The Business and Consumer Market: The Race for Relevance

There is a lot of activity in marketplace right now.  Much focus has been placed on “Cloud” services on side and tablet or portable hardware on the other.  I have found it hard to really put all of this in context and understand what companies are doing to leverage technology and make significant impacts in the marketplace.

To get a bigger picture of a company’s direction in a particular service or product area, I came up with a two element view of a technology or product.  The first part is an assessment of the capability of the service or product, and the second is a view of market share momentum.  Examples of this are shown below:

Applied to some interesting technology areas and companies, I come up with this admittedly subjective view of the current marketplace:

• Google has developed a wide range of infrastructure elements that cover both consumer and business needs.  Its mobile platform (i.e., Andriod) is becoming dominant, and it application environment (i.e., Google Apps) covers both desktop and mobile applications for home and business.

• Amazon is following suit, with a targeted set of capabilities focused on enabling businesses and providing wide scale consumer services including rich content.  Their “pad” (i.e., Kindle Fire) entry is completely tied to their existing and expanding consumer content model.  Not tied to a single vendor's set of devices (i.e., the Apple model), Amazon has a larger set of potential customers.

• Apple is tailored much more to the consumer, enabling rich messaging, content, and a full range of desktop to mobile applications.  Excelling at the user experience, Apple is the standard by which new devices and environments are measured.  In fact, I made a late update to the cart that reflect that Apple has now committed to a Cloud-oriented environment for the storage of user music, videos, etc.  It will be interesting to see how Amazon and Apple differentiate their services.  

• RIM, once dominant in the mobile market, is going sideways in the application environment, loosing traction in messaging, and not making an impact content distribution.  As a second tier player in the App landscape and with only a rumored music and video sales environment, there is not likely to be much market impact.  The launch of their pad (i.e., PlayBook) focused on the fact that is runs Adobe Flash (as opposed to Apple that is opposed to Flash).  Hoping to stir the wishes of the consumer market, this alone was hardly a reason to run out to buy.  In addition, they failed to take advantage of their strong business messaging position.  Without at least 3G connectivity to corporate email, contact, and calendaring, how is a business going to justify the expense.  Their previous market differentiation, Blackberry email service, is now an anachronistic method of email distribution – does all email have to cycle through Canada?

• Barnes & Noble is clearly focused on books and magazine subscription content on their mobile device (the “Nook”).  The main purpose initially is to sell electronic books.  However the Nook device is based on Android enables other provider’s content.

• HP.  Clearly, their attempt at a “pad” was not going to be anchored with content desired by consumers.  Without the draw of applications and content (see Apple iPad and iPhone commercials for what to do right) their entry was doomed.

The bottom line is that you can pretty easily see that the players that focused on integrated service delivery and content are the ones that are likely to have a continued to make new markets and have lasting market impact.