around on both parts.

You might be reading this wondering what I’m concerned about, but it seriously winds me up. I don’t like the fact that I have to mentally insert a pause into my day. And I don’t like the total waste of time for both parties. Assume 5 credit card transactions per day, right? Each 30-seconds in length. Factor that across 7 days, 4 weeks and that’s 70 minutes of blank staring every month. Or, if you’d like to put it another way, I spend approximately 14 hours a year — just over half a day — waiting for the credit card payments industry to get it’s act together.

I’ve had enough

It’s simply ridiculous. Why can’t I just swipe my mobile on some payments reader? It’s the device I have with me *all* the time. It’s got oodles of personal identifying elements associated with it. My mobile operator is already heavily regulated. They’re already a transaction processing system as far as I’m concerned.

Why — after the technical equivalent of at least a century — have mobile companies not sorted out mobile payments? Why can’t I just swipe my mobile at the waiter’s machine on the way out? Why can’t I do the equivalent of swiping my NFC-enabled oyster card at a payment terminal?

I’m looking at you, industry!

Do we seriously have to wait for Apple to anoint their official mobile transaction system before the rest of the industry is galvanised into action? I’m aware of the myriad of excuses that have previously been voiced by many in the industry whenever I bring this subject up. “legislation” is an oft voiced excuse. We can’t get the Governments to agree to it. Or we can’t agree any standards. Or we can’t be bothered. Or, we’ll do that next year because our revenues are a little bit unstable at the moment. The basic answer, of course, is wait-and-see.

Visa has been dancing around the issue now and again. It looks like they might finally do something worth looking at in the context of their apparent arrangement with DeviceFidelity. They’re both working on something for one of the world’s largest mobile platforms. What’s that, you say? Nokia? No. Samsung? No. iPhone. Obviously. In fairness, the technical concept appears to be compatible with almost any device with a memory card slot.

First Data, one of the leading card settlement protagonists, almost got there with it’s gotag iniitative (where every credit card user would be issued with an NFC-style rubber sticker that you would swipe across the reader at, for example, McDonalds.

Of course, hardly anything happens in the mobile industry until somebody-else-does-it.

So we’ll probably need to wait for Apple.

Great.

It’s a shame, it really is. By the end of this week, almost every person in my close family will be sporting an Apple iPhone as their primary communications device. Both my parents, both my parents-in-law, my two brothers, my wife and one of her sisters.

Of the 10 people in my immediate family, 8 of them have Apple iPhone 3GS devices. Soon it will be 9 iPhones and one BlackBerry. It’s getting ridiculous, it really is.

But I can’t argue with it. I can’t find a way around it. What alternative is there?

It’s Fisher-Price but…

The geek in me points out that the iPhone is effectively a Fisher-Price mobile phone, seriously limited in its capabilities. You can only do one thing at a time, something that I find seriously frustrating. But it’s not a problem for the rest of the planet. Indeed, it’s painful watching the look of joy on the faces of those finally getting iPhones.

My Father-in-Law was phoned last week by Vodafone because his contract had expired. Would he like to renew, they asked — and get a free phone? Certainly, he replied and initially accepted a new BlackBerry Bold. Then he phoned his daughter — my wife — and asked if that was the right decision.

“No,” she said, “I don’t think you’ll like the small keys.”

I happen to really enjoy the BlackBerry’s physical keyboard layout, but she had a point. Within 30 seconds, the BlackBerry decision was reversed and Vodafone were asked to supply an iPhone instead.

This is happening all across the UK and in developed countries around the world. Ever so slowly, the iPhone is seeping into the mainstream marketplace, replacing Nokias, Samsungs, LGs and BlackBerries — and bringing great joy with it.

My members can’t believe how easy it is to get email. They can’t believe how cool it is to be able to flick through their photos and buy media with just a touch of a virtual button. They’re astounded by the simplicity of the user interface. This is manifested by their confidence in the device. I don’t see family members being ‘astounded’ instead I see them confidently asserting their preferences and delights. I am accosted regularly by iPhone friends and family with the phrase, “Have you seen this app?”

Expert In Minutes

Within a week of getting her iPhone, my wife was an expert. Such is the command that iPhone users have over their Fisher-Price device, they can confidently feel that they’ve ‘got it’ within days.My wife is downloading applications left right and centre. She doesn’t differentiate between free or premium, provided the cost is below £5.00. She makes her download evaluation based on the App Store reviews, the screenshots and whether her friends (the majority are also iPhone users) recommend the app.

My wife’s biggest issue is that she’s being woken up by 630am push notifications from some lady in Perth, Australia. By way of explanation: She’s recently taken to playing Words With Friends (iTunes link) — the scrabble-like game that enables you to play, in turns, with other people. She’s been checking out the ‘play with a random person’ function and started a game last week with a lady called Laura thousands of miles away. Once or twice a day, each of them knocks out a word via the app and the other is notified with a push update. Simple pleasures. My wife thinks it’s fantastic. I dare say that Laura is a big fan too.

My wife’s only issue is wondering whether it’s possible to turn off the vibrate option for push notifications. She asked and I suggested she check out the push-notification-menu. She disabled the vibrate function. And now she is entirely content.

Confidence & Delight

This remarkable confidence is one of Apple’s best inventions. By controlling their platform with tyrannical zeal, they are enabling their consumers to relax with their devices. To know that, for example, installing an application won’t screw things up. That if you take a photo, it’ll stay on your phone until you delete it. Oh, and plug it into your computer and it’ll be backed up. Properly. That is, if you lose your iPhone and buy another one, plug it into your computer and bang! it’ll be restored to precisely the last time you backed it up. Sounds simple but other mobile manufacturers haven’t quite got there yet.

Perhaps one of Apple’s biggest achievements has been to reach the disenfranchised mobile masses with disposable income. These are the people who previously couldn’t give a toss about their mobile handset. It was simply a communications device. I’m thinking of the over 40s, the over 50s and beyond — who earn sufficient not to have to worry about their precise spend each month.

