Fishpool

Metrics, funnels, KPIs - a comparative introduction

Osma — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:10:00 +0200

I know, I know - startup metrics have been preached about for years by luminaries like Mark Suster, Dave McClure, Eric Ries and many, many others. The field is full of great companies and tools like KISSmetrics, ChartBeat, Google Analytics, to name but three (and do a great disservice to many others). Companies like Facebook and Zynga collect and analyze oodles (that's a technical term) of data on their traffic, customers and products, and have built multi-billion dollar business on metrics. Surely everything is done already, and everyone not only knows that metrics matter, but also how to select the right metrics and implement a robust metrics process? There's nothing to see here, move along... or is there?

Metrics depend on your business as much as your business depends on them. No, more, in fact. It is possible (though hard) to build a decent, if not awesome business purely on intuition, but it is not possible to define metrics without understanding the business. Applying the wrong metrics is a disaster waiting to happen. In fact, in some ways this makes building a robust metrics platform more difficult than building the product it's supposed to measure. Metrics can't exist ahead of the product, but are needed from the beginning. Sure, with experience you will learn to pick plausible candidates for KPIs, and may even have tools ready for applying them to new products, but details change, and sometimes, with those details, the quality of the metrics changes dramatically. This is obviously true between industries like retail vs entertainment, but it's also true between companies working in the same industry.

This is a big part of why metrics aren't a solution to lack of direction. They can be a part of a solution in that well-chosen metrics will make progress or lack of it obvious, and may even provide clear, actionable targets for developing the business. Someone still needs to have an idea of what to do, and that insight feeds back into all parts: product, operations, measurement. I've never liked the phrase "metrics driven business" for this reason. Metrics don't do any driving. They're the instrumentation to tell you whether you're still on a road or what your speed is. You still have to decide whether that's the right road to be on, and whether you should be moving faster, or perhaps at times slower.

What to do, then? Well, understanding the differences helps. Lets start with a commonly applied metrics model, the sales funnel.

In a business-to-business, face to face sales driven business, a traditional funnel may begin with identifying potential customer opportunity, then measuring the number of contacts, leads, proposals, negotiations, orders, deliveries and invoices. A well managed business will focus on qualified customers and look for repeat transactions, as the cost per opportunity will likely be lower, and the revenue per order may be higher, leading to greater profitability. They will also look at the success rate between the steps of the funnel, trying to improve the probability of developing an opportunity into a first order.

This model is often adapted to retail: advertising, foot traffic, product presentation, purchase decision. For some businesses that's it - others will need to manage the delivery of the product, and may see further opportunities in service, cross-sales, or otherwise. Online retail businesses measure every step in much greater detail, simply because it is easier to do so. Large retail chains emulate that measurement with very sophisticated foot traffic measurement systems. But even in its simplest form, while the shape is similar, the steps of the funnel are very different.

Online businesses have developed a variety of business models, among which two large categories are very common: advertising and freemium.

The advertising-funded two sided market model is two different funnels: a visibility - traffic - engaged traffic - repeat traffic page view model, and a more traditional sales funnel for the advertisers, though even that one has been, through automation, turned to look more like an online retail model than what advertising industry is used to. This model is further enhanced by traffic segmentation and intent analysis, allowing targeted advertising and a real-time direct marketing product, the sales funnel of which is even less familiar to the sales funnel I described at the beginning.

Freemium isn't even one business model: a B2B service with a tiered product offering and a free time- or feature-limited trial product may ultimately use the traditional sales model, only so that the opportunity to prospect part of the model is fully automated. Often it's entirely automated to the point a customer never needs to (or perhaps even wants to, assuming a simple enough product) talk to a sales rep. Still, the basic structure holds: some of the prospective leads turn into customers, and carry the business forward. Free service, be it for trial only or for the starter-level segment, is a marketing cost and a leads-qualifier, enabling a smaller sales force.

On the other hand, the free-plus-microtransactions model, one which we pioneered with Habbo Hotel, and has since been used to great success by many, including Zynga, can certainly be described as a funnel, but to measure it with one requires significant violence to many details. The most important of these is that because individual transactions are typically of very low value, building a profitable business on top of a model which aims for, and measures one sale per customer is practically impossible. This class of business doesn't just benefit from repeat customers, it requires them. Hence, a free-plus (or, as it is called in the games industry, free-to-play) business model must replace counting a "new customer" metric or measuring individual transaction value with the measurement of customer lifetime value. Not just measuring it on average, but trying to predict it individually - both to try to develop 0- or low-value users (oh, how I hate the word) to higher value by giving them better value or experience, and by identifying the high value customers to serve and pamper them to the best of the company's ability (within reason and profitability, of course). And once you switch the way you value revenue, you really need to switch the way you measure things pre-revenue.

Funnels change. There are business models where funnels really can't provide the most instructive KPIs, even though they still may be conceptually helpful in describing the business. As this post is getting long, more on the details of KPIs of free-to-play in the next episode.

Dusting off the looking glass

Osma — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 14:16:00 +0200

It's that time again... to make a few statements I can feel ridiculous about later on. I did take an advance position back in October regarding Internet platforms, so no need to touch that topic again just yet (especially after the additional HTML5/Flash comments in November). As before though, let's take a look at what my hit rate is.

#1 Oracle's jostling on Java patents will hurt Java as a platform: yeah, although it's hard to notice, what with the chatter on cloud platforms instead. Still, you've got to write that cloud-hosted application in some language, and though evidence is sparse, it seems to me that more devs are picking other tools. Somewhat insanely, PHP still ranks well in those selections, which proves that these things don't follow any observable logic, though.

#2 Amazing natural motion control applications during 2011: well, not really, yet. XBox Kinect has supposedly continued to sell well, though Microsoft hasn't given any sales data since last March (when they announced 10 million units sold), but applications are rather lame. Some pretty amazing research stuff going on though, which will ultimately enable computers to truly augment live views into the real world.

#3 Flash and new computing devices: see the other posts, linked above. Progress is steady but impact will take several years. As for the long-term view; while my daughter already understands that tablets and phones are for looking at stuff and playing, and keyboards are for banging, I maintain hope that in the next couple of years, she will be able to interact with computers by speech as well as gestures. We'll still need to invent the new human-computer interface best practices for that age, though.

Facebook/Timeline did finally launch before end of 2011. What do you think of it? I haven't seen a reason to change my view since October, although the "social reader" apps like Washington Post's or Guardian's certainly are annoying. Don't know if I should expect media companies to learn how to interact with people, though.

Now, the predictions. This one's gonna be difficult. Not because the world would be ending this year, but because it seems like quite a few macro trends are converging. Lots to feel optimistic about: locally, the interest in growth entrepreneurship and globally, new forms of peaceful citizen democracy, and the ever-continuing development of technology (gene therapy and data-driven, preventative medical treatments are exciting). A few that I hope will turn out well, though it's going to be a bumpy road: the ongoing Arab Spring as well as the Russian pro-democracy movement, the Euro crisis, which could still lead to yet another banking collapse. And finally, some political and regulatory changes that are quite worrying, even if I've tried to avoid a position on politics, and especially politics outside the EU. Still, these bother me for both their privacy as well as anti-competitive aspects and lack of due process: ACTA, SOPA, NDAA. Still, these are hardly going to bring the Singularity around quite yet, dystopian though they seem.

