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Developer relations in your pocket

Phones

The telco ecosystem is finally waking up to Microsoft’s great epiphany of the 80’s and 90’s: it’s all about developers.

I was reminded of this when one of my high school alums Tweetered me about Motorola buying 280 North, makes of Cappuciono, an Object-C inspired app framework.

While I can’t say I’ve really every heard of anyone wanting to do more Object-C (like) coding, it highlights the fire under the collective back-sides of handset makers, carriers, and others in the telco space who’re seeing the developer ecosystems around Apple and Android disrupting their billion dollar revenue streams.

“…well I am now!”

Every technology need a parade of “killer features” to drive customers and for decades voice is what telcos offered. Remember all the “you can hear a pin drop” ads? While I might yell out “Bula Vinaka, Beachside!” each time AT&T drops my iPhone call, voice isn’t much of a killer feature anymore. There’s texting, of course, which while heavily used, is quickly becoming another undifferentiated feature (read: difficult to make easy money from in the face of cut-throat pricing from competition).

The App Economy

“Apps” are where it’s at now. Thanks to several years of advertising from Apple around the iPhone and the follow-on of Android, consumers are expecting their cellphones to be small computers. Just as with traditional computers, the availability of applications – killer apps – drives interest and buying behavior of the platform, here, various “smart phones” – soon just be “phones.”

Little wonder, then, that you’d see people like Motorola buying their way into application development. There’s a long way to go to build up a healthy and effective developer relations program, but having the actual technology – along with the talent and brand – is the necessary start. The existing cultures are a tremendous hurdle – the corporate structures are not really built around the slippery-slidey world of software and existing revenues are so stupidly massive that it’s easy to have a “what, me worry?” mentality.

Telco arms-dealers like Alcatel-Lucent are working on their own platform, and I’d expect to see more telco ecosystem folks – handset manufactures, telcos, equipment vendors, etc. – try to buy their way into, well, software.

Disclosure: Alcatel-Lucent is a client.

Categories: Community, Marketing, Programming, The New Thing.

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Continuing the Discussion

  1. […] interesting about Alcatel-Lucent getting into this business (along with others – Motorola recently bought mobile tool vendor 280 North, IBM is an interesting example, recently having show-cased their mobile portfolio) is that […]

  2. […] distribution and updating channels for apps. Again, you can see how this is attractive in the mobile space where your application might span the handset and the cloud, not to mention other devices that […]

  3. […] distribution and updating channels for apps. Again, you can see how this is attractive in the mobile space where your application might span the handset and the cloud, not to mention other devices that […]