I’m continually astonished at the fact my parents and parents-in-law cannot program their video recorder, but they can download and use iPhone applications. Targeting those with disposable income is a super move. They tend to be content to pay a slight premium for devices and services that make sense, that are easy to use. So whilst your average twenty-something might be too price sensitive to the ‘iPhone tax’ premium applied to the monthly operator contract, it’s not a problem for my wife’s father. He simply didn’t blink at the extra tenner a month.

My father-in-law has never had mobile email before. All of a sudden, he’s about to experience it — in all the iPhone’s simplicity. The email will just arrive. It’ll have a simple blue dot next to the unread items. It’ll make a satisfying ‘woosh’ when he sends a mail. It’ll make a little ding sound and show a counter on top of the email icon when new mail arrives. It’s ridiculously revolutionary for him.

His previous handset? Nokia N95 8GB.

Simple Works

For all the geeks reading who think the iPhone is a step-down from the ‘mobile computer’ that is (or was) the N95, the only feature my father-in-law used was the telephone and the address book. Everything else was too stupidly designed for him to bother wasting time using. The N95 was from a different era. The pre-Apple era. Everything was ‘your problem’. Nobody but the end user did the heavy lifting. You had to read the manual. You had to figure out how the stupid commands worked. You had to fit yourself around the mindset of the uber tech geeks who’d created the technology.

One of the key reasons people love Apple so much is because Steve Jobs simply won’t allow the stuff out the door unless it makes sense. It’s certainly not all about Steve — there’s a lot of other smarts working at the company who all think and believe the same. But when you look at the other companies and service providers out there, they’re simply too lazy to care. They will cite excuses like ‘nothing’s broken’ or ‘but we still make lots of money’ and ‘people still buy our products’.

Apple — in the context of the user experience — will not accept anything other than their own brand of brilliance. They make it work the way it should do. If that means a re-write or a lot of hard work, they make it happen. How many other manufacturers would have required the 140,000 applications written for the iPhone to have been re-written entirely for the iPad? It would have probably been easier not to bother. But no. They made sure that the iPad was backward compatible. Because you and I expected that to be the case.

Because It’s Cooler

You might not agree with a particular Apple strategy or viewpoint, but when Mr Jobs gets up on stage and explains that ‘this is cooler’ or ‘because we like this more’, it’s difficult not to at least respect the position.

Android hasn’t helped the end-user much. The plain vanilla viewpoint works nicely for geeks. HTC’s glorious ‘Sense’ UI does its absolute best to cover up the failings of both Windows Mobile 6.5 and Android. Indeed Android is now becoming a byword for ‘Symbian in 2002′. You only have to read the Android market feedback for most applications to see frustrated users demanding to know why the application they’ve just purchased doesn’t work with their new Droid. It’ll work with the T-Mobile G1, but not the Droid. Sorry? Isn’t this the ‘open source’ Android platform we’re talking about? Yes. But it’s been nailed by fragmentation already. Utterly nailed.

Nokia has got the message, it seems. Indeed, so has Symbian. A lot of what I know isn’t in the public domain yet so I can’t comment except to say their strategies look good. We’ll need to look at the execution and see.

As for the other manufacturers, well, Microsoft could well be on to a winner too. Again, we’ll need to wait and see. As for Samsung and LG? I think the jury is most certainly out whilst the painful transition from shitphones (“feature phones”) to smartphone continues.

The iPhone Customers: Lost Forever?

Meanwhile some of the industry’s best customers — the highest spending, the quiet ‘AAA’ masses, the contract customers who spend, day-in-day-out — have been hoovered up by the iPhone. And they’ve been locked into 24-month contracts.

And the majority aren’t coming back. That’s them, now, locked into the iPhone platform. Provided Steve Jobs and the Apple chaps keep knocking out the same quality and ensure their platform doesn’t stagnate, that’s it. These customers are Apple’s customers now. The mobile operator is simply the bit-pipe provider — and a happy bit-pipe provider too — because those monthly bills aren’t going away whilst customers continue to delight in their iPhones.

I can’t see my mother shifting from her iPhone to any other platform. Ever. Not in the next 10 years. Even if something amazing hits the marketplace (without the Apple brand on it — and that’ll be a shock), it’s going to take her time to even bother thinking about changing.

Of course, we are only talking about a small percentage of the industry at the moment. I’m not writing this as a true representation of the worldwide mobile market. I’m only talking about a small percentage of the marketplace. Why should (for example), Nokia bother investing in the North American marketplace when it’ll take — I don’t know — $500m worth of effort, when, for example, one operator (for example, Sprint) accounts for just 48m customers. India could shit 48m customers. They added 19m NEW subscribers to their customer population in December alone. That’s a Sprint every 2.5 months. You can see why Nokia doesn’t necessarily need to chase the Western markets. And why if I was a shareholder, I really wouldn’t want them doing so other than because it would feel good.

But the Western markets are still influential. And if you can unlock the income potential beyond just flogging hardware, there’s a significant amount of money to be had. But the industry doesn’t seem able to do anything other than put it’s best people and best resources to work trying to emulate the iPhone. Long ago, it seems, they gave up trying to — no pun intended — think differently. To innovate. To create and deliver bold new services.

The Nano Strategy

That said, I don’t know what would happen if Apple decided to change from it’s premium strategy. What would happen if Apple decided to go global, properly. To make ONE of their next generation iPhone range available at a total cost of $50 per unit. (Otherwise known and hugely feared within the industry as ‘the Nano strategy’). Apple’s challenge there would be to ensure that they don’t write off their premium Western customers but could they get their old 2G unit down to $50 retail? Critics argue that Apple would never cannibalise their ‘premium’ position in the marketplace, but they did a nice job with the iPod Nano, iPod, iPod Touch and so on.

