The Real Problem With Mobile WiFi: Terrible UX

Stacey Higginbotham with GigaOm wonders why WiFi doesn’t relieve some of the congestion on the mobile networks.

Apparently an AT&T executive says it’s like this:

The executive noted that AT&T didn’t see Wi-Fi helping the nation’s No. 2 carrier offset congestion because in most cases people don’t use Wi-Fi unless they are sitting still in a hot-spot. And apparently, there are plenty of people still wandering around watching YouTube videos.

That’s not the problem.  I often turn off WiFi on my iPhone and iPad even when I am sitting perfectly still when I’m out and about.  There might be a great WiFi nearby, but I never know it.  Why?

Because WiFi has terrible UX.  Let me count the ways:

-  It takes too long to try a connection and get it going.

-  Often, all the available connections are secured.  Don’t even get me started about WEP and similar security.  I won’t use it at all unless I’m pitching on Sand Hill which has the world’s worst cell connections and often no other way to get out to the net.  Life’s too short for the UX to set up a new secure WiFi connection you’ve never seen before.  FWIW, iOS makes this somewhat less painful than Windows.  Microsoft, you really should fix that.

-  Often, connections that are apparently unsecured require interaction.  You have to login, even when you didn’t think you would.  Or, you have to agree to some idiot lawyer’s terms and conditions.

-  You have no idea how secure the connection is.  Sure, mobile wireless isn’t especially secure either, but I’ll bet there is more FUD around WiFi unsecurity.  Its reputation is for being unsecure.

-  The connection drops more times than AT&T if you’re at a public HotSpot.  I was a Starbucks just the other day and it would alternate between being 100% great and 0% dropped connection.   Every time it dropped, I had to accept the terms and conditions again.  Guess how many times I let that happen before I turned it off?

-  Mobile browsers stink at dealing with WiFi.  My iOS devices act like they fell in a black hole if I turn on WiFi or there is a hiccup in the middle of refreshing a page.  If the status changes at all, best thing to do is a complete page refresh.  That’s not always a happy thing.

-  Pet peeve:  You’re at some luxury hotel, resort, or other expensive location.  These bozos want to charge you an arm and a leg for a little Internet connection.  Are they frickin’ kidding me?   That is so 20 years out of date and I think less of whatever business tries this stunt every time I see it.  Connectivity is cheap, so quit jacking me around about it if you want my business.  It’s your table stakes to get me to stay.

My bottom line after trying and trying WiFi?  Unless my 3G connection is terrible or AppStore makes me go to WiFi, I just leave WiFi turned off.  It’s too much trouble.  The User Experience is terrible.

The term “WiFi” was first used commercially 20 years ago.  Isn’t it about time it worked a little better?

A little cooperation between the WiFi devices and the mobile OS makers would go a long way:

-  Get the hot spot and browsers/OS’s working together to send everything back and forth https.  Even if the web site doesn’t support it, the WiFi router can take it back to http once it hits the wire, but leave it secure over the airwaves.

-  Figure out how to make a single box deliver both a secure and open hot spot so all the paranoid peeps can feel safe and I can connect to their hot spot.

-  Introduce a standard set of “hold harmless” terms and conditions that you can accept once on the device and then handshake everywhere you find a hot spot to let it know it doesn’t need to ask again.  If they want more restrictive T’s and C’s, screw ‘em, I’m not using that hot spot.

-  Browsers have to get smarter and smoother about dealing with interruptions and reconnections so they don’t lose their place or go away interminably.

-  Rebuild all the protocols to time out fast–5 seconds maximum.  Look, if its taken a blinkin’ computer 30 seconds to figure out whether the connection is alive you need to assume, “It’s dead Jim.”  30 seconds is 20 years or more out of date with modern levels of performance.  If it takes me that long just to connect, how happy do you think I will be with the BS I get once connected?

-  Mobile browsers should start remembering whether I was happy or not with a connection and make sure the OS knows.  Give me a button to rate the connection.  Choose the connections I like and ignore the connections I hate.  Let me rate my 3G while I’m at it.  Or, let the browser monitor the connection so there is an automatic rating–but make sure I can override it easily.

Businesses, think about your customer’s online connectivity as an integral part of your atmosphere and style.  It’s a connected world, some parts more than others.  If you’re serving lattes, quiche, or expensive wine, you come off like a 50′s diner when your Internet connection stinks.

What if You Had an Uber Game Console and an Industrial Graphics Workstation in Your Browser?

