We can look at Microsoft and Apple and compare them strategically: Microsoft is the plumbing for a commoditized desktop computing market where Apple delivers a unique computing experience based primarily on its proprietary technology stack. Microsoft as the complacent market leader, Apple as the wannabe - fighting hard to win share. Apple, in tune with today's computing lifestyle as the innovator, Microsoft as the raw execution machine, buying innovation where needed.

But for me, in the shoes of an end-user, all of that is summed up in a simple way:
Type in CNN in Safari (without url etc, just as we wrote it here) and then type in CNN (again without any internet "grammar") in Explorer. Here is what you get:

Microsoft (standard installation Windows XP):


Apple (standard installation OS10.4+):


Bottom line: with Apple you get what you expect, with Microsoft you get spun into their web, literally.

Maybe this is Microsoft's tactic to produce page hits to compete with Google: any user that doesn't know how to type in a URL will be rerouted by default to MSN search. I call that cheating, Microsoft. But even with those tricks, you still need Yahoo!

Getting and keeping customers is about integrity and authenticity, not sneaky monetization techniques to squeeze every cent out of every visitor - leading them down the endless path of search. I am glad Apple is around and here to stay. There is nothing better than getting what you want, quickly.

BTW: talking about Microsoft's complacency, does it still not have anti-aliasing sorted out - or is that the big improvement in Vista?

Tags: Investment, European, Private Equity, VC, Angels, Marketplace, Markets, Silicon Valley, Palo Alto

We communicate with each other using a common language and we obviously become more effective when we all understand that language. However, technology complicates our lives as each piece of technology we interact with requires us to learn a new (proprietary) language; a set of rules, technology grammar and a unique user-interface experience.

Think about it, when Larry King on national TV stumbles over his own URL (yes, language) and messes up http, semicolon and slash (or was it backslash), I can't help but think about the hell we put users through to use the internet. Only if you understand that language do you get to benefit from its capabilities. That's like forcing anyone that wants to vacation in Mexico to speak Spanish first. The Mexican tourist industry would grind to a halt.

It gets worse, for example, to make photographs look better, Photoshop (and now with Photoshop Express) and many other photo-editing applications deploy a language that requires users to understand the intricacies of color and light and apply that language in the right order.

Here is a synopsis of the skill level my mother-in-law would need to master in order to make her photographs look better: first increase the dynamic range using a histogram, then use curves to change the tonal values to your liking, apply the right white balance and improve saturation and vibrance. Indeed, what I just described is the introduction of yet another language to solve a pretty mundane problem.

To create a web page, we introduce yet another language, a compilation of HTML, Perl, Ajax and Flash usually contained within a desktop product with its own proprietary language. To write a book we wrestle with 90% of Microsoft Word's functionality and language we seldom use, trying to figure out how to create a table of contents. In Excel we use another language consisting of non-intuitive formulas (like sum() ) to derive values from other cells. Should I go on?

So why is it that we seem to get away with it - or are we? For one, lots of people make money understanding a computing language that fewer others do. Web designers don't always create better design, but they understand the language of design, and can implement it. So, web designers don't want you to know there are better ways to do this. Adobe is probably not in a hurry to remove the language and erode its premium market, it could have created much more democratization in the website creation process. Many times have designers, with corporate marketeers in tow, abjected the use of Rapidweaver, a tool that attempts to democratize web design (this site is built with it).

But we are fooling ourselves. The democratization of the internet requires that we make technology more accessible and easier to understand and implement. Only then will it reach real mass adoption.

We could easily build technology that figures out how to make the majority of images look better, or design a web page by drawing it - rather than programming, or have Word make recommendations for a table of contents when it discovers one.

The iPhone is a great example of how packaging existing technologies in a different way, can make people feel that they don't need to learn a new language to communicate with it. My 3 year old daughter uses it. Each of the individual technologies in the iPhone had been around for a while, Apple "just" packaged it so the language became intuitive.

But Apple is not the only vendor that can remove the computing language from the equation, others just need to pay attention to it.

So when you design products, pay attention to the removal of the language, fewer yet intuitive options - rather than more. After all, for thousands of years, we ourselves, have communicated in many other ways than verbal, the majority of our communication remains behavioral.

Innovation has become the art of packaging a flawless user experience, rather than a race to add features. The latter quickly becomes commoditized anyway.

Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Experience, Yahoo

Since a platform is the technology foundation for a marketplace, platforms - to achieve extraordinary growth - need to instill the rules of marketplaces as we laid them out in our previous post.

But not all platforms are created equal and some self-proclaimed platform vendors do not adhere to marketplace principles. That could mean you as a provider think you subscribed to a meritocracy - with equal opportunity exposure - yet other participants (your competitors) get pay-to-play advantages. Potential buyers in that tainted market are actually shopping in a premium market, not the free-market they expect to be most economic and trustworthy.

Other synonyms of the same phenomenon abused in the technology industry include: ecosystems, exchanges, communities and networks which all serve identical needs in connecting disparate supply with disparate demand, something a premium market is unable to do.

Consumer companies understand the freedom of choice customers demand. Enterprise software and services vendors have long basked in the glory of premium markets and have a long way to go in order to truly build winner-takes-all free-markets, which in total size are often larger in size than the total size of premium markets in that category.

In the Enterprise space the majority of customers (roughly 80%) buying products or services deviate from its intended design and want to add on, integrate or correlate those off-the-shelve configurations with other ones. Enterprise customers often spend more money on customization than they spend on licensing fees for say, Oracle products. Hence the requirement for a true marketplace of additional enterprise components (check out Serena, great concept but marketplace execution and marketplace compliance - yet to be developed - will be the tell-tale of their real success). Salesforce.com's Appexchange seems to provide the best proximity to a free-market of applications we've seen, although we have yet to verify its integrity against the marketplace rules.

Developer programs from companies like Oracle (with OTN), Microsoft (MSDN) and others use surrogate models of marketplaces to mimic, but not truly deliver on its powerful benefits. Go visit their websites and you'll notice no mention of third party products. There literally is no marketplace, although Microsoft has a link to "a library", if you can find it.

Apple (with the iPhone Developer Network) is experimenting with its rules but apart from compliance to the free-pricing rule, its overall compliance to a free-market is minimal. And, today, they don't need to. Apple still has time to deploy some premium market tricks as long as Google with Android doesn't deliver on a real marketplace for developers early.

As a software provider you may need to run on and comply to a major vendor's technology, just don't assume a developer network, exchange or community will make you rich - not until the marketplace supports a true meritocracy. And for that, again, real marketplace principles need to be deployed.

Tags: Apple, IPhone, Experience, Microsoft, Adobe, Photography, Internet, Democracy, Communication, Innovation