‘As Good As The iPhone’

Meanwhile, though, the most depressing point about the mobile industry is that — collectively — they’ve given up even trying to exceed Apple’s technical and user interface capabilities. Now it’s about making things ‘as good as’ the iPhone. It’s utterly frustrating to sit in a product launch conference and witness rival industry executives demonstrating that they’ve finally managed to make a touch screen that ‘rivals the best in the marketplace’ — by which we all understand to be iPhone. How many devices can you name that now sport the same iPhone 4 x 5 icon user interface?

If you’re going to copy the iPhone, at least make the copy exactly the same in terms of abilities. The industry couldn’t even do that. Can’t you do better? Can’t you change the paradigm? Can’t you use your might, your billions, your collective intellect, to move the marketplace onward? No. Because when it comes right down to it, the people running the industry are technical. Their heritage is about selling infrastructure, about selling airtime, about shifting boxes. They’re not dreamers, they’re not innovators and (broadly speaking) they’re most certainly not passionate about the next generation.

And that’s the fundamental problem.

Can’t Think Big

We need the Chief Executives and the senior executives in the industry to think big.

We need them to walk into London Paddington Train Station and wonder why ANYONE still needs to walk to a machine, stick in a piece of plastic, type a pin and receive a PIECE OF PAPER in order to travel.

Why isn’t this fixed? Why doesn’t every Nokia come with integrated NFC transaction capability tied to your operator bill? If they’ve got Ovi Store carrier billing in at least 18 markets right now, why can’t they introduce NFC transaction capabilities for every new device? Why not?

Well, we know why. Even if Nokia decided to do this, they’d face push-back from almost every single mobile operator, not sure whether Nokia’s brand of NFC is for them. Questions would need to be asked. Committees would need to be formed. Decisions would need to be considered carefully and in the fullness of time. Until, that is, Apple releases their own strategy into the market. And once again the industry will jump up and dance to the Cupertino tune, badly. Like your embarrassing uncle after 6 pints and two shots.

The industry’s still stuck in 1995 flog-a-phone-n-airtime mode and doing it’s best to drag itself into the next generation.

Why are people still being charged for sending sodding text messages? 2010 and we’re still being charged for transmitting 160 character text messages. Because that’s it. That’s the best the industry can collectively do.

Where’s the independent thought? Where’s the central belief in what’s needed, what’s next, what’s cool and what’s best? Where’s the market-moving, agenda-setting, table-banging, THIS-IS-NEXT confidence?

Alas, right now, we have to dance to the funky Apple tune, because everybody else is playing catch-up knock-off piped elevator ‘musak’.

Won’t somebody please save me?

Change has come to Nokia and I’m excited at the prospect of what’s to come.

The Ballsy Choice

It was a ballsy choice to relocated Nokia’s entire Mobile World Congress (“MWC”) operations to the Spanish Institute for the Blind across the road from the Congress buildings instead of the usual massive stand within the event. Going to visit Nokia required a special trip. Indeed, you actually needed a dedicated pass to get in the door. Congress attendees couldn’t just walk in. By taking more or less the whole of the Institute, Nokia was able to control the entire experience but rank significant risk that no one would bother making the journey.

In the end, the Institute appeared busy and nearly packed most of the time Rafe and I were on site. That is good news. It’s not the only good news, though. But first, let’s put the good news in perspective.

The Dire Reputation of Nokia

Reading much of the North American media output over the past year, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Nokia was now an entirely irrelevant third-tier handset manufacturer — on par with those chaps who used to make really, really chap Sony Walkman knockoffs back in the 80s. Indeed many of the people I know view the mere mention of Nokia as an affront. The inclusion of Nokia in a discussion alongside competing brands is — I kid ye not — actually offensive to much of the media and the Bay Area Massive. Suggesting Nokia is still a leading industry player is often on par with suggesting that the Earth is flat.

Nokia has screwed up on many fronts. Many, many fronts. In some ways it’s been laughable. In other ways, lamentable. It’s been painful to watch.

And while many doomsayers (me included) have derided and often written off the company’s efforts, you can’t argue with the fact that Nokia still continues to make money and manufacturer millions upon millions of devices that are still being purchased. So if they’re still the biggest handset manufacturer, why the ridiculously poor market reputation?

The Finnish Culture: Help or Hindrance?

The company’s Finnish culture has really not helped. The calm, confident, intellectual manner of the Finns doesn’t match the brash, marketing-message-led-bravado of the North Americans. By refusing to engage in the playground chest-beating so popular with many of the other industry players, Nokia allowed the other kids to eat it’s lunch. The hold-your-head-up-high-whilst-they-hit-you strategy has not been working for them in the context of their (brand) reputation.

And whilst the company continued to dominate the marketplace numbers, it’s reputation has been shot to shreds by an eager, eager set of competitors who simply cannot believe that the biggest kid in the playground stands tall whilst they administer fist after fist.

I don’t know how, for example, Nokia allowed Steve Jobs to get away with his ‘we’re the biggest mobile manufacturer’ comment. But they did. It took Mark Squires, one of the company’s most talented social media head honchos to post a rebuttal. (Did you read it? It’s here: “A Fruit Confused “). Why Nokia didn’t set their EVPs on Apple and the media in response, I don’t know. I’m pleased Mark posted a response but I’d like to have seen more — a lot more. The company appears afraid of engaging, afraid of being too contentious or too outspoken. The entirely competent Executive team appear to have chosen to simply focus on the numbers, not on a mud-slinging match (setting aside the Apple legal spat). But as a result, their Western audience of customers, partners and influencers is crying out for any sign of life beyond the standard level of corporate communications.

It’s Not Just About Market Share

I understand that your average Indian doesn’t care about the Nokia brand as much as they care about getting a decent, reliable, capable device at a reasonable cost — something Nokia’s supply chain logistics are phenomenally well placed to deliver. However the Western executives working in the mobile industry are tremendously effected by the perspective marketed by Nokia’s competitors and the crowing media. This is why Nokia is being judged by many as completely irrelevant when it comes to applications. Despite accounting for a huge percentage of the handset sales in the West, the executives in charge authorise development for whatever they perceive to be popular. iPhone, Android, BlackBerry. One of the most effective ways to compete with Nokia is to simply ignore it. Or to make the company irrelevant. Nokia’s message is easily lost amidst jazzy devices, regular OS updates, funky applications and highly emotive smart public relations and advertising.