However, I don't want to pretend I care about or follow politics closely enough to understand why these things always come years behind and over-reach, so I'd rather focus on something more tractable. In terms of professional interests, the trend toward hosted, multiplayer gaming is, by now, quite unstoppable. We're moving on from the Social Games 1.0 of Facebook Canvas, though, and the future is more for games where the players' actions impact each other. The challenge is, we need to learn to design these games so that while they truly have group interaction in their core, they still remains games; that is, masterable, repeatable and somewhat predictable experiences people can continue to enjoy, and a source of richness their lives might otherwise be lacking.

As always, comments welcome. This year this post was quite hard to focus on anything in particular, and maybe you have better insight. Let me know. In any case, Happy New Year! Whatever you do, make 2012 matter.

Driverless cars, and a complete rethink of in-city traffic management

Osma — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:17:00 +0200

Diverging slightly from my usual topics, Koushik Dutta's post prompted me to put into writing what I've been thinking for a while about the future of both public and private transportation. People reading this blog have probably all heard by now that driverless cars are coming along nicely, and that Google has already demonstrated a vehicle capable of autonomous road traffic, at least while being supervised by a human. This was announced a year ago.

Now, the technology certainly isn't perfect yet. It's debatable how perfect it needs to be, in order to be better and safer than a human driver, but we can probably agree it's not quite there yet. It's also quite clear that communities and regulation will have a hard time swallowing the idea of 2-ton lump of metal going about without a driver in a city at deadly-to-pedestrians speeds (anywhere 40km/h upwards would qualify), let alone perhaps while carrying children. This is not happening in the near term.

At the same time, there are problems the technology already is capable of solving, and I'm not talking about reducing highway inter-car braking distances or autonomous warehouse navigation, both of which are already in place for some high-end models, and factory automation, respectively. No, I mean daily problems on the streets of every metropolitan area.

In my home town of Helsinki, traffic isn't really a problem. There are a few places where, for 25 minutes in the mornings and 30 minutes in the afternoons, traffic slows to an average of 15km/h rather than 30. However, downtown parking IS a problem. I've long conjectured that if only 10% less people wanted or needed to park in downtown, there would be no parking problem. Where you now have to drive around a couple of blocks to find a space, there would be 5 free spaces in every block. That's more than enough. This is the nature of bottlenecking issues - you don't have any, until you do, and then it's bad immediately.

Public transportation will not fix parking, because public transportation will go from every place to every other place, and allow people to conveniently transport more than they can carry themselves. People need cars for these purposes, as well as for many conveniences. Yet every private car spends an overwhelming majority of its lifetime parked. This is why parking is such an issue. In a city like Helsinki, we don't really need less cars, we need less parked cars, and that can also be solved by having more of them on the road. The bottleneck would obviously move toward traffic conditions, but there will be a sweet spot.

What if you could have a car of the size you needed, at the time you need it, at costs much lower than constant taxicab use? If you are an in-city occupant, as I am, would you care to own a car, with all the associated worries of insurance, maintenance and so forth, even if parking was no longer a problem? I would not. Well, I don't own a car as it is, so I don't qualify for the question, but what about you?

Collective car services have sprung about in the recent years in many municipalities. We have City Car Club, Zipcar is known across USA, and so forth. Yet a problem with these services is that the parking spots the cars are at are not immediately adjacent to most people, and the companies need relatively complicated logistics for making sure cars are available in all places. This means that the customers need to often reserve a car ahead of time.

But what if cars could take themselves from where there are too many, to areas where there are fewer, and to customers who need one immediately? You could have exactly the kind of car you need at a couple of minutes of notice, just like you can have a taxicab in most places where there are enough of those.

And what does all of this have to do with community acceptance? Well.. Lets accept as a given that it'll take a while before we'll be ready for automated cars carrying passengers around on streets where people are driving, moving at regular traffic speeds. But what about having empty cars move themselves through preassigned routes, on specific lanes, at lower speeds, yielding to all human traffic? How many municipalities suffer from too many cars around bad enough to consider arranging for those special routes? I'm guessing there are a few.

This is a disruptive thing, and to many different industries at once. Car companies will need more service capability and less manufacturing capacity, if more and more of private cars resemble taxicabs in their replacement and maintenance schedules. Taxis will be challenged by automated cars, but only when the passenger is willing to do some driving themselves - and many taxi customers are specifically looking for not just a car, but also a driver. But public transportation will also be challenged, because for many, the choice between a car and public transport is a balance between the inconveniences of longer pedestrian distances and indirect routes versus finding a parking spot.

Flash is dead? What changed?

Osma — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:10:00 +0200

So, Adobe finally did the inevitable, and announced that they've given up trying to make Flash relevant on mobile devices. Plenty has been written already about what lead to this situation, and the "tech" blogosphere certainly has proved their lack of insight in matters of development again, so maybe I won't go there. Flash plugin has a bad rap, and HTML5 will share that status as soon as adware crap starts to be made with it. It's not the tech, but its application.

So, lets focus on the developer angle. Richard Davey of Aardman and PhotonStorm is offering a developer-focused review into the alternatives. TL;DR; Flash is what's there now, but learn HTML5 too. Yeah, for web, I would agree.

However, that misses the big picture as well. Choosing any tech today for the purpose of building games for Web is deciding a future course by the back-view mirror. Web, as it is today, is about a 500M connected, actively used devices market. Sure, more PCs have been sold, and about that many are sold both this and next year, but the total number of devices sold doesn't matter - the number of people using them for anything resembling your product (here, games) does. So, I'll put a stake in the ground at 500M.

In comparison - iPad and other tablets reach about 100M devices this year, and projections look like about as much more next year. I would argue that most of them will be used for casual entertainment, at least some of their active time. That makes tablet-class devices (large touchscreen, no keyboard, used on a couch or other gaming-friendly situations) a significant fraction of the Web market already, and that will only be growing going forward.

Mobiles are a class of their own. Several billion devices already, maybe about a billion of them smart phones, some projections claim another billion smart phone-class devices to be sold next year. Just by limiting the market to only those devices which sport installable apps, touch screens, significant processing power (think iPhone and Android devices, possibly excluding lowest-end Android and the iPhone 1.0 and 3G), you're still looking at a potential market of 1 billion devices or so. Now, phones are not in my book very gaming-friendly - the screen is small, touch controls obscure parts of it, play sessions are very short, the device spends most time in a pocket and rarely gets focused attention, and play can be interrupted by many, many things. Still, as we've seen, great games and great commercial success can be created on the platform.

However, lets not pretend that a Web game could ever have worked on either a tablet or a phone without significant effort, both technical and conceptual. The platforms' underlying assumptions simply are too different.

So, how would you go about choosing a technology for creating a game for the future, instead of the past?

