iPhone, Android, Win7 Phone and What is Missing in Product Management

I’ve now read well over 100 articles, reviews and prognostications on the future of the smartphone landscape. The latest -- this one, called “7 Ways Windows Phone 7 Is Cooler Than The iPhone” posted on Business Insider, -- all seem to have completely missed the point of the Smartphone battle. The most ironic about this latest version is the ongoing comments. Those particularly focused on how technological leaders were overcome by followers clearly -- in their minds at least -- that Microsoft will ultimately be the victor in the Smartphone war. This is much in the same way as Android has too many platform options and will overwhelm the iphone. In someone’s world there is only one automobile to choose from as well but that’s an argument for a different day. There are multiple examples provided including:

Lotus 1-2-3.....Excel
WordPerfect....Word
Netscape Navigator...IE
Sony Playstation....XBOX and Wii
Netware....Windows NT
(Thanks to poster “Juara Moran”)

But we should also remember that you can add Apple ... Microsoft ... back to Apple on that list too.

The point isn’t that Android or Win7 smartphones don’t represent an evolutionary step in the technological landscape in much the same way as Windows 7 OS represents a technological leap over XP or Vista. That much is clearly true. Android has some benefits over iOS-based smartphones. Win7 has some benefits over Android, iOS and RIM devices. iOS certainly has some benefits over the pack as well. The point is that Apple created the smartphone market tornado that these vendors are finding themselves in today. Apple created the iPhone five years ago. Then they introduced the iPad which is in the process of creating a brand new market around tablets. In much the same way as they created the mobile music market ten years ago. (I know that the iPod was hardly the first MP3 player and the iPad was hardly the first tablet but there is no arguing that both have created a huge market that simply wasn’t there in earlier iterations of these devices.)

The fact of the matter is that Google, RIM, Microsoft are creating cool options for smartphone customers to consider purchasing today. Three or four years after Apple created the market in the fist place. The assumption in calling these products iPhone-killers is that Apple isn’t innovating on the iPhone. The assumption is that Apple is sitting on its laurels. The more likely fact is that they are innovating on products that will create new markets and new opportunities in 2012. The wonderfully frustrating thing about the critiques is that they all presume to compete against a shipping iPhone as opposed to presuming that by the time a competitor ships the product will be exactly the same. The most glaring competitive comparison is RIMs recently announced Playbook which is supposed to compete with the iPad. Even without providing a personal competitive comparison of features it’s interesting to note that the Playbook will ship sometime in late Q1 next year. RIM was so nice to compare something I cannot purchase with something that has been shipping for many months now. My safe money is on the fact that Apple will upgrade the software at least once -- already announced for November -- and will introduce new hardware (my guess is late January) before RIM ships version one of the Playbook.

What does this have to do with Product Management? This entire discussion is a brief summary of what is wrong with technological Product Management practice: You can’t shoot for what your customer wants today. You have to define what your customer will want tomorrow. It appears that Apple is the only company having any success in defining what a customer doesn’t know they want but what they will demand in the future. There have been numerous books published on this fatal PM flaw however I’m currently drawing a blank on some titles. If you know of any please add a comment below.

New Place To Start

I promise to begin a more consistent update pattern on my blog -- I now have iPad posting software up and running.

Since it has been a while I should probably take a moment and update readerson what I've been up to in the last few months:

Following over fourteen months with desktop virtualization start up Pano Logic I took some time off and performed market research and marketing consulting for a diverse set of early stage start ups through 2009. In September of last year I joined specialty virtaulzation start up ScaleMP (www.ScaleMP.com). They provide a very unique hypervisor / VMM for server aggregation (as opposed to the "traditional hypervisor use case for partitioning). Having formally launched the Company, developed an ecommerce channel and developed a sales and demand gen infrastructure for them I decided to go back into the "big" company and, as of September 1, I joined the desktop marketing team at desktop virtualization leader Citrix Systems.

I am planning to reengage with my active blogging in the next few weeks focused on both the consumer or client end of the network as well as anything virtualization in the backend.

Stay tuned for weekly or biweekly updates. If you like what you read please connect with me on LinkedIn...

Testing Blog Updates from my iPad

I promise to begin a more consistent update pattern on my blog -- particularly if my new iPad software successfully updates!

Stay tuned...