Month: July 2014

The 3rd one

~ michael_msft ~ 3 Comments

It’s more a question than a statement. All one has to do is watch WWDC and Google I/O to see that Apple and Google are in a league of their own.

I keep thinking that Windows Phone is the one holding on to 3rd place but it seems like they are barely holding on according to this – http://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/windows-phone-sales-are-falling-in-the-u-s-and-china-according-to-new-survey/. Meaning they are only going to get 3rd place cause no one else is doing better than MSFT. Kind of a sad state.

I still think a healthy ecosystem in mobile phones would be the best thing for all of us product folks but of course I say that knowing the truth of the paradox – I am rooting for a 3rd place but I am not using anything or building anything for the runner up. There in lies the issue – if no one builds for #3 then there won’t be a #3. We want there to be one but we are not really supporting anyone right now apart from the two lead dogs.

This is kind of scary.

I played around with Firefox OS some and well – it’s interesting but has a long ways to go before I would use it or build on it.

We can see BlackBerry is still trying, http://crackberry.com/exclusive-pre-release-review-blackberry-passport, but seriously would you buy one of these phones? I wouldn’t. Someone might but I think BB will be a niche hardware maker with an OS not many developers are going to build for. I guess they may eventually make a great takeover target for some Chinese handset maker wanting to hedge their android bets.

So where does that leave the playing field?

Apple and Google getting it all or will MSFT do something cool – other than add folders?

Messing with your brain

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I am sure you have all heard about the Facebook experiment – I really don’t know what to say other than I am not surprised.

What it brings me to is realizing that a lot of us in the product world need to think about when designing our products that the human mind is complex – we tend to build things sometimes without remembering this. Meaning there is lot more to your product than the bits – you have to think about how people will react to it and how you might be able to invoke the reactions you want.

I found this video on pricing to help ton when thinking about pricing, market fit and feature matrixes.

http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/2013-07-16-michael-dearing

Love this section:

20 bucks.

Most common answer I’ve ever heard is 20 bucks. Some people say 30, some people say 40, but 20 is a very good guess. Now, what if I told you that that toaster had a mechanical timer that allowed you to get exactly the right level of golden deliciousness that you wanted on that piece of toast?

Do you see what I’m doing? I’m reaching into your brain, and I’m playing with your idea of what is value. I’m moving around the assumptions and beliefs that you have about what makes for good toast, and what makes for a good toaster. And I’m going to do it again. This toaster that I want to sell you has faster warm up, and that ensures that there’s perfect browning from the first slice to the last slice. You know, that terrible situation where you toast the first one and it doesn’t quite toast. And you toast the second and the third and they turn out to be charcoal? This solves that problem completely.

You feel what I’m doing, right? I’m going into the command line of your human OS and I’m playing with it.

enjoy!