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Are tech companies lazy or smart?

August 18, 2010 By

Early adopters are the people who can make or break an idea. They take the risks on ideas, technology, trends etc. Sometimes they are rewarded by being the first to see results from their adoption, sometimes they are left disappointed because their adoption leads to a deadend.

Google Wave was one such platform. Touted as the next best thing, I was never convinced of it’s usefulness. I re-read an article today by AdAge, posted in April 2010 that listed it as one of the Social Media essentials of 2012. Given that Google abandoned it last month that is unlikely to come true. There are a lot of reasons for Wave’s failure and those have been hashed over plenty that I don’t need to rehash them here. What it did get me thinking about is the way companies that obviously rely on early adopters then miss an opportunity to expand beyond that original marketing place.

My current focus is Social Location Sharing, writing the first book on how marketers can leverage them has given me the opportunity to really delve into them and look at what works and what doesn’t. I am amazed at the variance between platforms. For example Booyah’s MyTown, which has been out on the iPhone for over a year, claims the highest number of active accounts, is still only available on the iPhone. Whrrl is in the same position, they have been promising an Android & Blackberry app for at least a year.

Given that newer platforms like SCVNGR have come to market with a full offering of cross phone operating system ready apps I have to wonder what is holding back the others. It is surely not the lack of ability to produce these apps. While I completely acknowledge the complexities faced by someone trying to take an iPhone app and make it work on the Blackberry platform, it is not impossible and it is even more straightforward to port over to the Android platform.

So what is holding these companies back? Are they simply trying to build a user base on one OS or are they not spending their investment dollars in the right place? Obviously the answer differs from company to company.

What do you think, do you have more confidence in an app that is available on the majority of operating systems or are you looking for just the ones that work on yours?

image used under creative commons by orangejack

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Filed Under: Social Location Sharing, Social Media, Technology Tagged With: , , , ,
  • http://twitter.com/Irant @Irant

    I'm not sure it is either. There are a lot of reasons why tech companies don't offer cross platform support. The obvious are costs of development, and more importantly costs of support (which are generally ongoing and therefore significantly higher). Another less obvious reasons include the fact that many software companies, even with a large user base, may be very small operations that don't have the resources to do the work. Some companies even carry a bias toward one platform or another – "I think the iPhone platform is the best out there, so I'll only develop for the iPhone."

    Of course the bigger question is the idea of exclusivity in the social sphere. If a large percentage of people access information via their mobile phones, and you don't support a broad range of popular platforms, then you are really limiting the value of your application – you are saying that your app, or network is for these people but not those people, forgetting that you and I communicate and socialize, without even knowing what platform we use.

    So my answer is that if you are targeting the social sphere, you can't pick and choose platforms because people don't pick and choose people in their network based upon that platform. It isn't a question of how good a platform is, but how many people your application can reach. And that certainly implies a cross platform approach.

    My two cents.

    K

    • incslinger

      You make some really good points here, though to be honest I am concerned about any company that goes into this space without enough resources to at least cover the Android platform and only covers the iPhone. They are not thinking success into their planning.
      Definitely agree about social applications and that was really where my head was when I wrote this. Which is what your comments got me to realize. I need to get my head out of the social space once in a while :-)

  • http://twitter.com/myerman @myerman

    I think the investment needed for native app development has started to reach the point of maximum diminishing return. I'm starting to move most of my mobile development to HTML5 and then using minimal view controllers that call that functionality. I can update content when I want outside of Apple's horrible process, and I have a leg up when trying to port my stuff to Android or BlackBerry.

    This doesn't seem like a "sexy" approach, but it sure gets apps to market pretty fast.