Global Nerdy

Chart by Bruno Oliveira.
Click the graph to see it at full size.

File this under “It’s funny because it’s true.”

Perhaps you’ve heard of the recent deal in which Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion — that’s close to the estimated enterprise value of Sony — and are now asking the question “What’s WhatsApp?”. If you were imagining that it was some life- or paradigm-changing application, you may be surprised to find out that it’s an instant-messaging service that lets you send text, still pictures, video, and audio messages to your friends on a host of platforms. From a purely functional point of view, that’s all there is to it.

What sets WhatsApp apart, according to the Sequoia Capital blog, are four numbers:

• 450 million active users, which is more than double Twitter’s active users. Nine months ago, that number was 200 million, which was already more active users than Twitter.
• 72% of its users are active. Most apps are doing well if 20% of their users are active and only a handful can hit the 50% mark.
• 32 engineers. That’s shockingly lean. Think about it: that’s one engineer for every 14 million active users of a service that’s been noted for its reliability and low latency.
• 1 simple set of rules and $1 a year to use: Founder Jan Koum keeps these rules taped to his desk. It’s pictured below:

No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!: WhatApp’s mantra, taped to founder Jan Koum’s desk.
Photo from Sequoia Capital’s blog. Click to see the source.

Strategy consultant Benedict Evans, who just started a new gig at A16z — that’s the in-the-know shorthand, URL , and Twitter handle for the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz — writes that if you look closely at the deal, it explains a lot about where mobile social apps are headed:

• Facebook is determined to be “the next Facebook” and retain its status in the world of social and mobile applications, a tricky thing when tech companies’ fortunes can change so completely in a mere ten years (see Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, BlackBerry, Nokia, Lenovo, and so on). They’re willing to make audacious, aggressive acquisitions like this one — remember, they just spent 10% of their net worth to buy WhatsApp —  to stay on top.
• Social networking on mobile is different than social networking on the desktop, and that’s because:
  • Given your permission, mobile apps can access your device’s address book, reducing friction by not requiring you to manually build your “social graph” when you join a new social networking service.
  • It’s easier to upload photos on a mobile device, especially when mobile devices do double duty as people’s primary (or only) cameras these days.
  • Mobile devices can use active messaging in the form of push notifications or text messages, rather than relying on passive messaging (email, notifications on sites) that requires the user to actively check for messages.
  • Every mobile app gets an icon on the home screen (with mobile OS user interfaces as they currently are, anyway).
  • Unlike desktop apps, every mobile app can be available in a minimum of two taps: one to wake up the phone, and one to launch the app.
• Mobile is the next computing platform, and it’s bigger than the desktop. Unlike desktops, mobile devices are seen as more personal, most people keep theirs within arm’s reach, they’re almost always online, and installing apps is a no-brainer. These qualities, along with the userbase and reach of mobile and the low cost of starting a tech startup let the very good and very lucky hit the big time in ways unseen before. “WhatsApp,” writes Evans, “is probably now sending more messages than the entire global SMS system.”
• Mobile social apps aren’t about free SMS — they’re about being able to find people, content, and services effectively. Google was designed to find web pages, and doesn’t quite yet solve the findability problems that social mobile apps like WhatsApp are chipping away at. As Evans observes, “These apps have the opportunity to be a third channel in parallel to Google and Facebook.”

WhatsApp founder Jan Koum signing the acquisition deal on the door of the office where he used to collect welfare checks.
Picture via Forbes; click to see the source.

And finally, there are some lessons to be gleaned from the story of WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum, although they could be summarized as “hustle and hard work”, combined with the right amount of luck. It’s covered quite well in this Forbes exclusive.

The thesis of the TechRepublic article Avoid using a one-size-fits-all BYOD security policy is that you shouldn’t use a single BYOD policy for everyone in your company. While a single policy is the simplest to implement, it fails in the way that a blunt tool used for every purpose does, and fails to balance the needs of information security with the people’s productivity needs.

