Category: Personal Computers and Mobile

Sustaining Innovation and Disruptive Innovation in Cameras

A recent tweet from @charlesarthur on the camera market very nicely captured the difference between sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation. Let me explain.

Charles ArthurさんはTwitterを使っています How a segment dies http t co BkAkU49CHl

  1. Digital cameras started penetrating the consumer market around the year 2000. They were initially had very bad resolution and colours were inaccurate. Battery life was also a huge issue. Despite this, they took off in sales because you could view your photo immediately after you took it, and you didn’t have to go to your local photo processor.
  2. Initial deficiency is a hallmark of disruptive innovations. Disruptive innovations often start off as a “toy” that however provides significant convenience to low-end users. In this sense, digital cameras completely fitted the bill.
  3. However, if you look at the players in the market before and after the digital revolution, you notice that they are almost identical. The exception is that Casio gained significant market share (due to first mover advantage). Otherwise the main players, Nikon, Canon, Olympus all maintained their positions and enjoyed increased sales during 2000-2010. Clearly, digital cameras did not end up being disruptive to the film-camera market. Instead it was sustaining.
  4. The reason for this is that the incumbent film-camera makers were motivated to make the shift to digital. Digital cameras were significantly more expensive than film cameras and drove a replacement cycle that would not have been existent without the new technology. This was financially very appealing to the incumbents. There were technical hurdles like manufacturing the CCD cameras. However, there were modular CCD manufacturers who were willing to supply these to the previously film-only camera makers. Hence film-cameras makers were both willing and capable of making the shift to digital. This is why only Casio, with its first mover advantage, was able to gain significant footing among the film-camera incumbents.
  5. Since 2010 however, the incumbent camera makers have collectively seen a large drop in sales. This is due to cameras on smartphones. Instead of the traditional camera makers, the winners in this new market are Apple, Samsung, LG, HTC, etc. They are the smartphone makers. What happened here is unmistakably disruption.
  6. Smartphone cameras were also initially very poor compared to the regular digital cameras. Like digital cameras ten years before, they also started out as “toys”, which however provided significant convenience to the user because you could immediately upload the photos to the Internet. Technology-wise, smartphone cameras were no better than digital cameras were in the year 2000, relative to the incumbent products.
  7. The very different outcomes are a result of the difficulty of transitioning to the new market. I don’t mean difficulty in technology. I mean difficulty in flipping the whole organisation from top to bottom. For film-camera makers, it was relatively easy to transition to the digital-camera market. They were still selling cameras through the same channels to the same users. Film camera makers did not have to change their business models or their sales and marketing organisations at all. The only issue was technology and even this was easily overcome through modularity. However, for camera makers to transition to the smartphone market, they have to change their technology focus, their distribution channels, their sales and marketing organisations and everything else in between. This was too much for them to do. Instead, they focused on the higher-end of the market (digital SLRs and mirrorless cameras) where they could still thrive while maintaining their organisations and business models which worked, but only until smartphone cameras became good enough for all except the most demanding photographic tasks.

So there you have it. The takeaway here is that the most important element of a disruptive innovation is whether the incumbent is motivated and capable of embracing it or not. If the incumbent embraces the innovation, then disruption will not occur. However, if the incumbents don’t do so, then they will be disrupted.

It is usually not the technology that decides whether disruption will succeed or not, but rather whether or not the company organisation is capable of embracing it.

Quick Take on Disruptive Potential of Smartwatches

Just a few quick notes on the disruptive potential of smartwatches.

Smartwatches will not be disruptive to watches

This is very important. This tells you who will be the main players in the smartwatch market in the mid- to long-term. Smartwatches add features to traditional watches, and will often be more expensive than comparably built watches. Therefore, it makes perfect financial sense for incumbent watch makers like Seiko, Citizen, Swatch, Tag Heuer, Casio, and others to make a smartwatch. We are already witnessing this. If incumbents are motivated to fight back, the probability of an entrant being successful is greatly diminished.

Whether the incumbents (traditional watchmakers) can succeed in making a good smartwatch is another question, but given that the operating system is already freely available as Android Wear, and that the Shenzhen ecosystem should give them the electronic components that they need, it is likely that despite not having prior excellence in electronics, incumbent watch manufacturers will be able to create smartwatches that are almost as good as the ones coming out of Samsung, LG, Motorola, etc. Since brand and design are very important for selling wearables and that there is no easy way for entrants (smartphone OEMS) to acquire a strong brand image (i.e. they don’t sell strong brand images in Shenzhen), it is likely that the incumbents (traditional watchmakers) will prevail in the smartwatch space.