The choices are:

Native, writing for iOS only. Decent tools, except when they don't work, one platform, though a relatively large one with customer base proven to be happy to spend on apps.
Native, writing for iOS and Android. Perhaps for Windows Phone too, if that takes off. Welcome to niche markets or fragmentation hell.
Native, but with a cross-platform middleware that makes porting easier. Still, you're probably dealing with low-level crap on a daily basis.
HTML5, if you're willing to endure an unstable, changing platform, more fragmentation, dubious performance, and frankly, bad tools. Things will be different in a couple of year's time, I'm sure, but today, that's what it's really like. I would do HTML5 for apps, but not for games, because that way you'll get to leverage the best parts of web and skip on the hairiest client-side issues. In theory you'll also get Web covered, but in practice, making anything "advanced" work on even one platform is hard work.
AIR, if you continue to have faith that Adobe will deliver. In theory, this is great: a very cross-platform tech, you can apply some of the same stuff on Web too, get access to most features on most platforms on almost-native level, performance is not bad at all, and so on. Except in practice HW-accelerated 3D actually isn't available on mobile platforms, its cousin Flash was managed to oblivion, and perhaps most crucially, Adobe's business is serving ad/marketing/content customers, not developers. I keep hoping, but the facts aren't encouraging. For now though, you'd base your tech on a great Web platform with a reasonable conversion path to a mobile application, caveats in mind.
Unity, if you're happy with the 3D object-oriented platform and tools. You'll get to create installable games on all platforms, but lets face it: you will give up Web, because Unity's plugin doesn't have a useful reach. Here, the success case makes you almost entirely tables/mobile, with PC distribution (in the form of an installable app, not a Web game) less than a rounding error. This is probably what you'd be looking for in just a few years time anyway, even if today it looks like a painful drawback.

Conclusion: Working on tools? HTML5. Web game for the next 2 years? Flash 11. Mobile game? Unity, if its 3D model fits your concept. AIR if not, though you'll take a risk that Adobe further fumbles with the platform and never gets AIR 3 with Stage3D enabled on mobile devices out the door. Going native is a choice, of course, but one that exceeds my personal taste for masochism.

On the upside, Unity is actively doing something to expand their market, including trying to make Unity games run on top of Flash 11 on PC/Mac, so in theory you might be getting the Web distribution as a bonus. Making code written for Mono (.NET/C#/whatever you want to call it) run on the AS3/AVM Flash runtime is not an easy task though, so consider it a bonus, not a given.

Where the chips fall - platform dominator for 2012

Osma — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:50:00 +0300

It's been about a year since I put my prognosis skills on the line and tried to predict where technology and consumer products are heading. Since today is National Fail Day in Finland, perhaps it's time to try again. Lets see how right or wrong I end up being.

Last year I noted a couple of things about mobile platforms and of the software environments best suited for creating apps on them. While this year has seen a lot of development on those fronts, little of it has been in surprising directions. HTML5 is coming, but not here yet. If WebGL and Intel's River Trail project were supported by the Big Three (IE, Firefox and WebKit, ie Safari/Chrome), that'd make an amazing game platform - but at least the latter is research-only at this point, and IE9 isn't going to support either. In the meantime, Adobe finished Flash 11, which now has hardware-accelerated 3D in addition to a pretty good software runtime, and, after only 10 days out, already has 42% reach for consumer browsers (at least judging by stats on habbo.com). Like I've said a long time, Flash gets a lot of undeserved crap due to the adware content created on it. We won't get rid of that by changing tech, and platforms should be judged by their capabilities in the hands of good developers, not by mediocrity. And, as far as mobile goes, the trend continues -- iPhone and Android battle it out, now also in courts as well as in consumer markets, while everything else falls under the wagon. If you're creating an app -- do it either with a cross-platform native toolchain, or with HTML5. If you're doing a game, do it with Unity or Flash, and build a native app out of it for mobile.

The interesting thing, to me, is playing out on the Internet. Google+ came out as a very nice product with well-balanced feature set, but (fairly predicably, though I was rooting for it) failed to catch the early adopter fancy for long enough to displace Facebook in any niche. Facebook, on the other hand, scared (or is going to scare) 40% of their audience by announcing Timeline (eek, privacy invasion!). Brilliant move -- you can't succeed today without taking such leaps that nearly half of your audience will be opposed to them, at least initially. Smaller changes simply aren't meaningful enough.

So, I'm betting on Facebook. I'd also guess that once they get Facebook Credits working outside of the Canvas, they're going to demand that any app using Facebook Connect log-ins will accept Credits for payment. I'd hazard a guess they're even going to demand FB Credits exclusivity. They'll fail the latter demand, but that won't stop them from trying it. Having your app's/game's social publishing automatically done by Facebook simply by feeding them events, and not having to think about which ones are useful to publish, is just such a big time saver for a developer, no one will want to miss out on it.

Not even Zynga. They're doing this destination-site, we're-not-gonna-play-inside-Facebook-anymore strategy, but continue to use Facebook Connect for log-ins. That's not because FB Connect is so much more convenient than own username and password (though it is), but because even they can't afford to let go of the "free" access to people's social network. That's the power of Timeline and the new, extended Graph API.

The chips are still in the air. When they fall, I think Facebook will be stronger than ever, but strong enough to displace the "rest of the Internet"? No. As a developer, I want to push Facebook the data for in-game activities, because that saves me time doing the same thing myself. As a publisher, I'm unsure I want Facebook to have all that info, exploiting them for their purposes, risking my own ability to run a business. As a consumer, it makes me uneasy that they have all that info about me, and while I can access and control quite a lot of it, I can't know what they're using it for. I don't think that unease will be enough to stop me or most other consumers from feeding them even more data of our lives, likes and activities. Still, they're only successful doing this as long as they don't try to become a gatekeeper to the net - nor do they need to do that, since they get the data they want without exerting control over my behavior. Trying to fight against that trend is going to be a losing strategy for most of us - possibly even for Google. Apple and Microsoft won't need to fight it, because they're happy enough, for now at least, to simply work with Facebook.

MVP is about proof of potential

Osma — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:16:00 +0300

Among the people I interact with, and in the places I frequent, a question that comes up a lot is "what exactly is a minimum viable product?". Perhaps that tells you something about me, but let me tell you something more, and offer one answer to the question.

Back at the end of the 90s, between preparing for having a great bash for the Millenium and various other activities of the sort, I was also learning how to apply the software skills I had acquired to some sort of purpose which would pay my bills. I ended up, to a large degree by accident, to spend about four years of the rise and height of the dot-com boom at what I to this day consider the best possible school for creating great Internet apps for end users: the Helsinki offices of Razorfish, then-legendary marketing, technology and management consulting agency, now simply a legend.

In those days, we would at times come across a situation in which a pitch for a project, a client relationship, or a business idea consisted mostly of what we called the "Photoshop application" - a web site consisting of screenshots of something that had not been built. Coming from a developer point of view, and being rather proud of the skills we had collected, like any 20-something developer is, we saw these as something to laugh at. It's just a bunch of screens, it doesn't do anything! Anyone could come up with that!

Now, in some cases that's probably true, anyone could have come up with that. They weren't all great. Some were, and I would grow to respect the skills and effort people who took design seriously would apply to coming up with both great interaction, and beautiful looks for software. These are things not to be underestimated, because impressions matter a great deal, and nothing kills a budding consumer relationship faster than a dead-end transaction flow. There's something more than that to designing applications on the screen level, though, and listening to a recording of Bill Gross (of Idealab) talking at Stanford reminded me of one part of it.

At the end of that talk, he recalls the story of Carsdirect, of giving the founder a small budget and 90 days to prove there's a business. In other words, to find out whether anyone would buy a car from this site, without talking to the dealer. Turns out that once they got the web site up, in the first day four people did just that - buy a car. They would have to go and buy them from local dealers themselves and deliver the cars to their first four customers. However, what was NOT important to proving the business opportunity was whether they would be able to form a dealer relationship with auto makers, figure out the logistics of car delivery up front, and so forth. For the four first customers, it was enough to drive the cars from the dealer's lot up to their driveway one at a time, by the founder!