• Spell out your expectations for how corporate data should be handled on BYOD devices. Talk about the needs of corporate security and recognizing that BYOD devices help people be more productive, and how you plan to balance those needs. If you explain the “why” behind a BYOD policy, the sort of compliance you want to have, and the values you’re trying to promote, you’ll get more buy-in.
• Set clear boundaries demarcating what’s corporate and what’s personal on BYOD devices. For certain types of apps and data, it’s easier to tell which is which: the company-sanctioned email client and company- and industry-specific apps are corporate, music and photos are personal. It’s tricker with apps that blur the line between the two worlds; for example, people use Dropbox for both business and personal uses. You’ll have to make those calls, and it will largely depend on the security needs and culture of your organization.
• Set clear guidelines to promote good information hygiene habits. Like any successful society, BYOD works best when participants actively “police” themselves. Specify document-handling practices for BYOD users — the example in the article says that users who edit a company document on a BYOD device should delete it from the device once it’s been edited and sent. User who use cloud storage (Box, Dropbox, Evernote) should tag any work-related items as such so that they’re easily identified and accessible.
• Calibrate your BYOD policies to users’ level of access. Some people are content to use their personal tablet as a “second screen” for reading and may simply want access to the company wifi. Others may want to use theirs for work-related email. I’ve seen a number who use them as email and note-taking devices at work. And finally, there are those who’ve decided to travel light and use their tablets as their primary work machines. These are different levels of access to corporate data and resources, and they call for different policies.

In InformationWeek, Paul Waterhouse compares BYOD to Botox. He points out these similarities:

• Both are naturally occurring. BYOD naturally arose from people with clout demanding to use their favorite devices for work and people with tech-savvy sneaking in their favorite tools under IT’s nose.
• Both have therapeutic value. BYOD can re-energize a tired IT department using old, out-of-date practices.
• Both can be used cosmetically, to disastrous results. BYOD without much forethought or preparation  usually leads to half-baked implementations. Like Botox treatments done the same way, the result isn’t pretty.
• Both have side effects if not supervised by someone who knows what they’re doing. Like Botox, BYOD has side effects — security and risk, additional telecom expenses, and “allergic reactions” from infrastructure that’s not ready to handle all those different personal devices.

Like Botox, BYOD is powerful and can be poisionous, so it has to be applied judiciously.

BYOD itself doesn’t fit all corporate scenarios. If your line of work:

• in an a heavily-regulated industry where security concerns are paramount,
• requires mission-critical tasks to be performed on a mobile device, or
• is as an executive and you’ve got high service requirements,

….then you may be in a situation where BYOD may not be a suitable option, and corporate-owned devices might be more appropriate.

COPE — short for Corporate-Owned, Personally Enabled — is a term coined in 2012 by Philippe Winthrop of the Enterprise Mobility Forum. “COPE is the mirror opposite of BYOD,” said Winthrop in the TechTarget article BYOD alternatives emerge as tablets outship PCs. “It’s taking the benefits of the consumerization of IT … while retaining the flexibility for the employer.”

The COPE approach to mobile devices is modelled after the way many companies already provide laptops for their employees. COPE devices are provided by the employer, with the understanding that the device will be used not just for work, but also for personal use: web browsing, games, music, photos, video and so on. If the devices are seen as desirable, they’ll be considered perks. As company property, there’s usually less resistance to the installation of management tools and software.

Just as one approach to employee devices doesn’t fit all, one device isn’t likely to fit all needs. Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablet comes close to covering the bases of both tablets and computers, but the tiled-UI apps don’t feel as polished as their Android and iOS equivalents, and the Windows experience on Surface still feels unsatisfyingly netbook-like. For the next little while, it looks as though different use cases will call for different devices.