By all means go out and tell the planet that Nokia is a force for social change as the company’s CEO did earlier this year, extolling the virtues of delivering mobile computing to some of the poorest in the world. But the marketplace doesn’t need a reserved, silent, ‘wait and we will demonstrate’, quietly confident approach from Nokia. No. The marketplace needs fantastic devices, super innovation, excellent service evolution (at a fast pace) and super-eloquent, articulate and utterly compelling executives who can wield the company’s significant power and influence with alacrity and table-banging energy.

If you’ve followed my writing about the company over the past years, you’ll have watched descend into the same familiar malaise that effects many in the mobile industry when the subject of Nokia arises. I’ve been particularly hard on their Services division, especially the dire Ovi Store which, I’m glad to say is now slowly limping into the sunlight of usefulness. When it comes to the range and possibilities of their devices, I’ve been very depressed. I loved the N900 as a concept phone. I am a massive fan of their N86 style handsets. But I still can’t order toilet rolls on the train with a Nokia phone. Yet I can do that and a trillion other stupid/useful tasks on my iPhone at £0.59 a time. This is still hugely frustrating.

All Is Not Lost

Spending a week more or less full time with Rafe Blandford at MWC, however, can really change your perspective on Nokia. Rafe, Founder and Editor of All About Symbian, is one of the foremost external experts on Nokia and its ecosystem. Rafe and I were at MWC filming footage for both our sites. It turned out to be an excellent collaboration and I’m confident the content we’ll be publishing should prove very popular. It’s no exaggeration to say that Rafe knows Nokia better than some of the company’s own executives. I should say that whilst Symbian helped cover our costs to attend the event, we retain full editorial control.

Rafe put some highly uncomfortable questions to the executives whilst I concentrated on the filming. My overriding objective was to ensure we captured excellent content so a lot of the time, I remained behind the camera, sometimes popping out to ask one or two follow-up questions. The most interesting times were before and after each interview whilst we compared notes. I couldn’t hope to reach Rafe’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Nokia but I thoroughly enjoyed the ‘back-channel’ commentary he offered as we headed to the next executive interview.

That said, Nokia’s executives came out pretty well. One of the most exciting for me was sitting with Anssi Vanjoki, Executive VP of Markets for Nokia. Rumour has it that he’s been brought out to play by the company, having previously been locked away from the media. Well, I think you’ll thoroughly enjoy the footage of the chap. One of the key exchanges between Anssi and Rafe was over the N97 debacle.

The market has been seriously disappointed with the Nokia N97 teething problems mostly related to firmware. If you missed the details, essentially the handset was delivered into the market full of holes. This was disastrous for Nokia. Not only did the Western press absolutely slate the device (it sadly looks positively ancient next to an iPhone) but the consumer backlash was pretty vehement. I’ve known many die-hard Nokia fans move to Android recently because of this.

Change Has Come

There’s still a lot of love in the room for Nokia though. If only someone would start talking. If only someone senior from Nokia would stand up and start communicating. If only someone would put a rocket under the apparently stagnant Espoo Mafia.

If only someone would say, ‘yeah, we screwed up, we’ve learned, we’ve fixed it — and WAIT ’til you see what we’ve got for you soon!’

Guess what?

That’s what Anssi did.

Rafe and I came out of the interview in shock.

30 minutes with Anssi has transformed my perspective on Nokia. Neither of us have witnessed anything like it.

I wonder if it’ll do the same for you. It was thoroughly refreshing to witness a candid and direct response from one of Nokia’s top executives. Rafe and I are still deciding how best to edit and publish the videos, but rest assured there will be a ‘director’s cut’ of the full interview published too.

As I commented last week in one of my ipadio podcast updates, I sense a renewed sense of purpose and direction in Nokia, permeating all levels of the company, not least from the dynamic, energetic meeting with Anssi. The company appears to be getting there. I find myself broadly agreeing with their strategy (if not their timetable — quicker, quicker, quicker!). I really can see the future and power of Qt, Nokia’s all new cross-platform application UI framework that’ll run across Symbian, MeeGo and beyond. I’d like to see more of Anssi and I’d like to see more of Nokia’s executives hitting the road, telling the company’s stories and countering the considerable myths that have established themselves. And I’d like to see some super handsets. And faster service evolution.

I wonder if it’s too early to say that Nokia is out of the woods and marching toward some pretty exciting objectives? The Qt development framework really could change things dramatically for the company over the next few years.

We shall see. Meanwhile, I hope you’re having a decent weekend. Standby for the videos!

Ewan

[This editorial was originally published in the Mobile Industry Review newsletter on the 20th February 2010. Make sure you get the editorials ahead of time by subscribing here -- free.]

Which is why I didn’t send a newsletter on Friday, Saturday or Sunday. Of course, the thing is referred to on the site as ‘the Friday newsletter’ but sometimes it’s quite difficult to deliver a perspective or an opinion to the quality that I’d wish to, in a defined time period.

The thing that’s really been winding me up of late is Foursquare. Not the creators, per se, but the users and how rubbish mobile location still is. That subject, I think, might well form the basis of the next newsletter. Either this evening, or I’ll wait until Friday.

If you’re not signed up to The Application Review, by the way, you’ve been missing the weekly updates that I usually send out on a Wednesday. That’s far easier (in the context of not having to summon up a huge amount of bile) so it typically goes out on schedule. Sign up for The Application Review — it’s free of course, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

“360 will be an absolute and total failure… and then in 5 years, they’ll try again.” Discuss.