Smartwatches will be disruptive to smartphones

Instead of being disruptive to watches, smartwatches will be disruptive to smartphones. Smartwatches will make many of the smartphone computing tasks more convenient and easier to accomplish. Although their current functionality is rather limited, it is very likely that advances and innovations in both hardware and software will quickly expand the scope of tasks that we can accomplish with smartwatches.

For the most part, this will be a new-market disruption as opposed to a low-end disruption. In low-end disruption, you would typically target the least demanding customers. However, in the current format, smartwatches will depend on the user also having a smartphone nearby. A typical user will need both a smartphone and a smartwatch, so they will not be the least demanding customer.

Instead, smartwatches will be new-market disruptions. They will enable customers to interact with computers and the Internet in ways that were previously impossible or cumbersome.

Now in the previous section, I argued that traditional watchmakers will prevail in the smartwatch market. They will gain share of the total compute time per user. The question then is, who will lose share? Who will be disrupted by this new market disruption? My argument is that here the incumbents are smartphones and that smartphones will be disrupted by smartwatches.

Without going into detail, this is what I expect the smartwatch landscape to look like after the dust has settled;

  1. Apple will be the undisputed number 1. They will aggressively innovate on the Apple Watch, even to the extent that it cannibalises the iPhone. The Apple Watch will gradually become more and more independent of the iPhone.
  2. The current Android smartphone OEMs will initially play in the smartwatch market, but they will fail to make profits due to their lack of brand power. Eventually most will retreat from the smartwatch market and focus on making big and powerful smartphones. The few that remain will only get the scraps from the very low-end of the market. The exception might be Samsung. If their Tizen operating system enables them to innovate faster than Android Wear, there is the possibility that Samsung will be able to profit from smartwatches (due to the lock-in they get).
  3. Current watchmakers will be the major Android Wear players in the smartwatch space, especially in profits. The electronics will be provided by the Shenzhen ecosystem or a chipset provider (maybe Intel). Depending on how well Google can monetise from Android Wear, we might see some rapid innovation.
  4. Smartwatches in general will become more and more independent of smartphones. Ultimately, people may not carry a smartphone but instead carry a MiFi-like cellular connection device paired to their smartwatch (due to the battery requirements of connecting to a cellular network). For tasks requiring a larger screen, customers might carry a tablet-like device. The theme here is that smartphones will be at least partially replaced by smartwatches.

Final thoughts

Clayton Christensen famously misunderstood the disruptive potential of the iPhone. He saw it as a sustaining innovation to feature phones, and expected the incumbents to quickly respond and shut out the new entrant (Apple). Part of his mistake is that he failed to see how the iPhone would be a new-market disruption, making PC tasks possible on a mobile device.

We should be careful not to repeat his mistake. We need to be careful in understanding to which markets smartwatches are sustaining, and to which markets smartwatches are disruptive. If we fail to correctly assess this, we will end up with the opposite prediction.

Here I make the potentially controversial prediction that the traditional watchmakers will prevail and that smartphone OEMs like Samsung, Motorola and LG will drop out of the market. This will be the measure by which my understanding of disruption theory should be judged.

Update

Since many people will understandably have an issue with smartwatches disrupting smartphones, I think I should go into a bit more detail. Instead of going into logic, I will give my understanding of what happened when the iPhone entered the market (Christensen’s mistake) and examine the parallels with the Apple Watch.

  1. Smartphones did not disrupt the mobile phone market: Many people think that the iPhone disrupted the mobile phone market. Disruption means that new entrants successfully displaced the incumbents. While this is certainly true that one entrant, Apple, gained 8.4% market share of total mobile phones, if you look at the other players, the mobile phone market is still mostly comprised of incumbent companies that used to sell feature phones. These companies were fortunate that Google provided Android for free, so that they could easily and quickly develop their own smartphones. Some may note that Blackberry and Palm almost completely disappeared. I would argue that if you look at the total mobile phone market, they were never more than a small niche so they weren’t really incumbents at all. As for Nokia, they simply bet the company on the wrong horse. If they had chosen to use Android, there is little doubt that they would have still been a force to reckon with.
  2. Smartphones disrupted PCs: To understand this, you have to lump smartphones and PCs together to create a “personal compute market”. Ben Bajarin has done this, and the following chart shows what has happened. PCs have clearly been overrun, and importantly, neither Microsoft itself nor any of the PC OEMs (with the exception of Lenovo which is very agile at M&A) successfully made the transition to smartphones. This is what disruption looks like.
    Ben BajarinさんはTwitterを使っています Microsoft s journey of computing platform share through the years http t co taFsFr1sZp

Now if we apply this to the current smartwatch situation, we can expect the situation I described in 1) to happen to the current watchmakers, and the situation I described in 2) to happen to the current smartphone OEMs.

