John Bresee

Don’t get me wrong, slide rules are cool. We never would have gotten a man on the moon without them. I’m always envious of anyone who can run a slide rule or an abacus or even the classic Texas Instruments 12-C. Tools like these are amazing, deeply layered and powerful. They are often the engines that true scientists use to change our world, innovation by innovation.

As I slowly get to understand the Droid I realize that it is a far more layered and powerful machine than I realized at first glance. It is rife with problems but even more deeply loaded with innovation and promise.

The App market is the wild west, with every download a gamble; many of them crashing right out of the gate. And I wonder if I’m giving login information to hucksters. I just don’t have the faith in the Android marketplace that I do in Apple’s App store. But it’s cool.

There are physical aspects of the Droid that are wonderments, like the haptic touch screen keyboard. And there are physical aspects that are embarassingly bad, like the slide out QWERTY keyboard. It’s wholly unnecessary due to the excellent software.

The more I explore the more I learn to love the Droid. But it does not make me love my iPhone any less. The iPhone just works and it works beautifully and when it comes to communicating, be it text or voice, I want something straight forward that never crashes and has the usability of a simple light switch. In mobile simple is great. But the Droid, while overloaded with stuff, is a fascinating device.

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Ten years late mCommerce has arrived. Due to our convoluted quilt of 12 wireless technologies like the laughably bad TDMA (AT&Ts previous technology that could manage only eight calls per cell) we find ourselves arriving a decead after iMode revolutionized Japanese pop culture.

Apple’s iPhone strategy has been the most beautiful business ramp in the history of technology. The OS is, despite some minor flaws, excellent. A year ago it became the one material possession I would save with me if there was a fire (pardon the duh factor of grabbing a phone). In the past my laptop was my most vital possession and yet quickly my iPhone has supplanted. Yet convergence is just as far in the distance as it ever was. I use my laptop just as many hours a day…it’s just the the iPhone has eaten up all the space that comes between. Even a pause in conversation is enough to have me idly unlocking the phone, considering a spin through the app store.  Divergence is alive and well as it always has been.

Much of the business world is still grappling with what kind of opportunity the iPhone really represents. Often the thinking goes that mCommerce should be like the Tommy Hilfiger web model. I believe that is the wrong tack, taking traditional eCommerce and just shrinking it to a smaller form factor.

What needs to exist is the notion mobile is leading us to a new model for computing that I’ll call for the moment, Better than Web.

Better Than Web is, well, just like it sounds. eTailing always runs a few years behind the content revolution and generally  also just doesn’t do things as beautifully. There isn’t an ecommerce site in the world that has anything like Facebook’s beautiful UI and phenomenally layered business logic. I dream of an eTailer that hits even 70 percent of the Facebook mark.

And in the world of Apps the gap between the A players and the eTailers is larger. I have yet to se

e an etail example using GPS, shared browsing, haptic interface, audio, accelerometer and more. With GPS, turn by turn navigation and some simple work Walmart could have every one of their store’s guide you through a real map your current stadium like store. Add a list function and it could walk you to each product you need while offering you coupons on nearby or similar items. Average cart could climb and time in store could go down. Need a clerk. Hit the big panic button and scan the bar code and have an instant call back…from the call center in Mumbai.

And for us rare pureplays the world just gets rosier. Show only reviews from my state, current location, in the last fifteen minutes, from my friends, etc. No longer need a person in Naples Florida be greeted by puffy down coats on the homepage. We could actually personalize. If it’s a ski site like ours and we’re able to track vertical skied in one day then we would know much better what skis to recommend.

Simply put, in eTailing your retail App better not be a slimmed down dimmer retail store with itty pictures that works in conjunction with your web site. It instead needs to be the next generation or etailing offer much much more. The move to dynamic localized and personalized content just moved up a few years. Ebay is averaging $89.95 per download in revenue and we haven’t even hit the holidays. Mobile is the future of etailing, duh. And Better Than Web is the future of mobile.

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If you don’t have an iPhone then you are one of the teeming masses of the world that has missed yet another crucial juncture in technology. I don’t want to love Apple. They’re smarmy and pretentious in an icky way. Were they on the island in Lord of the Flies they would have been Piggy and that’s no way to get ahead in a uptight society. But the truth of the matter is that Piggy made fire with his glasses. He was damned handy to  have around.

And in this world Apple is quite simply the best product company on the planet. They make beautiful brilliant products. Okay, they kinda suck at customer service and their web site is oh-so hip circa 2005. But when it comes to stamping out a product you can hold in your hand it dwarfs all others…whatever the category. *For all you sad wannabes toting your BoysenBerry Crescendo and saying, “it has a touch screen too”, please, please just shut up and click away on your miniscule QWERTY keyboard. I know, it costs you $150 to get out of your contract…yawn again. It’s worth $150 to stop the bleeding and join the world. Simply put Apple is five years ahead of the nearest competitor in wireless. It’s like Icarus boasting about having Greek bees wax with a one degree higher melting point while Daedalus is kicking it in a G5.

Rather than get your dander up and say things like, “there are 11,000 apps in the Android app store”. Yawn. Apple has sold or given over 2 billion apps. The competition is laughable. It’s like Manchester United taking on my sons team, the Condors. There is no competition in wireless smart phones. It may burst to life again in a couple of years, but I haven’t seen signs of it.

And it’s the App store where the love resides. It’s so good that I check it at least daily. And when I find a new app; in whatever category; my life becomes instantly better in that way.

The momentum behind apple is enormous. They have created a better UI, a better way to navigate the web, a mobile eco-system that works and ultimately the one portable computer that we must all own.

I had a Blackberry for quite a while. And it had as much in common with Apple’s communication platform as my first tin can and string phone. Good luck wireless world. You’re going to suffer for a long while.

*Apple, you suck at mice and that is inexcusable. The Apple TV is cool, but not cool enought to bear  your name.

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