That quote was sent into me this week from a very knowledgeable source. I’ve got a lot more perspective for you — but first of all, let’s check we’re all on the same page by getting a definition of Vodafone 360 from Bobby Rao, Vodafone’s Marketing and New Business Director:

* “Vodafone 360 is an internet service that works across a range of mobiles and is accessible by a website. It brings your digital life together and at it’s heart is this rich connected address book that aggregates all of your contacts from your mobile phone, social networks and other internet communication tools.”
- speaking on the Vodafone 360 launch day (Youtube Link)

Sounds good. The trouble is, that’s not entirely accurate, Bobby. In fact, Bobby, that description is nigh-on total b*llocks. But we went over that last week.

This week it’s all about your feedback. I had hundreds of emails from readers telling me about their own experiences of 360. Some were commenting on the actual 360 service (most, like me, seem to approve of the whizzy UI interface) whilst the majority chose to place the blame squarely on Vodafone management. There were a fair amount of “bunch of muppets” style commentary pieces — I don’t disagree — but then, mid-week, after the newsletter had been forwarded around by record numbers, the juicy stuff arrived.

And I’m reproducing it in full.

Names have had to be changed. Indeed, some of the feedback I’ve had has actually quoted and highlighted the exact people that you think are to blame. I’ve edited comments to remove direct references to identities — but other than that, this is directly cut-and-paste from some of the industry’s brightest and most well connected.

Let’s start first with the direct Twitter message I was sent which formed the basis of this post earlier in the week. The sender is a big cheese in the UK mobile industry. If I gave you his name, you’d nod and recognise him. He’s not necessarily the chap who gives all the presentations at industry events — he’s one of the chaps who actually gets things done. He sat down with a set of colleagues who’d just been into Vodafone — and then sent me this:

VF360 insider gossip: Pre-orders? 50. Returns on Samsungs? Massive. Atmos in VF? Point finger / duck for cover. T-R-A-I-N-W-R-E-C-K

I’d like to point out that nobody from Vodafone has contacted me to say these figures are false. I can imagine returns being high.

Right after last week’s newsletter went out, I received this email, commenting on the poor implementation of 360:

Ewan, if you can find me 10 people working at Vodafone UK (not MIR readers obviously) who know what API stands for I’ll eat my iPhone…!

Heh. I’m not sure if that’s possible — there are quite a lot of Vodafone employees reading and I’m sure most of them know the definition of API — but I get the point.

Another well-placed industry source –let’s call him Gregory — mailed in this:

Nice rant, Ewan. BUT the problem is not that “senior management doesn’t care”. I think it’s the exact opposite – senior management do care, just about the wrong things… They care about not being a bit pipe. They care about “owning” the customer. They care about monetizing that. So if you want to upload your content to a web service, it should be a Vodafone one. Never mind that the Vodafone one is rubbish – they own you. And if you want to order a print of your uploaded photo, that will come from the Vodafone partnership with whoever. Never mind that isn’t in place yet, it is coming. That’s how they monetize it.

This never-ending obsession with controlling the user model is simply ridiculous. I asked one chap from Vodafone why I could only send photos from Vodafone360 to Facebook. He responded by explaining that, ‘Facebook is what the majority use.’ Which is a completely bullshit viewpoint. Absolutely crazy. What about Flickr? What about Picasa ? What about Photobox?  The chap looked momentarily stunned before responding, ‘But nobody uses those! We have to pick the services that most of our customers use.’ And there, is the problem. Apple doesn’t pick the applications that I download. Yes it strictly controls the deployment of applications on to its service, but it doesn’t choose which ones I can use. This is the fundamental problem with 360. Some Vodafone management arse in a nice looking M&S suit decided that 360 users will only ever want to send photos to Facebook. Job done. Put that in the specification and let’s go home. No wonder returns are so high. It’s almost 2010 and Vodafone is still trying to do its best to understand what its users want, instead of doing it the other way round. Let the market — the users — decide. Stick in 10 APIs and see what happens. Let other photo services build APIs for you. Rubbish. Absolute total rubbish.

Gregory continues:

Someone senior at Vodafone is worrying desperately about 360 cannibalizing SMS revenue – if people are sending messages over data networks they’re not sending SMS or even MMS. Need to protect that revenue. The business case for 360 will have had that objection to overcome.

Is this why they’ve just included a link to Facebook from the 360 portal? Gregory’s final point:

Don’t forget, mobile operators are the people who looked at the internet and came up with walled gardens. They genuinely thought that was a good idea, too. Senior management at Voda believes that 360 is a compelling experience, compelling everyone to ditch their operator and existing web services to come over to Voda to use 360. The same thinking that Nokia is having with Ovi.

Too right, Gregory. Too right.

Iain wrote in with this feedback:

Thank you for the hilariously insightful article on Voda 360. I spent a decade in the real media industry before going to work for an operator in 2000. Although as you say there are some very bright individuals in these businesses – the operators are self-crowned media empires – but the two industries are like chalk and cheese. There is no understanding therefore no commitment at the top to make these services work – just to be seen to be doing something…

It’s fascinating Iain — the complete lack of executive commitment astonishes me. Iain finished his email with this point:

Although I managed to escape before too long myself – the lure of the corporate pay cheque, the constant request to head the bill at conferences, and the glory of launching services on multi-million pound campaigns can be real golden handcuffs…

Agreed, Iain — I recommend that Vodafone 360 executives ensure they are a million miles away from me when they’re speaking on a panel or doing a presentation about 360. And if they find themselves on a panel I’m hosting, sparks will fly.

An industry heavyweight — who knows Vodafone intimately and asked to be anonymous — read last week’s newsletter and wanted to weigh in thus:

They are f**cked. You are entirely right on ALL points. Using ‘but people don’t use it’ as an excuse to throttle innovation is indicative of Vodafone’s state. It allows others to set the bar and for them to try and jump up to it — by which time the bar is higher.

I totally agree — this is one reason why 360 is already ‘out of date’. The heavyweight continued:

The global/opco observation is 1 of the core issues here. Internal battles and indifference is like business cancer. Boy do they have it. ANYONE who says that voda 360 is a success is living in a f**cking DREAMWORLD.