My friend Lee Dale’s company is moving office, and there’s some server and consumer gear that he doesn’t want to take with him and is willing to part with for incredibly low prices. If you’re in the Toronto area, you may want to get your paws on these! Among the items he’s selling are…

Must be picked up near 401 and Warden, to be coordinated on Friday, Feb 28th.
Click the photo to see all the items Lee has for sale.

Must be picked up, ideally we would coordinate pick up on Feb 28th.
Click the photo to see all the items Lee has for sale.

Free if you pick it up.
Click the photo to see all the items Lee has for sale.

Click the photo to see all the items Lee has for sale.

I can’t name any techies who are betting on BlackBerry, but I can point to a few investors on Seeking Alpha who are:

• It was revealed late last week in a regulatory filing that Dan Loeb, head of the $13 billion-or-so hedge fund Third Point, bought a 2% stake in the company (valued at about $92.5 million) during 4Q 2013, making him one of the top ten shareholders. Loeb is described in Financial Times as an “activist hedge fund manager”, which means that he’s one of those people that uses the clout that comes with owning a significant number of voting shares to pressure management into doing things that lead to higher share prices and returns. BlackBerry’s stock price went up 5% in response to the news.
• Betting Big on BlackBerry: A self-described contrarian analyst going by the nom de plume “Quoth the Raven”, writes “BlackBerry (BBRY) is one of the largest positions in my portfolio”, cites a list of accurate predictions that he or she has made about the company, and explains why he or she is “cautiously optimistic” about its future. “Quoth the Raven” has written other articles that say that BlackBerry has a future, the most notable being BlackBerry: Rebirth of the Original Gangster.
• George Kesarios, another self-identified contrarian, argues that BlackBerry “is worth a minimum of $20 a share, if it stops bleeding”. It almost sounds like a tautology (“the patient will live if he doesn’t die”), but he says that if the company can manage to cut its losses, its revenue from its MDM software and services can bring in nearly $3 billion a year alone, without any hardware sales at all.

I shouldn’t have to remind you that the bets an investor makes and the bets that a mobile technologist makes are very different creatures. These Seeking Alpha analysts are in the business of getting as much bang out of their investment buck as possible, while readers of this blog are in the business of getting as much functionality out of their tech as possible. These rumbling from the investment community are worth noting because they give some hints as to what BlackBerry may do in the future, which the investors seem to hope is to give up hardware and concentrate on mobile device management and security, which are sure to be a big deal over the next few years.

Nor should I have to remind you that none of this should be construed as investment advice: you pays your money and you takes your chances, and nowhere did we didn’t tell you what to bet on.

Creative Commons photo by Matthew Hurst. Click to see the source.

And now, some links to interesting news and articles about mobile technology as applied to the enterprise…

Good Technology’s data suggests iOS has a dramatic lead in the enterprise

CIO points to the latest report from Good Technology, the Good Technology Mobility Index Report Q4 2013, which says nearly three-quarters of all activations in the fourth quarter of 2013 among its customer base — more than 5,000 organizations in over 130 countries — were for iOS devices:

iOS accounted for 73% of all Q4 2013 activations of mobile devices using Good’s security platform, followed by Android at 26%, and Windows Phone for the remaining 1%.

When you look at just the tablet activations, Apple’s lead is even more stunning, accounting for 91.4% of tablets with Good’s security solution installed. Android accounts for the remaining 8.6%:

Samsung’s enterprise push sees success with the US Army and the NSA

The recent exodus from the BlackBerry platform — one we recommend — has created an opportunity for its rivals to capitalize on. While Apple’s been doing a good job of winning over the enterprise, Samsung is also actively courting the enterprise by pushing features like its Knox security platform and chip-level security. Their efforts seem to be paying off, as the US Army has placed an order of 7,000 devices, and “several thousand” have been ordered by the NSA. Both were originally BlackBerry customers, who chose the platform for its security features; Samsung Knox-enabled devices received approval from the US Department of Defense last year.