This is the MVP - the minimum viable proof of business. The front-end of a business is where value is delivered. Sometimes you can prove that with just by showing Photoshop images of the service to prospective customers. Sometimes you need to have a prototype site up that looks and feels like a real business. What you will not need is to figure out the supporting processes, back-end business logic, and a whole partner value network to prove business potential. Sure, those are things that you will need to figure out to turn a profit - but without the front-end facing the customers and acquiring sales, there's no revenue, there's no business, and there's no chance of profit, never mind how wonderful your back-end would be.

Looking back, I'm not sure I knew this back in the days. I was lucky to have people around me who did. Today, I still see a lot of people thinking of future businesses worry about the back-end processes before they've figured out whether there is a front-end business. Tackle the front-end first. Sometimes Eric Ries's "spend $100 on Google AdWords and see if you get any clicks" is enough to do that, sometimes you do need a web site resembling a real service. Do not waste your precious runway building out something to support even the first 10 customers through the entire product delivery before you have one customer, though! If you get even one customer, you're learning a ton about how your next product version is not what you though it would be.

Zynga's ARPU doubling? Not quite

Osma — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 17:20:00 +0300

Apparently today the pundits and analysts around have come up to reviewing Zynga's ARPU figures from their S-1 filing (Inside Social Games, Eric von Coelin). Something seemed fishy in these calculations, and since I'm home for a day, I had the opportunity to review the filing figures on a computer, rather than just a tablet. Yep, people, you're comparing apples to oranges. Zynga's monetization rate is improving, but it's nowhere as dramatic as you're making it look. Did you already forget, they defer revenue? You can't compare GAAP deferred revenue to non-deferred DAU/MAU figures! Use the bookings data instead.

This is what the S-1 filing states about the difference:

"Bookings is a non-GAAP financial measure that we define as the total amount of revenue from the sale of virtual goods in our online games and from advertising that would have been recognized in a period if we recognized all revenue immediately at the time of the sale. We record the sale of virtual goods as deferred revenue and then recognize that revenue over the estimated average life of the purchased virtual goods or as the virtual goods are consumed. Advertising revenue consisting of certain branded virtual goods and sponsorships is also deferred and recognized over the estimated average life of the branded virtual good, similar to online game revenue. Bookings is calculated as revenue recognized in a period plus the change in deferred revenue during the period. For additional discussion of the estimated average life of virtual goods, see the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations—Revenue Recognition.”

Zynga is of the opinion that bookings more accurately represents their current sales activities, and I fully agree. After all, this is not subscription business we're talking of! If you're as hard-core geek about these things as I tend to be, the description of when a booking turns into revenue is discussed on pages 62-63 of the filing:

"Durable virtual goods, such as tractors in FarmVille, represent virtual goods that are accessible to the player over an extended period of time. We recognize revenue from the sale of durable virtual goods ratably over the estimated average playing period of paying players for the applicable game, which represents our best estimate of the average life of our durable virtual goods"

That deferring means that during periods of rapid growth, ARPU monetization appears to decline, while on the other hand periods of flat or declining traffic would seem to improve ARPU, due to the recognition of earlier deferred revenue against current, not earlier userbase.

With these covered, what are the actual sales figures? The average daily Bookings to DAU rate is somewhat higher than the Revenue to DAU rate, at $0.051 (B) in Q1 of this year vs $0.042 (R). Both seem to have plateau'd on that level since growing from a year-ago $0.030 (B) / $0.017 (R). Respectable, but not earth-shattering -- and the growth, while impressive, isn't quite "more than doubled".

On software and design, vocabularies and processes

Osma — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 08:55:00 +0300

Having recently witnessed the powerful effect establishing a robust vocabulary has on the process of design, and seeing today the announcement of the oft-delayed Nokia N9 finally hit TechMeme front page, I again thought about the common misconceptions of creating software products. It's been a while since I posted anything here, and this is as good a time as any to do a basics refresher.

A typical axis of argument sets software engineering somewhere between manufacturing and design. I, among many others, have for years argued that the relationship of software to physical manufacturing almost non-existent. This is because while the development process for a new physical product, like any involving new creation, starts with a design phase, the creation of a specification (typically in the hundreds of pages) is where the manufacturing really only begins. The job of the spec is to outline how to make the fully-designed product in volume. In comparison, by the time a software product is fully-designed and ready to start volume production, there is no work left - computers can copy the final bits forever without a spec. There's more to that argument, but that's the short version. Creating software is the design part of a product development process.

So, goes the line of thinking, if software is design, then it must be right to always begin a software project from zero. After all, all designs start from a blank sheet of paper, right? At least, all visual designs do... No good comes from drawing on top of something else.

If this truly was the case, what do you think they teach in art schools, architecture departments, and so on? Technique? For sure, but if that was all there was, we'd still be in the artesan phase of creation. History? Yes, but not only that. An important part of the history and theory of design is establishing lineage, schools of thought, and vocabularies which can serve as a reference for things to come. All truly new, truly great things build on prior art, and not just on the surface, but by having been deeply affected by the learning collected while creating all which came before them.

Not having actually studied art, I have only a vague idea of how complex these vocabularies are, and this is an area where a Google search isn't going to be helpful, as it only brings up the glossaries of a few dozen to at most a hundred basic terms of any design profession. This is not even the beginning for a real vocabulary, since those describe to a great detail the relationships of the concepts, ways of using them together, examples of prior use, and so on. However, even from this rather precarious position, I will hazard a statement which might offend some:

Software design, in terms of the vocabulary required for state of the art, is more complex than any other field of design by an order of magnitude or more. The practical implication of this is that no new software of value can be created from a "blank sheet of paper".

This will require some explanation. Let's tackle that magnitude thing first.

Any complete software system, such as that running within the smart phone in your pocket, measures in the tens, if not hundreds of millions of lines of code. LOC is not a great measurement of software complexity, but there you have it. In terms of other, more vocabulary related measurements, the same system will consist of hundreds of thousands of classes, function points, API calls, or other externally-referable items. Their relationships and dependencies to each other typically grow super-linearly, or faster than the total number of items.

By comparison, the most complex designs in any other field are dwarfed. Yes, a modern fighter jet may have design specs of hundreds of thousands of pages, and individual parts where the specs for the part only are as complex as any you've seen. Yes, a cruise ship, when accounting for all the mechanical, logistic and customer facing functions together may be of similar complexity. And yes, a skyscraper design blueprints are of immense complexity, where no one person really can understand all of it. However, a huge part of these specs, too, is software! Counting software out of those designs, a completely different picture emerges.

None of these designs would be possible without reusing prior work, components, designs, mechanisms and customs created for their predecessors. Such is the case for software, too. The components of software design are the immense collections of libraries and subsystems already tested in the field by other software products. Why, then, do we so often approach software product development as if we could start from scratch?

Why was it that the N9 reminded me of this? Well, if stories and personal experiences are to be trusted, it seems that during the process of creating it, Nokia appears to have "started over" at least two or three times. And that just during the creation of one product.. As a result, it's completely different, both from a user as well as a developer standpoint to the four devices which preceded it in the same product line, and two (three?) years late from it original schedule. Of course, they did not scratch everything every time, otherwise it would never have finished at all. But this, and Nokia's recent history, should serve as a powerful lesson to us all: ignoring what has already been created, building from a blank sheet instead, is a recipe for delay and financial disaster.

Software is design. Design needs robust vocabulary and the processes to use them well, if it is to create something successful.