Newsletter reader Geoff couldn’t quite believe 360 is so bad:

You’d think Vodafone would just stand back and say “Actually, this doesn’t work”, and try and do something about it. They’ve got great UX guys there, so I wonder what happened. It’s as if they finished work at 5:30 and never bothered to *use* 360 on their own phones

Clearly, Geoff. You’d think an executive would have actually sat down and taken a look at the service in-depth, rather than drinking the kool-aid.

Finally I’d like to bring you this feedback from Nick, a former Vodafone employee:

Oh, I did enjoy reading this Ewan; made my cry (both with laughter and frustration). 360 was the straw that broke the camels back for me with Vodafone! When I heard about the 360 project, and saw the details of what was being created it was the final trigger that made me leave.

The problem though is far worse than you think. You’ve got one thing in your rant slightly wrong; it isn’t that Vodafoners don’t care (trust me, they really do), its that they don’t understand.

In my years at Vodafone I met about 2 or 3 other people who had a similar level of interest in all things mobile. The vast majority couldn’t tell (or care about) the difference between an N70 or a Nokia 1100.

When you’re selling minutes and worrying about network capacity, it’s perfectly fine not to care about ‘terminals’. Indeed, I remember meeting a chap from Vodafone about four or five years ago who explained that ‘terminals (that’s the word he used!) were simply a necessary evil for us’ and that they needed ‘terminals’ so that consumers could actually use their service. He went on to explain that management couldn’t give a stuff about the actual ‘terminals’. Fair enough, as I say, if you’re all about selling minutes. But when you’re developing your own range of devices — running your own software and services — well, then your entire team needs to be on the right page. That’s a big ask if you find yourself working at Vodafone and don’t actually care too much about devices, OS and usability. There was provision for assistance at the company in the form of ‘Vodafone Wizards’ — sadly, that’s been discontinued as Nick explains:

The internal mobile advocacy team (Vodafone Wizards) was shut down – a victim of the many rounds of cost cutting at the company in the past two years.

Nick reckons mindset is a key problem:

One of the biggest problems is that the company still has a ‘handset & base-station’ mindset; their market share was built by rigid control of these – there isn’t really any understanding that value nowadays is created by open collaboration with the services customers use. The potential value of the Vodafone network as a mobile web platform is just simply not understood. To most managers this just means utility, which they are terrified of becoming. Vodafone simply don’t have the culture, calibre of staff or interest needed to make the leap from being basically a mobile version of Freeserve to becoming a modern day information services provider (potentially the next Google). Although to be fair I think Three are the only network to have caught on to that opportunity.

Finally, Nick makes this prediction:

360 will be an absolute and total failure, and then in 5 years they’ll try again…

I recognise what you’re saying Nick, but I don’t think Vodafone has that kind of time. They’re already — what? — two or three years late to the table with 360. It’s so late it’s not even ‘me-too’. I can’t believe they actually shipped the service as it stands.

I remain entirely embarrassed by Vodafone 360.

I’m embarrassed to have to point out things like ‘Gents, why can’t I send pictures to Flickr?’ and getting strange stares in return. If 360 had been developed by three guys in a garage, I wouldn’t be giving it this treatment. I’d be giving it a positive write-up. What’s more, they’d have introduced Flickr and Picasa as extra features five minutes after I’d left the interview. Instead … goodness me, how much money have they blown on 360?

Laughable.

It’s laughable for about 20 seconds before you realise that Vodafone is serious.

[This editorial was originally published in the Mobile Industry Review newsletter on the 28th November 2009. Make sure you get the editorials ahead of time by subscribing here -- free.]

If you’re working at Vodafone, you’ll want to look away now. In fact, hit ‘escape’ and press delete. Now. Very quickly. Because this text is all about you.

There is nothing worse than a commodity supplier that thinks they know entertainment. That — fundamentally — is where we’ve got to with our mobile operators. There are exceptions, but generally speaking, they are all the same. They all think they know best.
And it’s patently obvious that — yet again — the mobile fairy is not at home at Vodafone.

I’m talking of course about Vizzavi … Er, sorry, no, Vodafone 360.

Those of you with elephantine memories will remember Vizzavi — the 1.8 billion dollar balls-up joint venture between two commodity suppliers. On the one hand we had Big Red (“Vodafone”) fresh from buying up everyone it could under the direct reign of Sir Chris Gent. On the other hand we had Vivdendi, the mighty conglomerate, that, when it wasn’t arsing around with water companies, it was sodding about with music labels. The two of them got together and knocked out this massively ambitious WAP Portal and website that had a strategic promise hard to ignore. Free email integrated into your handset, online storage, synchronised address books and so on. Of course only the best handsets at the time could handle colour and the reality of WAP was beginning to dawn (the oft heard phrase from consumers: “How shit is this?”).

Sadly it wasn’t to be. Both companies got cold feet and dumped the service promptly before quickly erasing the memory.

The concept was right. The vision was correct. The fact that millions were jumping on to the mobile bandwagon was eminently clear — Vodafone’s brimming coffers were proof enough. It didn’t take a total arse to recognise that at some point, the idea of an integrated mobile experience — contacts, calendaring, online storage, email, IM (and beyond) — would, give or take a few years, become a hugely compelling possibility.
Like most mobile operator led services — the concept with Vizzavi was ‘right’.
The vision, well… One or two people got it.

But in the end, the people who sell minutes won over.

That’s the trouble with mobile operators. They still sell minutes. And sod about with transmission pylons and frequency layers. The folk in control are wedded to the idea of being a network. And this is right and proper. I want my handset to work whenever I need it to. Anywhere. That does take a lot of effort from very smart people.

When it came to vision, Vodafone blew it. They did the proper operator thing and waited-to-see.

Meanwhile we all bought bollox handsets year on year via ever-extending contracts. Some of us realised that PAYG offered a better deal but many simply wanted the handset with a slightly better camera. And 200 more minutes of talk time.

The market settled. All this talk of integrated mobile services disappeared from the radar and everything got back to normal.