So for current watchmakers, they will quickly adopt the new emerging technology, and the freely available Android Wear will help them immensely. The Shenzhen ecosystem will also help on the hardware side.

On the other hand, smartphone OEMs will dabble in smartwatches in the same way that DELL and others briefly entered the smartphone market (Dell Streak 5, HP iPaq). Notice the bulkiness and inelegance of their offerings, which reminds me of the bulky and unfashionable Android Wear devices that we are currently seeing from Smartphone OEMs.

In a few years time though, I predict that smartphone OEMs will mostly exit from smartwatches, just like DELL and HP did. There seems to be something that holds back incumbents in the higher spectrum of the market from creating something that is simpler and more elegant.

Uber Is Clearly Not For the United States

When I hear of all the talk of Uber coming out of the United States, I am struck with a sense of disbelief. I cannot understand why the Americans, who at least in my impression seem to think that buses are very undesirable or even dangerous in certain cities, have suddenly come to love public transportation.

Luckily, there are statistics for this. The Flowing Data website compiled data from the United States Census Bureau’s 2013 American Community Survey and created a great interactive map in addition to the following chart.

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The vast majority of Americans go to work driving alone in their cars. Although there is a bit of carpooling, any mode of public transport is very, very rare. Really, there isn’t any surprise here.

The United States is very obviously not the ideal market for an taxi-like service. Uber is only skimming a very small portion of the transportation market; one that taxi-drivers used to own.

Examples of Smartphone Specialization and Implications for Google’s Control

A while back, Bob O’Donnell wrote a piece on Techpinions titled “Tablet and Smartphone Futures: Specialization”.

Ultimately, technology products are likely to follow the path of other mass-produced goods, such as cars, appliances and even clothing. In all those markets (and many more), the ability to specifically target different types of consumers and then create products that match the unique needs/interests of those different consumers is what allows companies to thrive. Now, it’s time for technology companies to step up to those challenges and give us the breadth of product options that the market is hungry to see.

I very much agree with Bob’s point. The wider a product penetrates a market, the more diverse needs it will have to address. This is what has happened in almost all markets, and although personal computing devices are different in that customers can install software to customize to their preferences, there is little guarantee that this is sufficient to satisfy the very divergent needs.

Furthermore, diversification is not necessarily aligned with the interests of the platform owners. In the case of Apple, they try hard to control the experience on their devices. They minimize customization options in the name of simplicity. They try hard to find a single one-size-fits-all that works well. In the case of Google, the first started by allowing OEMs and carriers to customize the Android OS, but then scaled back when they felt they were losing control of the platform, and that fragmentation was becoming an issue for developers. It is clear that the platform owners are discouraging diversification.

What we are seeing is a natural tension between conflicting requirements. In this situation, small changes in the market could dramatically shift the balance of power. This is why I’m very interested in observing how specialized products will enter the market, and what level of success they will achieve.

One example that cropped up recently is the announcement of some very interesting Android smartphones from KDDI, the second largest carrier in Japan.

The first exhibit is a smartphone targeted towards primary school pupils (miraie KYL23). Apart from the hardware which is designed to withstand the constant abuse that one can expect from small children, it has good Web filtering features, and can even track what swearwords and insults your child may have typed-in. You cannot use Google Play or other Google Services; instead, you install apps from a specialize app store.

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Message pops up when you try to enter “ばか” (stupid). It tells you that you are using a bad word, and your parents will be notified.

When you think about it, it’s absolutely obvious that you don’t want to use a Google certified Android device on these smartphones, and you really have no choice but to go with AOSP.

As the smartphone market saturates and it becomes important to address the smaller niche markets, it is very likely that we will see even more customization. In this situation, the restrictions that Google applies for Google Play certification may be too limiting, and AOSP may see more adoption. Obviously, Apple will not play in this market.

Update

Importantly, the miraie KYL23 smartphone is manufactured by a Japanese smartphone vendor, Kyocera, which also sells Google certified smartphones. Therefore, although it has been rumoured that Google does not give out licenses to companies that also sell AOSP or forked-Android, this does not always seem to be the case.

App Annie Shows iOS App Store Widening Revenue Lead Over Google Play

As I have been mentioning on this blog for quite a while now, despite the impressive growth rates that Google Play is showing in revenue growth, data suggests that the gap in absolute revenue between it and the iOS App Store is actually widening.