Nordic Game followup

Osma — Mon, 23 May 2011 11:04:00 +0300

A week ago Thursday, I gave a presentation in Malmö on Nordic Game Conference's second day on a couple of related topics, slides below. I spoke about the lack of truly social interaction in this generation's "social games", and reflected on what a social game where players actually play together looks like. As you might guess, Habbo has been a social playground for a long time.. 11 years, in fact. The slides themselves are, typically for me, a bit difficult to understand since they're mostly just pictures. You should've been there :)

True Social Games - NG11 - Slides

This is a top blog? Really? Thanks, I guess

Osma — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:00:00 +0200

So, apparently a media analysis company named this blog a "top Finnish tech blog" of February. I'm not really sure why, given I post here pretty infrequently, and the majority of my small readership comes from USA (26%, versus Finland 9%, UK 8% and Germany 5%). This is out of about 1000 monthly visits, most of which are coming via search engines to a few older, more reference-style posts like these about wireless sharing and RAID optimization.

The only post I made in February was a rant about about passwords. I wonder if it was that, or the previous posting about web identities which made them pick me on the list. I doubt either will be an influential post over a longer period, and certainly have not collected a massive amount of traffic since their posting. Perhaps it's just the fairly good search ranking some of those reference posts seem to have gathered. The list is a pretty random bunch -- F-Secure, a few daily/weekly gadget blogs, and a couple of relatively infrequently updated blogs sort of similar to this one.

But what does it mean to be named a top blog? Well, they've brought in 3% of the traffic since they released the list on Feb 28th. That gets them spot #7 on traffic sources to Fishpool.org, and 9% share of the hits to the front page. There were 10 individual articles in the archive that got more landing visits via references and search engines, though.

Thanks, anyway. I'll try not to have this influence my writing in the future :)

Update: 24 hours later, the tweet about this post has generated 3 times as much traffic as the top-10 listing has done in 2 weeks. I suppose posting this, I've donated more publicity, little as it has been, to Cision than they did to me - and I suspect that is the point of their blog listings in general.

Passwords are a broken system

Osma — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 10:34:00 +0200

..and I'm not even referring to the multitude of website passwords this time. I thought earlier OpenID would be the fix to those, but apparently not -- perhaps OAuth 2.0 and Facebook will be, though.

No, this time I'm talking of personal computer passwords. I don't have a huge amount of recent first-hand experience with how Mac and Windows work in this department, but the Linux/GNOME experience, connected to some presumably sensible company network access control, is certainly busted. Or, perhaps it's just me, and I'm doing something wrong - in which case, I would love to hear from someone who knows how to do this right.

I have:

an encrypted home/user partition on my laptop hard drive, for which I have to type in a password to get the computer to boot. Never mind that the operating system partition (which doesn't contain anything secret, since the OS is downloaded off of Fedora Project's web site) isn't encrypted, so the computer ought to be able to boot without the user partition password -- it doesn't. That's a separate peeve. This is password #1.
a password for my user account, since GNOME login facilities seriously under-appreciate using an account without a password. Never mind that I already proved who I am by typing in a password during boot - well, the last boot that was on average 19 days and 78 suspend-resume cycles and 42 laptop-bag trips ago. As far as I can tell, there is a valid reason for having this password, though I could imagine switching that to fingerpring recognition. Password #2.
a password for the GNOME built-in passphrase storage keyring, which automatically collects things like network WPA passphrases, ... well, that's about it, really, but anyway, it makes life somewhat bearable. Password #3. In fact, all that stuff is actually stored in a keyring with a very long random string as a key, and a separate keyring holds a copy of that, locked using the password #2 -- when things work. This is what is supposed to let me type in a password once, and have the system usable.
a password for my company account which lets me in to things like the intranet. One of many, many, many work-related passwords in various systems, internal and external (mostly external), which are infeasible to synchronize to one-time authentication at least today. This one is special though, because it's practically impossible to get any work done without it. Password #3 (I didn't count the one above, because it's not supposed to exist).
a KeePass keyring pass phrase, because the GNOME keyring a) doesn't have decent UI so it could be used for manually managed passwords b) because of above, there are many of those c) that I need to also use on other devices, so this keyring is synced to those devices. Password #4, for those who are counting.

That's just the start, but without these, nothing works. Now -- password policy best practices often say that passwords must be changed periodically, in order to ensure various guarantees of dubious value. I ask you this - what happens, when one of the above passwords must be changed?

As good as my memory seems to be with random alphanumeric strings of letters and digits, I simply can not maintain four of them in memory along with the credit card PIN, phone number PIN, VPN token password, GMail password, Facebook password, and so on an so on, if I'm supposed to also get any work done. Especially not if one needs to be swapped out to a completely new random thing every now and then. So, I do what any human would do: try to minimize their number.

Because I'm relatively security conscious, I don't do that by using the name of my childhood pet on every system from the most security sensitive to every second web site that appears to require its own password. No, what I do is try to use the same password in all five of the above cases, because a) they're all needed in sequence anyway, b) I can't do effectively anything without access to all of them. I still need to type it way too many times, but at least that keeps the memory fresh.

Except -- changing any one of those places doesn't change any of the others. Not even the supposedly-integrated 1, 2 and 3. So, I end up with 5 instead of 1, and I don't know which is which. New "enter password to keyring 'default'" dialogs pop up on my desktop, prevent anything else from receiving any keyboard input, accept nothing as a valid password, and prevent me from working for 45 minutes.

I did figure out how to solve it, though -- prevent GNOME Keyring from accessing the 'default' keyring (for which there is no typable password to begin with), force it to change its login password to the new login password, and then re-enable access to the main keyring with all the WLAN pass phrases and other assorted stuff. However, it still wasted a lot of time, and would probably have stumped anyone else I know (I'm pretty hard core with this crap, sad to say).

Broken? Yes. How to fix it? Hell if I know. Perhaps posting this rant would prompt the LazyWeb to point me in the right direction. Having to follow a 20-step routine to change one password isn't the fix, though.

Did common identities die with OpenID? No

Osma — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:56:00 +0200

About a year ago I posted here a summary of trends I expected would be relevant to our product development over 2010, and looking back at it, perhaps I should have put tablet computing on that list.. However, what prompted me to go back and look at it today was picking up on the news that 37signals has declared OpenID a failed experiment, and the related Quora thread I found. Wow, the top-voted answer there is one-sided. Here's what I think about it, to update my statement from a year ago. Comments would be welcome!

Facebook has established itself as a de-facto source of identity and social graph data for all but a few professional/enterprise-targeted Internet services. Over a medium- to long-term, it is still possible that another service or a federation of multiple services using standard APIs will displace Facebook as the central source. However, a networked, "external" social graph is a given. Majority of users are still behaving as if stand-alone services with individual logins and user-to-user relationships are preferred, but that's a matter of behavioral momentum.

This has not removed the problem of identity-related security issues, like identity theft. The nature of the problem will shift over time from account theft to impersonation and large-scale and/or targeted information theft. Consumers still remain uninterested and even hostile to improving security (at the cost of sometimes reduced convenience). Visible and wide-spread security scares are beginning to change the mindset though, and it's possible that even by the end of the year, at least one of the big players will introduce a "secure id" solution for voluntary access as a further argument for their services.

The spread of the social graph will have more impact to the scope of Internet services, however. Application development today should take it for granted that information about the users' preferences, friends, brand connections and activity history will be available and should be utilized (wisely) to improve service experience. The key to viral/social distribution is not whether applications can reach their users' network (which will be given), rather what would motivate the user to spread the message.

A last look at 2010... and what's in sight?