Adobe has just released its first public “Incubator” (I think that’s early Beta) version of a new Flash player with Molehill API’s.  It represents a whole new level of graphics performance inside your browser.  Imagine being able to run Game Console quality games directly from the browser.  What’s different about Molehill is it directly accesses the hardware GPU capabilities of the underlying machine.  That’s where all the newfound 3D performance goodness is coming from.

Here’s a shot of Zombie Tycoon, a Playstation game, running under Molehill:

Imagine full 3D graphics with rich texts and not just thousands but hundreds of thousands or millions of polygons.  That’s what Molehill is all about.  And it isn’t just for games.  For example, I’ve been playing around in the CAD-CAM world, a decidely un-gamelike but very graphics-intensive world.  Here is a shot of my g-code simulator software G-Wizard:

G-Code is the “assembly language” of CNC manufacturing, where computer-controlled machine tools whittle all parts out of solid chunks of aluminum, steel, or whatever other material is desired.  Those green and red lines show the path the cutter will take as it machines the instrument panel that’s shown on the simulator display above.  Using Adobe Flex, AIR, and the Away3D open source library, I was able to build this application amazingly quickly.  It’s a Fat SaaS architecture, meaning it has the benefits of SaaS but can be run disconnected as well.

Until this point, CAD-CAM has been very much a software world trapped in the cutting edge of the early 90′s, selling software that comes on a gillion DVD’s and selling it for many thousands of dollars worth of on-premises perpetual license.  Given a high performance rendering engine capable of running in a browser, it suddenly becomes possible to bring the benefits of SaaS to this world.  Imagine being able to cruise around the manufacturing Shop Floor, tablet in hand, with full access to all of the product design information and no need to take notes and get back to your office workstation to access the information.  This sort of scenario, where your work follows you instead of forcing the worker to go to the work, seems to me embodies the ultimate potential for the mobile connected world.

With Molehill, the Adobe Flash/AIR environment gives us the ability to:

-  Run Game Console and Industrial Workstation Quality 3D Graphics

-  Build applications that are equally at home whether connected or not either as desktop (or mobile) apps with AIR, or as browser apps with pure Flex or raw Flash.

-  Run portably from one line of source code on essentially all the interesting mobile platforms, with the artificial exception of running in the browser on iOS.  You can, however, create Flash apps for iOS, you just can’t run from the browser.

-  That same line of code can use the excellent screen layout capabilities inherent in the Flex framework to make the app comfortable configuring itself to run on a phone, a tablet, or a PC, again, all with one code base.

-  It’s got hard core image processing and graphics capabilities even aside from the new 3D that are just amazing.  If animation, special effects, precise control over look and feel, or rich UI are at all important, Flash has got it covered.

-  While it doesn’t yet have true multithreading, the Flash engine does a pretty darned good job of using multiple cores for garbage collection, rendering, and now taking advantage of the GPU to achieve more parallelism.  We’re promised that we’ll see multithreading before too long as well, which will open up yet another level of performance.

-  The Flash VM is a pretty high performance interpreter, and the language itself has a lot of very nice dynamic language sorts of features.

-  Unlike Javascript, you need not worry about browser incompatibilities.  The same AIR executable for my G-Wizard software runs just fine on PC, Mac, or Linux.

-  It’s an ideal platform if you’re interested in Rich User Experience and Fat SaaS-style clients.

-  There is a rich  ecosystem with plenty of tools available and plenty of Open Source to assist your development efforts.

If you’re developing client-side software, I can’t understand why you wouldn’t want to be up to speed on what’s going on in the Flash world, whether or not you choose to take advantage of it.  Sure, there are the fanboy trolls who take delight in deriding it, but I’m not aware of any other platform that has the breadth of capability, performance, and robustness.

Virtualization Made Mac What it is Today

Sam Diaz is writing about Apple’s latest Draconian App Store subscription policies and how they’re not a bad thing.  Forrester CEO George Colony says Apple is headed for a repeat of their defeat at the hands of Windows with these policies:

We know what happened — the world has had to use a lowest-common denominator PC operating system for decades, with excursions into wonderful places like Vista. This time around, Apple’s hostile position could result in a 2014 App Internet market that looks something like this: 80% Android, 10% Apple, 10% Other.

Colony’s concern is that this is the formative time for app consumption and app markets.  It’s too early to exert a monopolist’s egregious tax on those markets.  People aren’t locked in enough yet.

Diaz has a counter-argument:

Here’s the thing: Colony says that like it’s a bad thing. Say what you will about Apple’s share of the PC market – but the fact is that Apple’s lineup of Mac computers are far superior to anything that’s running Windows. And increasingly, quarter after quarter, the company notes that its share is growing and that about half of the Mac purchases in a single quarter have been by consumers who switched from Windows.