Then Steve Jobs, harassed daily by the fact that Nokia was swiftly becoming the planet’s biggest maker of MP3 units (integrated into handsets that no one could be bothered actually using for that function), thought it was time to act. Steve had seen the writing on the wall. At some point, a mobile hardware vendor would create a handset with decent music capabilities. That would severely threaten the dominance of his iPod division, already one of the brightest Apple stars.

Steve and his team of talented chappies put their heads together and — from *publicly* available components — knocked out the iPhone platform with the obsessive love, care and tenacity that is a trillion miles from anything Vodafone, T-Mobile — or, to this day, anything Nokia could deliver.

The iPhone delivered an experience. What’s more, it didn’t need a manual. It just worked.
There are committees at Apple. Sure. But there’s a series of individuals who — gasp — make decisions. Smart, competent, correct decisions. This culminates in the now legendary show-downs with the big boss who would accept nothing but utter brilliance. Take along a mediocre piece of shit at your peril and at worst you could expect to be fired, at best you’d be told to totally re-do it from the start.

This top level and cultural obsession for quality and excellence is one of the key reasons that the products and services delivered by Apple have so many fans. My own adoption of the Apple product range began when, at 11pm my flippin’ expensive PC decided not to connect to the internet. Four hours of sweat later and I ended up having to reinstall Windows to correct the ‘DLL’ that was failing. That morning — at about 3.30am — I swore I’d try out an Apple desktop to see what it was like. I never looked back and now I own an array of 8 laptops and desktops on two continents.

I can appreciate the joy and delight that geeks get from using Apple desktops and laptops. I particularly appreciate that my mother doesn’t really care whether she’s using an Apple or a Dell. She really doesn’t. As long as the web browser is working and there’s an internet connection, she’s happy. I appreciate that the end-users in the ‘personal computing’ space don’t really mind what they’re using — which explains why so many people still go out and buy 400 quid Dell machines. And they get on fine.

When it comes to the mobile experience, that simply doesn’t work.

Oh don’t get me wrong — it has worked. Totally. If my mother wanted to make a phone call on her piece-of-shit Motorola, well, she knew how to do that. The experience, after all, wasn’t that much different than the landline handset she’d been using for decades. She could never quite get the hang of the Motorola’s address book. Me either. But every time she wanted to use the address book, she would guess. Seriously. Sit down and watch a normob trying to use their existing rubbish handset — you’ll witness the same behaviour. She couldn’t quite get her head around the absolute d1ckhead user interface.

Looking at her calling pattern with the Motorola, there was a reason 99% of calls were to the home landline or to her mother’s — she typed the telephone number in manually each time.

She naturally felt inadequate. Her response — like many of a particular age — was ‘oh this is a bit beyond me’. Like setting the video. Every new handset brought a completely different user-interface and despite a 30 minute dedicated training session from each of her three sons, she couldn’t get to grips with it.

I was at pains to explain to her regularly that this wasn’t her failing. It was an industry failing. But all she wanted to be able to do was take a picture of a nice jumper she’d seen at the shops, send it to me and ask if I’d like it.

A little mobile fairy would die every time I heard her say this. The fact that she had the user-model in her head (take picture, ‘send’ to Ewan)… it was so frustrating that she couldn’t actually do it. Especially since, at this time, the mobile networks were wringing their hands at just how badly MMS (“multimedia bollox messaging”) was being accepted by the end-consumer.

Then Apple came along and fixed it. I gave her my iPhone for a day and then let her keep it. She understood it within 20 seconds. She took confidence from the always reliable ‘home’ button. She delighted in the little animations and the ability to ‘flick’ through photos. Within days she was downloading songs and sending the whole family photos and email. It’s now not unusual for her to show me an application she’s downloaded. (“That Jamie Oliver’s one is really good!”)

Now. It’s not all about my mother though. If you work on the basis of my mother being in her late 50s, there’s a considerable amount of consumers out there in their 30s who — also — never used their handset for anything other than calling and texting.
The other functions they were given were either total rubbish (“This handset can play MP3 files! IF you buy the £49.99 cable connection kit.

And it’ll take 3-hours to transfer each file.”) or they were so difficult to use that people simply didn’t bother.

Only the geeks could be arced to mess around with GPS-encoding their photos and updating their Facebook status from the web browser. Everybody else had other things to do.
The Apple changed the model entirely. All of a sudden this huge, huge disenfranchised set of people were set free. They could do stuff. Before they knew it, normobs — normal mobile phone users — were ordering their shopping on the train through the Ocado application.

And so on.

Now let’s bring it back to Vodafone.

Delivering a competitor to the iPhone experience is now a business critical objective. It’s not just the iPhone of course. But it’s a huge curse for the mobile operator. On one hand, they can use the device to win customers from their competing networks. On the other hand, the device itself simply sidesteps anything they offer and uses their network. No longer does the operator control the user experience. Thank god. No longer does the user get sent immediately to the ‘operator deck’ when they open their web browser. No. The iPhone simply sits on the data and telephony layer and ignores everything else. Perfect for the end-consumer, terrifying for the mobile operator.
And they’ve got to do something about this.

They’ve got to offer ‘service’ to their customers, right?

They too can deliver a brilliant alternative to the iPhone, right?

They too understand what mobile consumers want — and — heck, they’ve got three hundred million customers, right? They can spec up a system and flog it to their customers by the bucketload. And that way, they can lock’em in, right?

Oh dear.

You only have to look at the total gang-fluck that is Vodafone 360 to see just how badly that’s going for them.

It’s a total mismatch in expectations — for everyone — from the normob to the geek.
The normal mobile user is seeing Facebook on his Samsung H1 360-branded device. He enters his account details and… well, he just assumes that the device will pull down all his contacts.

And by ‘contacts’ he means his Facebook network *WITH* their mobile numbers.

What do you mean it doesn’t do that? Oh.

The normal user will then try entering his Google or Hotmail account — again, on the basis that, theoretically, his contacts, calendar, all that jazz, should be pulled down to his handset.