Osma — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 13:56:00 +0200

For a few years, I've tried to recap here some events I've found notable over the past year and offering some guesses on what might be ahead of us. I'm somewhat late on these things this year, due to being busy with other stuff, but I didn't want to break the tradition, no matter how silly my wrong guesses might seem later. And again, others have covered generals, so I'll try to focus on specifics, in particular as they relate to what I do. For a look at what we achieved for Habbo, see my recap post on the Sulake blog.

This time last year Oracle still had not successfully completed the Sun acquisition due to some EC silliness, but that finally happened over the 2010. It seems to be playing about how I expected it to - MySQL releases have started to appear (instead of just being announced, which was mostly what MySQL AB and Sun were doing), and they actually are improvements. Most things are good on that front. On the other hand, Oracle is exerting license force on the Java front, and hurting Java's long-term prospects in the process, just at a time when things like Ruby and Node.js should put the Java community on the move to improve the platform. Instead, it looks like people are beginning to jump ship, and I can't blame them.

A couple of things surprised me in 2010. Nokia finally hired a non-Finn as a CEO, and Microsoft's Kinect actually works. I did mention camera-based gesture UIs in my big predictions post, but frankly I wasn't expecting it to actually happen during 2010. Okay, despite the 8 million units, computer vision UIs aren't a general-purpose mass market thing yet, but the real kicker here is how easy Kinect is to use for homebrew software. We're going to see some amazing prototypes and one or two actual products this year, I'm sure.

In terms of other software platform stuff, much hot air has been moved around iOS, Android, JavaScript and Flash. I haven't seen much that would have made me think it'd be time to reposition yet. Native applications are on their way out (never mind Mac App Store, it's a last-hurrah thing for apps which don't have an Internet service behind them), and browser-based stuff is on its way in. Flash is still the best browser-side applications platform for really rich stuff, and while JavaScript/HTML5/Canvas is coming, it's not here yet. For more, see this thread on Quora where I commented on the same. Much of the world seems to think that HTML5 Video tag, h.264 and VP8 equate to the capabilities of Flash, that's quite off-base.

On the other hand, tablets are very much the thing. I very much expect that my Galaxy Tab will be outdated by next month, and am looking forward to the dual-core versions which probably will be good for much, much more than email, calendar, web and the occasional game. Not that I'm not already happy about what's possible on the current tablets -- I carry a laptop around much less already. An in terms of what it means for software -- UI's are ripe for a radical evolution.

The combination of direct touch on handheld devices and camera-read gestures on living-room devices is already here, and I expect both to shift on to the desktop as well. Not by replacing keyboards, nor necessarily mouses, but I'm looking forward to soon having a desktop made out of a large near-horizontal touchscreen for arranging stuff replacing the desk itself, a couple of large vertical displays for presenting information, a camera vision for helping the computer read my intentions and focus on stuff, and keeping the keyboard around for rapid data entry. One has to remember that things for which fingers are enough are much more efficiently done with fingers than by waving the entire hand around..

Will I have such a desk this year? Probably not. At the workplace, I move around so much that a tablet is more useful, and at home, time in front of a desktop computer grew rather more infrequent with the arrival of our little baby girl a few weeks ago.. But those are what I want "a computer" to mean to her, not these clunky limited things my generation is used to.

Notes on Samsung Galaxy Tab

Osma — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 15:46:00 +0200

Last week, I noticed Amazon UK had a pretty decent price on the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which I had already set my eyes on earlier - so order it I did. It's been a mixed bag of experiences over the week. I was hoping for a bit smoother ride. Now, to begin with, I'm a very satisfied Android user since getting a Nexus One last March - having gone through the experience of both Android 2.1 and 2.2, I'm eagerly awaiting 2.3 release. I've also been impressed by the Galaxy S phone, which I have not used as a primary device, but have played around with for a few days. I knew what I was getting into - having used a Nokia 770 back in 2006 and tried the iPad enough times to know Apple's limitations still don't jive with me, I knew the Tab would not be perfect, but it'd probably be useful. Also, I wanted something that would let me avoid carrying the laptop around quite so much.

The good

I like the form factor of the Galaxy Tab a lot. Never mind what Steve Jobs says, I think 7" is a brilliant compromise. It's big enough to work for an Internet terminal, just big enough to have a usable two-finger keyboard, and yet small enough to fit to a pocket. Not any pocket, mind you - but most mens' jacket pockets will do.

The doubtful

What's up with that dock connector? Galaxy S has a perfectly working micro-USB connector, and Tab would have been much better with one, as well. Sure, maybe they felt the 2W charging power requirement and micro-USB would not have fit together that nicely, but I'm sure there would have been better solutions. Also, while I don't really see the need for HDMI connectors on phones (the N8 micro-HDMI for instance feels more of a gimmick than something truly useful), on the Tab I miss it.

The build quality is good, but not great. Unlike the Galaxy phone, for example, there is a clear seam between the front face and the rest of the case. This sort of thing wouldn't even have been noticeable just a few years ago, but now it stands out.

Finally, I knew that the device is more "a phone" than might be expected from the form factor, due to Android 2.2 having been developed for smaller devices, but the amount of places the phone capabilities show up in is rather amusing, given it makes calls only with a hands-free attached. For example - why is there a call button in the web browser besides the URL bar?

The downright ugly

Update 3 weeks later: I took the hacker route (again!) and downloaded an alternative firmware to the device. Certainly not a task for the faint of heart, but after three failed attempts, it booted. Many of my previous issues are solved or at least greatly mitigated -- but my "this is not a consumer-friendly experience" assessment stands... Original critique continues below.

Given how much money Samsung has thrown into marketing this device, with every streetside filled with ads, it's nothing short of amazing how bad the packaging is. I don't mean the box - that was nice enough, but what appears on the device once you turn it on. Mine has the UK customizations, and other markets will probably see something slightly different, but... 1. a task manager widget that you'd expect on a developer prototype, but not in a final consumer version, 2. video examples consisting of trailers for last years' movies in low resolution and broken aspect ratios! I mean, The Dark Knight was a great movie, and I plan to watch it again, but I didn't need a YouTube clip to remind me!

That's all fixable by some customization. A consumer shouldn't have to, and it sets a horrible first impression, so I'm not surprised the device isn't quite selling as expected, but I was going to throw that crap away anyways. No, what really bugs me is that the thing is sluggish. It has a 50% faster CPU and twice the memory of an iPad, and at times that really shows in great performance, and then, out of the blue, it decides to wait 2 seconds before responding to anything, or show a blank browser window for 15 seconds when I try to load a simple news article. And no, it's not due to Flash - I disabled automatic Flash startup (equivalent to AdBlock, a standard feature in the Android browser).

Samsung has made quite a few tweaks to Android's UI to fit it better to the 7" screen. They've stayed admirably close to the already-good Android baseline (unlike some other manufacturers), and most of the UI changes are quite OK, but at the same time, it looks like they've bitten off a bit more than they can chew in terms of software development, and the amount of bugs affecting the usability is pretty high. I hope they'll be able to deliver 2.3 soon.