My problem with Sam’s argument is that none of that shift started happening until Virtualization meant you could have your Mac cake and eat some Windows software too.  It isn’t really clear they’re leaving the door open to do that with their App Store policies.  This isn’t about not only having Apple wonderfulness PLUS everything else in the world when Apple doesn’t happen to have the right answer.  It’s about ONLY having the Apple wonderfulness and being glad of it, dammit.

It’s going to be interesting to see what happens come the June 30 deadline for compliance with the new policies.  We will no doubt get hints along the way.  As an iPad user who set aside his Kindle but still constantly reads using the iPad’s Kindle app, I’m keenly interested.

During his last go-round with book publishers and Amazon, Steve Jobs largely managed to get book prices on Kindle raised.  That may turn out to be the result here too.  Kindle charges a “publishing expense” fee back to the book publishers.  So far it covers the wireless costs for Kindle’s built-in Sprint modem.  Perhaps Amazon will decide to roll the iPad 30% into that fee, making books sold there dramatically less profitable for publishers.  There would be a certain poetic justice in that.  The publishers leaned on Jobs to break one walled garden only to see another spring up immediately in its place.  What are they going to do about this one?

 

 

 

 

 

Remember HP’s New Wave? Here We Go Again!

Sam Diaz has gotten clarification on the future of Windows in the light of their Web OS announcements.  It should come as no surprise that Windows isn’t going anywhere, and certainly won’t be replaced by Web OS any time soon.  Instead, HP is saying:

HP will integrate the WebOS experience into Windows, but not through virtualization. He said: “…it will be a combination of taking the existing operating systems and bringing WebOS onto those platforms and making it universal across all of our footprint.”

Sounds great.  Been done before.  Remember HP’s New Wave?  It was a new object-oriented UI shell and mini-platform (we looked at possibly using it for our Windows apps at Borland but declined–not enough value add for the trouble) that HP launched way back in 1989.  They’ve been down this road before of trying to enhance Windows.

It’ll be interesting to see whether it works any better this time around.  Personally, I’m betting against.  The little things it adds that have been demoed so far are all obvious things Microsoft should be building into Windows and in fact will have to build if they want to make their Nokia partnership perform as it should.

This is more or less what happened to New Wave.  It introduced some cool stuff that Redmond promptly scooped up and marginalized through various releases of their own.  It’s good news for Microsoft though.  Their engine is not particularly innovative, but if someone else can show them what to do that’s in a format not too far removed from what they’re familiar with they will grind that stuff out like nobody else.  They’ve needed some of that help, though frankly it has been out there lately and Microsoft hasn’t bitten (Xobni, anyone?). 

Perhaps this will get their attention.

Nokia-Microsoft Deal Completes the Three Winning Strategies a Market Can Have

According to Michael Porter, markets have three winning strategies:

-  Best:  Build the best product in the market.

-  Low Cost Provider:  Compete on Price.

-  Niche:  Service a niche that is under-served by the other two strategies.  All markets have niches of one kind or another.

Can you guess which of the three smartphone players goes in which slot?  It’s easy:

-  Best:  Apple’s iOS products.

-  Low Cost Provider:  Google’s Android

-  Niche:  Nokia-Microsoft had better be targeting this spot, at least for now!

It’s not an unreasonable play for the two companies, although most commentators see it as a marriage of desperation.  Still, we shouldn’t let that reality steal too much away.

How can Nokia-Microsoft serve niches that are underserved by iOS or Android and go on to prosper?

In many ways, the Microsoft .NET world has grown up to be just such a world.  It isn’t really the best, despite what Microsoft or some fans might argue.  The ecosystem that places Oracle instead of SQL Server at its center has that base covered.  It isn’t the cheapest either, since Open Source of various kinds has handily taken that spot.  Instead it has grown up to fit into all the gaps these others leave under-served, and it’s worked out reasonably well for them.  Take a look at the XBox business for example.  It’s been reborn with a vengeance by the Kinect, which is a niche gizmo.  A very cool one to be sure, but it isn’t as if every single game you’ll ever want to play is a Kinect game.

Now in the phone world, Scoble has two pretty good examples of the kinds of niches Nokia-Microsoft can go after:

1. Nokia has dealers and stores in the weirdest places on earth. Places Apple won’t have stores in for decades, if ever.

2. Microsoft has great developer tools.  I will add to that they have the .NET community and ecosystem, which is under-served by iOS and Android.

