Its been interesting to watch from afar the iPhone and Blackberry stories this week.
When my last contract came up for renewal I looked around, asked the opinions of those around me and after long deliberation I still opted to renew with another Android phone.
Android isn’t as fast of slick as an iPhone but its nearly there; the battery life of most Android phones doesn’t match any Blackberry model; and the Market doesn’t offer as many apps as Apple (although its rare I can’t find what I need).
However, the consensus of opinion was clear – if I bought into the world view of RIM or Apple, that I liked their way of doing things, then Blackberry and iPhone handsets were great – in fact arguably better than anything else on the market. BUT if I didn’t, and I wanted to tailor the device to the way I work, choose what features I had and how they worked then neither was a good choice.
At the time, the Adobe Flash row seemed epitomise it all for me. Steve Jobs hated Flash. He’s perfectly entitled to that opinion but the balance of the world didn’t agree – and purely from a pragmatic perspective I didn’t agree but neither you nor I had any influence over Apple so Flash wasn’t available to iPhone customers.
I’d grown to love Swype – an alternative keyboard for both Android and iPhone users BUT I’d have to jailbreak my new iPhone to use it while I just install it on any Android phone. Why should I have to break my warranty and risk frying my new phone simply to use a keyboard I think makes the default choice of the developer looked dated, pedestrian and inefficient?
I have grown to hate iTunes for the same reasons and although we have a bunch of iPods about the place, we no longer buy anything from iTunes, keeping our music library separate and treating iTunes as the required tools for managing the device and not my world view of music.
Its very different on Android – I’ve no idea what Eric Schmidt thinks of Flash and, while I might be interested in his views as an industry leader, the fact that neither he or Google impose that view on me was enough. I could install Swype at the touch of a button without getting special permission, and Amazon is happy to integrate their MP3 market with my phone without taking control of everything or treating me as thief.
This week Blackberry customers had a massive outage – I know its not breaking news but it is worth spending five minutes thinking about why it happened.
Blackberry customers buy into the soup-to-nuts solution offered, owned, and controlled by RIM. The software, client and server, is developed, owned, hosted and controlled by RIM.
On the surface that’s appealing – a single point of contact delivering a complete solution that delivers my mobile world. But its also a reliance on a single corporate world view, and total reliance on their processes and controls. This week they failed, probably a very small process fault somewhere but it stopped all Blackberry customers dead in their tracks.
If the same had happened on Android, what would the impact have been?
Well I use Twitter and Facebook for instant messaging so no impact there; I use a mix of IMAP and gmail so there is a chance that I might not be able to get some of my mail but as the IMAP client isn’t owned, developed or controlled by Google it would have to be a catastrophic failure for all my mail to disappear. My contacts are naturally synced between Google, Plaxo and LinkedIn as well as Twitter, Flikr, Facebook and so on, so I could still contact people.
The chances of a significant service outage on all Android phones because a Google server died is almost inconceivable.
But, I hear you say, what if the bugs were introduced by an Android update?
Even here the Android approach has safeguards. Android development is a more collaborative approach – its not as open as say, Apache or LibreOffice, but it is somewhat open. As a result the raw development work can draw on many more eyes.
Then, because Google don’t control the Android handset market, any update to the core system will also need to be tested by a large market of device manufacturers, each with their own processes and controls, each with their own reputation on the line.
And finally, when the updates begin to roll, not all manufacturers will deploy at the same time and at the same rate so significant bugs will be discovered long before they become a problem and will have impacted a relatively small number of customers.
And then I have my own little safeguard. I’m an early adopter by nature but when it comes to single points of failure I try to resist installing anything on the day it was released – a hint to all those on Twitter bemoaning Apple this week.
Today, Ubuntu has released version 11.10, the Oneiric Ocelot – I got the pop-up asking me to upgrade – my fingers hovered over the mouse, itching to click “OK” – but I resisted, so far, and only just. I won’t be tweeting today using phrases that include “Ubuntu” and “#FFS”.
I’m sure its been widely and thoroughly tested, that’s its passed through a globally huge alpha and beta programme of diverse and demanding users, I’m confident its worth the upgrade but I still want to be second on this one.
Whether they buy into the whole Opensource movement or not (I do), I think the executives of both RIM and Apple could do well to read and understand two books:
- Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral & the Bazaar” and
- “Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution”
Buy into the political aspects of Opensource if you chose, release your code to your global customers if you like, but please don’t ignore the wider lessons of collaboration and sharing – it does far more than simply make your customers your collaborators, and therefore more loyal and supportive, it introduces safeguards and resilience.
I doubt friends of mine will be willing to dust off their old Nokia bricks a second time because you had another self-inflicted mishap.