Speaking of 2.3, my Nexus One received 4 over the air software updates over the last week. It's still Android 2.2.1 build FRG83D though, and the only thing I've noticed has been the last letter of that build number changing). I wonder what's up with Gingerbread -- with this winter weather in Helsinki, I might grow tired of glög and gingerbread pretty soon :)

Fall 2010 consumer technology commentary

Osma — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 09:30:00 +0300

I know, no one probably cares or even will find out what I think of the technology scene, but hey, I have to keep notes for myself, so here's a copy for the benefit of you, my 700 monthly visitors, too. Hope you'll find it at least marginally useful :)

Yesterday's big news first, Apple backtracks on their ban of third-party developer tools, ie Flash, on the iOS platform. The timing is interesting, I certainly wasn't expecting it just at this moment, but in the long run it was always coming - Apple wasn't enforcing the rules against Unity and others, so they were just playing time, trying to convince developers to target native iOS instead of cross-platform tools. Well, that part of the game is over, and they handed out quite a lot of mindshare for Android. Now, consumers and developers alike are going to benefit from a pretty even game between several mobile and tablet device platforms with great apps on each. So, good news, all around.

The other drama unfolding over the year, at least from this Nordic perspective, has been Nokia's failure to respond to the competition. N900 was a disappoinment, N8 is late, Meego devices are slipping further (apparently not to be introduced in next week's Nokia World either), and so on. Then you get these brilliant analyses explaining Nokia won't use Android because that would mean loss of control. I'm sorry, what control? First Meego devices have been spotted, but not with a Nokia logo on them. No one else is doing anything interesting with Symbian, but that's not because of Nokia's control -- Symbian just isn't interesting. No, Nokia hasn't been in control of the only thing that matters, timely, focused development, ever since they hitched onto to the Symbian horse. Their process isn't one of software developers, and until they learn that, don't expect anything breathtaking out of Espoo. Sorry, guys, I would love to see you succeed.

Update: oh, this was a surprise: Nokia gets a new CEO from Microsoft, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo is out in a week. Nokia World just got interesting.

Still, as an application developer, Nokia remains interesting as long as they offer a compatible platform, thanks to their wide reach on the market. Unfortunately it seems even they have given up on supporting any older generation device, and have not heard the cries for less fragmentation, so my advice: for new software, S60 is as good as dead, and on Symbian^3, don't even look at Qt. Web applications are the way to go, and I keep hoping Nokia will pay up for Adobe to put AIR also on their devices. Having the same Flash-based, touch-enabled rich API and runtime on Android, Nokia, Palm, Apple and Blackberry would be the dream come true.

On the consumer side, tablets are coming even faster than I was expecting back in the beginning of the year. That'll be the hot electronics product for this Christmas, for sure. Homes were rapidly shifting from desktops to laptops for convenience of living room use when netbooks came along, but netbooks were in this uncomfortable corner between computer shape and mobile performance. Tablets are a MUCH better fit - convenient, one-piece construction, easy to pass around. Long battery life, enabling a full afternoon of entertainment. A UI perfect for casual interaction. Even easier to take along on a trip than a netbook. Plus, thanks to the simpler construction and mobile-inherited technology, they can even be cheaper than the folding/keyboard netbook form factor. Who doesn't want to have one? I'm even anticipating shifting my professional computing onto one (with all heavy lifting on a data center-hosted virtual desktop, of course).

Well, that's it for this morning - meetings call. Feel free to leave feedback!

LOGIN presentation on Habbo's Flash transition and player-to-player market

Osma — Tue, 11 May 2010 23:52:00 +0300

Had my presentation as one of the first sessions of this year's LOGIN conference. Darius Kazemi liveblogged the speech at his blog, and the slides are here. Best viewed together.

On rich web technologies

Osma — Sun, 02 May 2010 17:53:00 +0300

For the past week, the technology world has been unable to discuss anything but Apple's refusal to allow Flash applications on the iPhone and iPad, and Steve Jobs's open letter which paints this as a technology question and Apple's position as one of protecting consumer interests by ensuring quality applications. It would be incredibly naive to take that literally. No, of course it's all about business control.

Charlie Stross has written a great, if speculative piece on the bigger picture. I think Charlie is spot-on - Apple is seeing a chance to disrupt the PC market, and wants to finish at the top, holding all the aces. That might even happen, given how badly other companies are addressing the situation, but if it did, it would be anything but good for the consumer - or for the small developer.

The business interest

Apple today is a $43 billion annual revenue, $240 billion market cap giant, give or take. Out of that value, 40% or so is riding on the iPhone, and Steve is clearly taking the company to a direction where devices running the iPhoneOS will replace the Macs, so that share is only increasing. Right now, they have more resources to do this than anyone else in the world, and least legacy to worry about, given that despite the rising market share and the title of leading laptop vendor, computers running Mac OS X are still a minority market compared to all the Windows powered devices from a legion of other makers.

The company's DNA, and Steve's personal experience over the past 25 years has taught them that an integrated, tightly controlled platform is something they are very good at, but that earlier mistakes of not controlling the app distribution as well left them weak. They're not going to repeat that mistake. And certainly they'll try to ensure that not only do the iPhone and iPad have the best applications, but that those applications are only available on Apple devices.

Adobe, despite their history of dominating many design and content production software niches and a market cap of $18 billion, is tiny in comparison. Furthermore, the Flash platform is a visible but financially less relevant part of Adobe's product portfolio (though exact share of Flash is buried inside their Creative Solutions business segment). Even disregarding that Apple can, as the platform owner, dictate whatever rules they want for the iPhoneOS, Adobe símply can not win a battle of resources against Apple.

But this fight is not about Flash on the iPhone - it's about Apple's control of the platform in general. Whether or not it's true, Apple believes tight control is a matter of survival for them.

The technical argument

Apple wants to make it seem like they're doing this because Flash is bad technology. As I wrote above, and so many others have described better than I have, that's a red herring. It's always convenient to dress business decisions behind seemingly accurate technical arguments ("Your honor, of course we'd do that, but the tech just doesn't work!"). Anyway, let's look at that technical side a bit.

First, lets get the simple bit out of the way. Flash is today most often used to display video on web sites. However, this is not about video, and video has never been Flash's primary point. It just happened to have a good install base and decent codecs at a time in 2005 when delivering lots of video bits started to make sense and YouTube came along to popularize the genre. In fact, it was completely superior for the job compared to the alternatives at the time, such as Real Player. The real feature, however, was that Flash was programmable, which allowed these sites to create their own embedded video players without having to worry about the video codecs.

By that time, Flash had already gained somewhat of a bad reputation for being the tool with which some seriously horrible advertising content had been made, so the typical way to make the web fast was to disable Flash content - rendering most ads invisible. I'm pretty sure for many YouTube was the first time there really was an incentive to have Flash in their browsers at all. That is, unless you liked to play the casual games that already then were also often created with Flash.

But that's all history, what about the future? Adobe certainly needs to take quite a lot of the blame for the accusations leveled against Flash - in particular, the way Flash content slows a computer down even when nothing is visible (as in, the 10 Flash-based adverts running in a browser tab you haven't even looked at in the last half an hour), or that yes, it does crash rather frequently. Quite a few of those problems are being addressed by Flash Player 10.1, currently in beta testing and to be released some time in the next months. Too little, too late, says Apple, and many agree.

I would, too, except for the fact that despite the issues, Flash is still the leading and best platform for rich web applications. It took that position from Java because it was (and is) lighter and easier to install, and keeps that position now against the much-talked-about HTML5 because the latter simply isn't ready yet, and once it is, will still take years to be consistently available for applications (that is, until everyone has upgraded their browsers). Furthermore, it's quite a bit easier to create something that works by depending on Flash 10 than to work around all the differences of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and so on.