Ideally, Nokia-Microsoft should look for more of these niches.  For example, Nextel created an awesome cell phone niche play by rolling up the features needed by services that dispatched their trucks, taxis, and other vehicles by 2-way radio.  Perfect example of a niche play.  Nokia-Microsoft will have a great niche if they can better serve Windows users than iOS or Android, since that’s already Microsoft’s niche and a huge one at that. 

Speaking of serving Windows users, HP is showing some fascinating new developments.  For example, the ability to see your phone’s instant messages on your PC without having to go get the phone in the next room.  That’s the kind of stuff Nokia-Microsoft should be doing for Windows.  The question in my mind is where does this leave HP?  They’ve decided to go it alone, even talking about Notebooks without Windows.  The demonstrations they’re showing are spot-on the kinds of things that under-served markets love to get their hands on, so I would say that what we are going to see is a real dogfight between HP and Nokia-Microsoft because neither has much chance of usurping Apple or Google from their Best and Low-Cost plays.

What’s also interesting is we will see the play between Vertical and Horizontal Integration and Partnerships.  Andy Kessler wrote a great article at GigaOm on Ken Olsen, who recently passed away, that talks about how DEC lost the war by trying to be too vertically integrated like IBM.  They wanted to do everything soup to nuts.  I don’t agree that this was DEC’s only problem–they also faced the horror of rebuilding their whole channel to work the way the emerging retail world operated instead of via Direct Sales.  Faced with that, most companies give up.  It means taking a real dip before you get back to ascendency and throwing away many core competencies while you learn something new.  Nevertheless, it was a factor, and one to consider for HP, who are assuming they can go it completely alone.  Yes, there is an installed base, but that’s about it.  Nokia-Microsoft can at least hope to rally a broader ecosystem around their axis which is crucial when dealing with a platform like a mobile phone.

As I was reading fellow EI Vinnie Mirchandani’s take on the whole thing, I was reminded that this is a wonderful study in when to be a polymath (vertical, doing it all) and when not.

The Polymath, who is expert at all the key areas needed for a project, has the advantage in producing the Best because they avoid all of the cruft and friction of fitting together two areas of expertise when the experts don’t speak each other’s language.  Apple may be the world’s foremost example of this, at least in terms of visible consumer products.  In terms of being the Low Cost Provider, there will certainly be opportunities for the Polymath because there are savings to be had in avoiding the friction of fitting together.  However, the advantage is not so great.  The reason is that Best has to start out Best and stay that way.  There is therefore very little time to learn and evolve your way to Best.  Low Cost is always looking for incremental savings.  They can learn their way past their lack-of-Polymath.  For many years, I think Dell would’ve made a fabulous example here.  They outsourced so much that they were basically marketers and component specifiers.  They did not have the Polymath knowledge of a great many things and didn’t want it.  I don’t know if they are still the masters.  Because one can learn to be lower cost, it is a less defensible barrier.  As for the niche, this too seems like an excellent Polymath domain.  Niches often come about because the Best and Cheapest players just don’t know enough about the niche.  The Polymath has to span that gulf in domain knowledge.

It’s going to be interesting to watch the Nokia-Microsoft and HP gambits unfold.  Probably the biggest obstacle against them is time.  Nokia-Microsoft are talking 2 year time scales at a very pivotal point in the Smartphone era.  That’s a long time to wait!

HP’s Pad UI Printer: We Need More Thinking Like This!

What a fabulous idea:  spend $399 for a pad and get a free printer!

That’s the idea behind HP’s Photosmart eStation printer, and I love it.  In fact, we need more thinking like this.

Why continue to offer difficult hardware pushbutton UI on so many devices when a pad interface lets you offer a much richer User Experience?  Can you imagine if every hard push button UI were replaced by a really slick webby UI accessed via one of these pads?  Forget the microwave, which suddenly won’t need to blink its clock, what about the really hard stuff like:

-  Programming a very complex DSLR camera.

-  Heck programming a printer.  I still remember the horror of getting our Helpstream office laser printer to scan and send a Fax.  Brutal!

-  Programming a complete home entertainment system so it really all works together well as an integrated system.

There are only two things not to like, and they point to the same conclusion.  First the two things:

1.  I don’t need a new pad with every device.  That’s a lot of pads!  Imagine how cheap that HP printer would be without a pad.

2.  I want my pads to talk to every device.  Ideally, I want to be able to drop a pad into any device’s cradle for charging too.  No more nest of wall warts!

That conclusion I mentioned is that we could use some standards.  There needs to be a “pad UI RESTful interface API” that works for any pad-loving device.  Probably a chip or two that makes it all easy and automatic.  Memo to chip guys, can we have every pad supporting device be a WiFi hotspot while we’re at it?  Can they relay to each other to extend coverage or what?