App Annie has been my source for data. However, since about a year ago, they have made it quite hard to directly observe the gap. Now, in a recent report, App Annie has provided the chart that clearly shows this trend.

This that chart;

App Annie Index 2014 Retrospective EN pdf 5 39ページ

We can clearly see that Google Play’s revenue growth rate has been quite impressive, but that is only because it was quite small in 2013. In absolute terms, the gap is clearly widening. Hence the current trajectory suggests that Google Play will not catch up with iOS in revenue.

Breaking down the revenue, we can see why.

  1. As App Annie has previously shown and as they show again in their most recent report, revenue growth of both the iOS App Store and Google Play comes almost entirely from three countries; Japan, South Korea and the United States. Revenue growth from developing countries, the countries where Android is typically very strong, is still almost negligible.
  2. In both Japan and the US, iPhone is increasing market share. Therefore it follows that iOS App Store revenue in these markets should be outpacing Google Play. With the iPhone 6 and 6 plus, it looks like this is starting to be the case in South Korea as well. Therefore, iOS App Store revenue in winning in the countries that matter.
  3. Android is continuing to gain market share in the developing countries and download numbers in these nations clearly show tremendous growth. This however has very little effect on absolute revenue because in these markets, customers simply do not pay much for apps.

What else would I like to know

Now that it is clear that Google Play revenue will not catch up with iOS App Store in the foreseeable future, the next topic related to the app ecosystem that I find interesting is the status of non-game apps.

App Annie has noted in their Q3 2014 report that “Games drive nearly all Google Play Revenue Growth”. This is deeply disturbing. It suggests that the non-game categories in Google Play are barely growing at all.

When we revel in how technology has improved out lives, we are seldom talking about games. We are talking about apps that help us and our children learn things, apps that improve our productivity and apps that help us communicate. If these apps are not growing, then it suggests that tech is not improving or lives, but is in fact an opium that enslaves us to spend money wasting our time.

It would be terrible if this were the case.

Questions About Google Becoming an MVNO

Some quick questions that I have following the reports that Google is striking deals with Sprint and T-Mobile to become an MVNO;

  1. What will the larger carriers, Version and AT&T think about this? Unlike Android OEMs who had to rely on Android in spite of how Google provoked them with Nexus phones and Motorola, carriers do have a choice. If they decide that they don’t want to do business with a competitor, they can more heavily promote iPhone or Windows Phone, and de-emphasize their efforts selling Android phones.
  2. Will Google have access to the data that flows through the wireless network? I think this is unlikely because MVNOs don’t own the wireless communications infrastructure, but I don’t know much about the system so I can’t really say. I’m sure Google would like the data, but if they really did, they could simply monitor everything that happens on Android phones. Maybe eavesdropping on the network is more acceptable than on the phone.
  3. Is this a Nexus? As I recall it, the purpose of the Nexus project was to create good hardware and sell them at low prices, hopefully encouraging their OEM to follow suit. Is the purpose of the current deal to do this. Since MVNOs are completely reliant on their partner for the network, Google has no control over the quality of the network. The only thing they can control is price. They might try hard to lower prices, that’s all that they can do.
  4. Is Google just dipping its toes into the water? Maybe their ambition is to eventually become a full scale carrier. Becoming a carrier would give them data and the ability to improve on quality.
  5. Maybe Google just wants the money. Despite all the businesses that Google is getting into, money generation is almost all from their old search advertising business. As the Internet and even smartphones are starting to saturate the market, it is likely that Google will start to see its revenue growth slow down. Google is certainly looking for other ways to earn money. Maybe becoming an MVNO is simply part of this plan. Maybe they are simply looking for profitable businesses in adjacent markets. I doubt that MVNOs make much profits, but Google has to start somewhere.

64-bit Android Is Starting To Hurt

Ever since the iPhone 5s was announced with a 64-bit processor, I have been watching when Android will move to 64-bit. My concern is that if Android does not move to 64-bit soon, the performance gap between Android and iOS may widen to a point where it becomes ridiculous to talk about “High-End Android”.

I initially thought that it would be a software issue; that Google would not commit itself to the high-end and would not be aggressive in moving the OS and applications to 64-bit. This has been true to a certain point. However, AppleInsider reports that the CPU hardware might be having an even harder time moving to 64-bit.

Following up on rumors in December that described “hard to solve” issues that Qualcomm was experiencing as it works to deliver its first mainstream 64-bit mobile chip, Bloomberg has now reported that Samsung “will use its own microprocessors in the next version of the Galaxy S smartphone.”