5 arguments to convince your boss to let you BYOD

Dell’s Tech Page One has these five arguments you can use to persuade your boss to let you bring your own device for work purposes:

1. It’ll save the company money. They point to this CIO Insight article that suggests that BYOD can save a company up to $80 per month per employee.
2. The support requirements for BYOD are very low. They say that consumer phones and the apps that run on them are quite easy to use, choosing one’s own device means that users will be using platforms that they know and love, and users will be more likely to upgrade their own software and rely on the manufacturer for support.
3. It’s not insecure. It’s no more insecure than any given company-issued desktop computer, and people are far more likely to take better care of devices that they own.
4. It’ll make workers happier and more productive. Users will tend to choose the phone that’s right for them and their job.
5. You can’t stop them, anyway. Shadow IT is pervasive. “You may not want to hear this, but asking for permission to BYOD is really just a formality. Just as your employees are already using their work phones for personal stuff, we’re also using our personal devices to access work stuff as much as we possibly can. We just don’t tell you about it.”

5 enterprise mobility myths you probably think are facts

In BizCommunity.com. Nilesh Talaviya lists five thing people think are true about enterprise mobility that actually aren’t:

1. It’s best to wait and watch. With many enterprises already building mission-critical mobile apps, the longer you dawdle, the more you’re giving your competition the lead.
2. BYOD is mandatory. BYOD makes sense in a lot of situations, but not all of them. There are other approaches, such as COPE (Company-Owned, Personally-Enabled), and CYOD (Choose Your Own Device), for starters.
3. Enterprise mobile apps are a security nightmare. With the right security measures, apps on mobile devices are no more dangerous than desktop applications.
4. Enterprise mobility is too costly. There are lots of inexpensive options for building enterprise apps, and custom-built enterprise apps don’t have to have the same UIs as consumer apps.
5. Enterprise mobility needs big investment in infrastructure. Most of the infrastructure is taken care of by the carrier and wifi — most of what you’ll need to add is made up of building ways to integrate mobile devices with your back end.

There’s a classic Star Trek episode in which a transporter malfunction beams Kirk, McCoy, Uhura, and Scotty to a “mirror universe” where everyone has an evil counterpart. In the mirror universe, the Enterprise isn’t a ship of exploration but war and conquest, the peaceful Federation is the hostile Terran Empire, and Evil Mr. Spock is wearing the dreaded Beard of Evil. If you’ve never seen it before, or are itching to see it again, someone’s posted it on YouTube, and I’m posting it below. Enjoy it before Paramount issues the takedown:

We don’t live in a world of starships and transporters, but Microsoft’s head of PR, Frank X. Shaw, the company’s answer to the Iraqi Information Minister, just might. The latest evidence for this came to light in his response to Farhad Manjoo’s first column for the New York Times.

In his column, How to Survive the Next Wave of Technology Extinction, Manjoo writes:

By following a simple strategy, you can get the most out of the digital world while reducing the chance you’ll be burned by a single wrong move. The point is to minimize the danger of getting locked in to any one company’s ecosystem. The strategy also ensures that you can easily move from device to device without much hassle.

The key is promiscuity. When you decide what to use, you’ve got to play every tech giant against the other, to make every tech decision as if you were a cad — sample every firm’s best features and never overcommit to any one.

Here’s his strategy, boiled down to three lines, which I’ve dubbed “The Manjoo Mantra” and to which I’ve added those lovely graphics that you’ve come to expect from this blog:

Manjoo’s approach is my approach, and if you talk to your local alpha geek, and the odds are pretty good that s/he’s following it as well. From informal nerd gatherings like Toronto’s Rails Pub Nite, to more organized get-togethers like DevTO, to the Toronto and Ottawa offices of the billion-dollar ecommerce business Shopify, to the San Francisco Bay Area, from small startups working out of their kitchens or at cafes, to operations ranging from Stripe to Dropbox to Google (all places where I’ve interviewed in the past little while), it’s the same: hardware from Apple, services from Google, media (and often, other tangible goods from Amazon).