Want to control that HP printer with your iPad?  No worries.  Want to control your microwave oven with the printer’s pad?  No worries.  How about your home?  Can I get on my pad after I leave for vacation and turn down my AC, heating and water heater after the fact?  Good and green idea!

I tell you, as I tote my iPad and iPhone around, it would be so cool if they could interact more with the fabric of my existence.  Sure it gets a little creepy sometimes, but I can get over that.  Wouldn’t it be great to have maybe one pad per room, and the ability to control any appliance in the room, plus the room’s lighting from any pad in the house? 

Whoa.  That would be a very cool idea.  Who will Open Source the first version?  Google, you wanna sell ads on my washing machine?  Build this pad stuff and get it out as Open Source.  I’m all for it.  You know you want to!

Related Articles

HP just blew up Android tablet pricing (with a printer):  Competition works, consumers look on and cheer!

And why not a Pad UI for my car?  My kids are old enough those stupid baby locks are a real nuisance.

The Notebook Sales Crash

Year on year sales growth for Notebooks have entered negative territory for the first time ever: 

Notebook Sales Crash

It was already underway before the iPad was launched, but I’m sure the iPad hasn’t helped.  Looks to me like the whole thing is a victim of this massive recession we’re still finding ourselves in.  And the truth is, there are more things to spend our money on.  

These are retail notebook sales, so presumably they reflect consumer and perhaps small business more than business in general, which is also telling.  I suspect there aren’t too many large enterprises financing iPad purchases yet.  Best Buy’s CEO is being widely quoted as saying their internal numbers show iPad is cutting into sales by up to 50%.  Let’s not forget the Kindle either.  Love the new Kindle vs iPad videos, they’re funny. 

Here is the essential buyer decision: 

-  Times are tough, money is tight. 

-  Do you really want to upgrade the notebook you probably already own? 

-  Or, would you rather soldier on with that notebook at least another year and get the new hotness in town, an iPad? 

Seems like not much of a decision to me.  I have always been more of a desktop guy, and I get more that way as I get older.  The reason is power and a big display.  I’m running some pretty hefty tools for things like CNC machine work (CAD/CAM).  Very graphics intensive.  And I want a lot of pixels and the computing grunt to move them around fast.  So I like my desktop, especially since it was upgraded not that long ago with a new Mobo, latest multicore cpu, graphics, and solid state disk (boots in about 12 seconds).  

I guess if there is good news, it is that I suspect people are soldiering on and not just discarding notebooks in favor of iPads.  At some point, they will want to upgrade, but not until they have their ‘pad (whichever brand it may be).  

I have a laptop too.  It’s more like 3 years old and is squarely in the category of “good enough”  and not “great”.  And I have an iPad.  One thing I noticed is that while I can’t replace the notebook with the iPad, I sure can use it in place of the notebook pretty often.  There are certain times when I am going to a meeting and I know I want to run software that won’t run on the iPad.  That happens pretty seldom, and hopefully even less seldom now that I can run some Flash on iPad.  

The primary thing the iPad isn’t very good at (so not very good my barely good enough notebook has it beat) is content creation.  Whether for lack of the apps, the touch keyboard, the screen form factor, or whatever, it just doesn’t work for content creation.  I’ve tried it, and no joy.  But, how often do I need mobile content creation?  It turns out, not very often.  Unless I’m travelling (where I take the notebook in my checked luggage and carry on the iPad), I don’t need it at all. 

Interesting to think about what it would take for the iPad to become a really slick content creation device.  I’m envisioning a clamshell carrying case with integrated keyboard.  I have Apple’s keyboard, and it is very flawed.  For starters, it wants to run in portrait instead of landscape mode.  You can get around that with a cable, but then the shape is awkward for compact carrying.  I want a keyboard like Apple’s, built into a clamshell.  Open the clamshell and you can set up the iPad in an easel-like configuration with landscape screen view.  The keyboard should fold down.  Make it easy to snap the iPad in and out, because I view this case as being a some time thing for when I need to travel and create content.  Add the right content creation software (not convinced they are there yet, BTW), and it would be quite a handy gadget. 

Of course that’s all add-on BS.  The ultimate killer notebook would look like a regular notebook except that the screen would pop off to become a ‘pad.  Imagine if Apple built one of those.  Now that would be the new hotness!

Related Articles

Of course BestBuy now wants to retract their statement.  I’m sure the notebook manufacturers who are their partners wanted to know, “WTF?”