Citing “people with direct knowledge of the matter,” the new report said Samsung tested Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 but “decided not to use it.” Both companies have declined to address the issue publicly.

Two weeks ago, a research note by JP Morgan described the same overheating issue, explaining, “For the Snapdragon 810, a flagship chip for use in high-end models, we believe the issues are related to the implementation of new 64-bit ARM cores (A57), which is causing overheating when accelerating above 1.2-1.4 GHz frequencies, which is a major limitation for a flagship phone.”

This is starting to look very bad. It is starting to look like high-end Android will truly end up being a Samsung exlclusive.

Apple Watch Pricing Revisited

Following a tweet that I read yesterday, I’ll give an update on my thoughts (1, 2) on the price of the Apple Watch.

Abdel IbrahimさんはTwitterを使っています gruber Touché I say that because so far every girl I ve asked would like Edition but when I suggest at least 2K they re turned off

Full thread on twitter

Abdel’s point is very valid, and I think its something that Apple has deeply thought about. The thing is, and I mentioned this before, unlike watches in general, the Apple Watch will live and die by its ecosystem. Apple has to ensure that the ecosystem will be vibrant and profitable for developers, and the way to do that is to maximize the number of users who are willing to spend a dollar or so for an app. If the price of the Edition is so high and the design of the Watch not appealing enough for women, then the Apple Watch as a whole may not attract enough female users.

I’m certain that this is not what Apple wants, and they would push hard to make the Edition affordable, at least for the majority of women in developed countries.

Then the question is, how low can Apple possibly go?

This depends on how much gold is used in the watch. In my first article, I quoted a teardown of a Rolex gold watch;

  1. Case ring weights 18.5 grams. Contains 13.875 grams of pure gold. It has a value of $178.43.
  2. Case back weighs 7.21 grams. Contains 5.41 grams of pure gold. It has a value of $69.57.
  3. Bezel weighs 5.30 grams. Contains 3.98 grams of pure gold. It has a value of $51.18.
  4. The bracelet weighs 68.85 grams. Contains 51.64 grams of pure gold. It has the most value at $664.09.
  5. The total value of the pure 24kt. gold in this Rolex President is $963.27.

There’s actually a better page here which shows you what each part looks like.

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Comparing the Rolex watch to the Apple Watch, we can see that the Apple Watch does not have a gold case back or bracelet or a bezel to hold the glass in place; it only has the case ring. Also, although hard to be certain from just the photos, it’s likely that the gold in the case ring is also much less than a Rolex because the face of an Apple Watch is almost entirely the screen

It looks like the Apple Watch would only use a very small fraction of the gold in a Rolex. I suspect that Apple is purposely using as little gold as they can without sacrificing the design, which is in direct opposition to the Rolex which is trying to stuff in as much gold as possible. I would guess that Apple is only using at maximum, 15 grams. Maybe much less. The fact that people who actually wore the watch found it to be very light, might be a hint in this direction.

This would suggest that, at today’s gold prices (~40,000 USD/kg), the price of using gold will be something like 600 USD. Therefore, I think that it’s quite possible that Apple could make the Edition less than 1,500 USD.

I actually expect Apple to try even harder to further reduce prices because I think that it is a strategic imperative.

Slow Adoption Of Android 5.0 Lollipop

It seems that three months since its release, the adoption of Android 5.0 Lollipop seems to be unprecedentedly slow.

Still, as can be observed from the graph below, three months into its existence KitKat somewhere around 2% was already present in a significantly higher number of devices than Lollipop currently is.

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Compared to previous major upgrades of Android, Lollipop is quite big. It renews the UI design (Material Design) from Holo which has been in use since Android 3.0 (2011), it features a new ART runtime that replaces Dalvik which has been in use since, the beginning and it also has support for 64-bit devices. Lollipop is brand new in many ways, and I thought that Google would try very hard to drive quick adoption.

This clearly hasn’t been the case. I strongly doubt that this was intentional.

A bit worrisome.

Office 365 Adoption

Very interesting statistic from Okta regarding adoption of Office 365 relative to other cloud services. This is for businesses.

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In particular;

  • Office 365 is used across companies of all sizes. Workday, Clorox, Seton Hall University and DocuSign – all very different organizations in terms of age, size and industry – connect their Okta tenants to Office 365.
  • Banking, food & beverage and manufacturing favor Office 365 over Google Apps.
  • Consulting and law firms, as well as general technology companies, are more divided with pretty even adoption of Office 365 and Google Apps.
  • Google Apps is the clear choice among advertising firms, educational institutions and software companies.