No?

It’s not doing that? Yeah. Sorry.

Ah but if you type in the contact, don’t worry. It’s saved. Automatically!

Yes. If you manually type in a contact entry, it’ll be zapped up to the Vodafone 360 cloud before you can say ‘mediocre’.

Head over to Vodafone 360, login and you’ll see the contact there. Like magic.

But, yeah.. your other 200 Facebook contacts? And the address book you’ve got at Hotmail? Stuff’em.

That wasn’t in the committee’s mandate.

This is the trouble.

It’s all run by committee. Clearly nobody at Vodafone thought there was a problem vomiting this system out to the masses. Nobody.

Not one person in seniority seems to have said, ‘Er, look, I think it really should do contacts properly.’

That’s because everyone in seniority at Vodafone is either:

- concerned with network architecture
- concerned with getting more customers signed up
- concerned about how they’re doing in India

The real problem for Vodafone is that it’s senior management doesn’t care. They’re quite happy to pose with a nice grin holding a 360 device (“Isn’t it marvellous?”) and that’s because they don’t actually use them.

Oh they do carry the devices. Of course they do. But they only call people. Text them. Occasionally snap a picture.

If they did anything else with their devices they’d have noticed the glaring set of total fluck-ups that their design committees have delivered.

And this, I think, is the problem with Vodafone. They employ bucketloads of talented individuals, none of which, it seems, can make the seniority grade. Or if they do make it to seniority, they find themselves with power and influence over a very small section of the company’s product set.

Or they find out that they work in ‘Global’. Which is nice, but nobody at country level takes them seriously. Or, they work at country level, which means they can only influence their immediate country — and, since 360 is a ‘global’ offering (i.e. multi-country), there’s not much they can do except write a memo and ‘press’ for changes on the weekly conference call.

There are good things about Vodafone 360. For instance, when you snap a picture on the Samsung (and it does a good job of pictures), it’s instantly transferred to your Vodafone 360 portal. So when you login on the web, you can see your photos. Genius.
Oh you can’t do anything with them.

You can share them with other 360 people.

And that’s it.

I screwed up my original account by deleting a lot of people from Facebook. Then I deleted the account and added it again. I tried adding my other Facebook account this time. That worked. Then I changed my mind and deleted the account and those contacts. Then… I added my original Facebook account again. I saw no people on my 360 account though. I was mystified as to what happened. Turns out if I delete you, you’re gone. Completely gone. Even if I add in the Facebook account details again. I have you manually go to the ‘deleted items’ folder and add you. Gahhhh. If you’ve more than 10 friends, the whole thing breaks, basically.

So I ended up resetting the Samsung (the reset code is eight zeroes, by the way) and creating an all-new Vodafone 360 account — ewanjmacleod — and this time adding in all my Facebook friends again.

Goodness me it’s total shit. Total shit. We’re heading into 2010! Twenty-TEN! The year of the second Space Odyssey. And this is the pinnacle of Vodafone’s capabilities?

Technically speaking, the service works. It does look nice too. But I don’t want my photos to sit on files.vodafone.com. I want to do things with them.

I might, for example, want to order a canvas print from a photo using Photobox.com. Or I might want to send my photo up to Facebook for my friends to laugh at. Perhaps I’d like to Twit-Pic it. Or maybe I’d like them to be copied directly into my Google Picasa?

Well tough.

I can’t.

Because somebody, somewhere, at Vodafone, decided that was out of their remit.

I can imagine just how it happened. I’m imagining an air-conditioned meeting room with harassed executives trying to work out what they should be doing with this ’360 thing’ and not really caring that much.

You can tell they don’t care.

You really can. You just need to look at the corners they’ve cut, the edges they haven’t bothered filling in.

Did nobody in the specification meeting think to say ‘it’d be good if we synched contacts with, you know, all the major providers out there.’ The APIs are public!

No. None of the executives cared.

They’re all being paid reasonable salaries and, frankly, none of them signed-up for 360. None of them really care about this sort of thing. There are precious few people at Vodafone who’re actually passionate about this stuff. The vast majority are too busy sending email to each other about next quarter predictions of blah-de-blah or — let’s be honest — doing what they all enjoy most: politicking and wringing their hands about the future.

There’s an odd few exceptions, but sadly those chaps and ladies have to defer to the numbskulls and empty raincoats making the 360 decisions. Who, it seems, all wanted to go home too badly on the day that they agreed the 360 specification.

I am continually staggered that this kind of thing still goes on.

You cannot put disinterested executives in charge of this kind of service, because it demonstrates to absolutely anyone who cares to look, that the company is in dire straits.

Just wait ’til the iPhone is offered in the UK. Watch the amount of Vodafone 360 customers peering against the window at the Vodafone shop, wishing that they’d waited the extra few months.

In the words of the great (and imaginary) Gordon Gekko, Vodafone 360, ‘is a dog. A dog with fleas.’

Apple find it hilarious. I know. I’ve asked.

Many in Nokia are bemused by it.

Samsung are delighted that they’re able to flog branded handsets to Vodafone.

And the consumer?

Until Vodafone’s top management sort this total bollox out, the Vodafone consumer will continue to be made to eat shit and to pay handsomely for it.

All is not lost though, dear reader.

The good news is that the Vodafone 360 experience — dear me, I should start calling it the ‘Vodafone 060′ experience as there’s at least 300 degrees of innovation and possibility missing — the good news is that it’s upgradeable over-the-air. So there’s possibilities. It’s a dog with fleas, but it can be rescued.

Whether it will be, I wonder.

What’s your prediction?

I wonder if 360 will die a Vizzavi-style death by Q3 next year? If there are no changes, no action — if it’s just steady as she goes from Vodafone, it’s a virtual guarantee.

We shall see.

[This editorial was originally published in the Mobile Industry Review newsletter on the 20th November 2009.  Make sure you get the editorials ahead of time by subscribing here -- free.]

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