I do keep a Windows 8 machine handy just in case there’s some Windows-specific work to do — a Lenovo T430, which I call the “StinkPad” — but at this point, it’s relegated to secondary tasks such as email, Skype, audio and video playback, torrenting and other joe-jobs so that the main computer, an early 2011 MacBook Pro has maximum free cycles to do real work. At this point in the game, most of my Microsoft user experience comes from my trusty Xbox 360, and the occasional Office document (which I open on the Mac), and doing tech support on aging friends’ and relatives’ aging home computers (a good number of which run Windows XP).

Note that Microsoft doesn’t appear at all in the Manjoo Mantra, and that’s not the sort of snub that Frank X. Shaw, Corporate Vice President of Corporate Communications (that’s right, the word corporate appears in his title twice) gets paid big bucks to take lying down. He published one of those “open letter” replies to Manjoo’s column in Business Insider, which I include in its entirety below:

Dear Farhad,

When you wrote for Slate, you often championed new emerging technologies that offered the tantalizing prospect of disrupting static markets by putting more power and choices into the hands of the people who use them. So naturally, I was a little confused when I opened the paper of record this morning to find that along with switching your employee badge, you seem to have switched sides, and are now a firm supporter of the status quo.

I’m referring, of course, to your advice column for consumers wishing to avoid “tech extinction” by betting on the wrong horse. Surprisingly though, your predictions seem like you are using a rear-view mirror, not a windshield, to look at the road ahead. You recommend sticking with today’s biggest players in the mobile phone, web services and content marketplaces, diversifying purchases between Apple, Google and Amazon accordingly. The core argument for doing this seems to be that none of these companies are likely to go away, and that spreading your bets reduces the risk of “lock in.”

Ironically, these recommendations do lock you in. To expensive hardware with fewer choices and to aggressive content screening and intrusive advertising.

More importantly though you are discounting the possibility that the best antidote to extinction is actually betting on players who are innovating today, not simply monetizing the products they invented 5 or 10 years ago. Your own advice would have had a 2007 smartphone buyer picking a BlackBerry over an iPhone, a 2001 gamer buying a Dreamcast instead of an Xbox, and a 2008 social media user putting all their contacts into MySpace, not Facebook. This would have look like sound advice at those moments in time, but of course it wasn’t. Not because those products were bad, but because they had already peaked, and were no longer focused on solving customer problems in fresh new ways. The best way to avoid extinction is betting on a commitment to evolution through innovation.

So while your readers could take your advice and blend in with the current crowd, we’d encourage you (and them) to take a look at some alternatives that offer even better ways to get things done. And with a cross-platform connected ecosystem that spans the workplace to the living room featuring best in class products like Office, Skype and Xbox, we’re a pretty safe bet too.

fxs

If you have any grasp of the history of tech over the past twenty years, your reaction is probably similar to this:

Think about it:

• For a Microsoftie to warn of the dangers of lock-in is rich beyond belief. Lock-in is what made made Microsoft; its association with Microsoft is strong enough for it to get mention in Wikipedia’s entry for “Vendor Lock-In”.
• He cites examples of innovative, disruptive, industry-redefining products, but can’t point to a single Microsoft product of that ilk (and for the record, a 2001 gamer’s smart bet would’ve been the PlayStation 2, not the original Xbox).
• He says the Manjoo’s pitching products that have “already peaked” made by companies “monetizing the products they invented 5 or 10 years ago”, yet what business is Microsoft really in, if you look at their revenues? Windows and Office, both of which come from the ’90s. Besides, the current version of Windows sold 100 million fewer copies in the first 15 months than its predecessor in the same period of time.

I admire the bare-knuckle yet tactful way in which Shaw deals with bad PR for Microsoft, but he’s living in an alternate reality. In that parallel universe, I’d have gladly stayed in Microsoft, evangelizing an industry-redefining, disruptive, successful Windows Phone and Surface Tablet.