But that's exactly what Steve is saying, isn't it? That these cross-platform Flash applications simply can't provide the same level of sophistication and grace as a native application on the iPad. Well, maybe that's true today. Maybe it's even true after Adobe finally releases 10.1's mobile editions on the Android. And given the differences in the scale of resources Apple and Adobe can throw at a problem, maybe it's true even with Flash Player 10.2 somewhere down the road.

But that doesn't matter. What matters is what developers do with the tools given to them, because the tools themselves do nothing. There's plenty of horrible crap in the ranks of App Store's 200,000 applications, and there's plenty of brilliant things done with Flash and AIR. Among the best of the best, which platform has the greatest applications? That's a subjective call that I will let someone else try to answer.

I will say this: all technology is fated to be replaced by something better later. At least ActionScript3 and Flash's virtual machine provide a managed language that lets application developers worry about something else than memory allocation. Sure, it wasn't all that hot until version 10, and still loses to Java, but it sure is better than Objective-C. If we're now witnessing the battle for platform dominance for the end of this decade, I sure would like to see something else than late 80s technology at the podium.

The consumer position

Apple wants to provide the consumer a polished, integrated experience where all pieces fit together, and most of them are made by Apple. The future of that experience includes control of your data as well. Put your picture albums in Apple's photo service, your music library in iTunes, your home video on iMovie Cloud, and access it all with beatiful Apple devices. Oh, you don't want to be all-Apple? Too bad. That's what you get.

Or, you can choose something where you'll have choice. If you believe Steve Jobs, that choice is between dirt, smut and porn, but his interest is to scare you back to Apple, so take that with a grain of salt. Me, I've never liked being dictated to, so I'll be choosing the path where I can pick what I want, when I want it. Sure, it'll mean I'll miss some of the polish (iPhone is by far the nicest smart phone today, and the iPad sure feels sweet), but nevertheless, I respect my freedom to choose more. Today, it means I'll choose Android, and am looking forward to playing Flash games and using AIR applications on tablets powered by it.

A new lean software manifesto

Osma — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:10:00 +0300

This weekend saw Eric Ries's Lean Startup movement produce a conference on the approach. People who were there have already summarized and documented the proceedings in quite a detail. One of the interesting take-aways seems to have been Kent Beck's proposal for the evolution of the Agile Manifesto into something more applicable to the startup context of continuous learning and adaptation. Apparently, it has created quite a bit of discussion, but apart from the video recording, I haven't seen it being stated completely anywhere. So, it goes something like this (original waterfall comparison parenthesized):

As practitioners of software development to support lean business, we have come to realize that the unknowns of the business context are more critical to the success of the enterprise than the attributes of the software we create. As we learn this, we have come to value:

Team vision and discipline over individuals and interactions (or processes and tools)
Validated learning over working software (or comprehensive documentation)
Customer discovery over customer collaboration (or contract negotiation)
Initiating change over responding to change (or following a plan)

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

I hope I did not butcher some subtlety when extracting those words out of the keynote speech. Now, for my own view: there's plenty in the above statements which I can resonate with, but some bits that I find myself somewhat uneasy about. And no, it's not over the second point, which apparently has ruffled the feathers of quite a few software engineers (I'll let Steve Freeman explain that one).

The biggest issue I have is with the third statement, preferring customer discovery to customer collaboration. Not because that's not a great thing in some situations, but because it limits the applicability of this model to a tiny cross section of where the lean principles truly apply. Namely, it works great for a garage startup that doesn't yet know what its market really is. It doesn't work all that great for a business which already has customers, revenue, and even profit - yet such a business is still well served by maintaining a lean approach. Now, one may argue that a growth business will always need to continue to discover new customers, either similar to those it already has, or entirely new segments, and I will not disagree. Still, there comes a point where greater success comes from collaborating with your customers than from looking for new ones.

The second issue I have is with the first statement of preferring teams and discipline over individuals and interaction. Again, not because I disagree, but because I know there are many people who will interpret the word "discipline" as "lets set up processes, plans and approval mechanisms", and turn the whole thing back to waterfall. Successful application of the agile principles has never been as easy as the books and educators make it sound like, and the subtlety of the differences between the values of the first statement is, I think, the primary reason why.

Smartphone platforms comparison - a developer perspective

Osma — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:12:00 +0200

Having for years used Nokia phones, lately S60 phones of various generations, with a fair amount of experience of the iPhone/iPod Touch OS and lately having used both the Nokia N900 (Maemo OS) and the Google Nexus One (Android) devices as well, I can't avoid comparing these together. As a developer, I'm not really that interested in what they look like today, because today's devices are not what a developer needs to target for applications - rather, what can one determine of the platforms' future from looking at their past?

I can't make any comparisons to the Palm Pre (WebOS), Windows Mobile or Blackberry devices, since I have no first-hand experience of any of them. However, of the four platforms I know to some degree, not only is iPhone still clearly in the lead, but it looks to have the most predictable future as well. iPhone OS 3.1 no longer misses any significant functionality and has gained all the important bits without giving in on the level of platform polish, and the application market is humongous. Its only real weakness is the draconian control Apple enforces, and the crazy restrictions that results in. Those issues are well documented by a recent EFF post outlining the contents of the iPhone developer program contract.

The imminent launch of iPad is the first time the platform starts to experience any kind of real fragmentation in terms of a application development target. At this point that fragmentation looks like to be minimal - with the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad all sharing the same OS, same UI, practically same inputs and outputs and differing only by what networks are available for communication and what size the screen is, developers are not going to have a hard time at all in developing for all three devices.

That is quite unlike the situation on the other three platforms (Symbian, Android, Maemo). The fragmentation of the Symbian market is a matter of some notoriety. Basically, the same app will not work on phone models launched 9 months apart, or sometimes even on simultaneously launched devices, due to differences in the OS, let alone differences in the form factor, screen size, input mechanisms, and so on. With already two major revisions announced, this trend is only going to continue, and the base OS is already nearing 15 years old, if traced back to the first 32 bit EPOC it evolved from, though I believe the first S60 UI version came out in 2002.

Android is beginning to suffer from the same disease. Not only are the devices on the market each a running different base OS version with different features available to applications, but nearly all of them are also customized by their manufacturers or network carriers with little regard to compatibility (nor in fact could they have any regard for it, since none of them have any previous experience maintaining a platform). And of course each one has a different form factor. However, the most surprising feature of the platform (as a recent Nexus One user) is that even though Android is barely two years old, it already carries with itself a legacy of inconsistent UI controls. What exactly does one do with an indirect-control pointing device (a trackball) on a device capable of direct control via both a touchscreen and motion sensors? Why are the built-in applications (never mind those available on the Android Market) full of menus, "select an object and execute a function on it via a separate control" type UIs clearly inheriting baggage from the decade before touch screens, and other clunky hacks, when there's a rich base to copy from in the iPhone UI design library of 150,000 applications?

So, what about Maemo? I bought a few years ago the very first Maemo device, the N770 Internet Tablet. I've seen and played with every device since. All of them up to the N900 carried the same "windows and menus" baggage Android is suffering from, but the refreshed UI in N900 got rid of most of that. Not entirely so, but enough that I can state with confidence that the N900 UI is more modern, more designed for the touch screen than Android is. However, Maemo's weakness is that of a platform - there's none. Every version of the OS thus far (five iterations on the market) has broken compatibility with the previous. Now, that's to be expected and somewhat forgivable as long as it's in developers-only mode, essentially being beta tested. It's hard to call N900 a beta test any longer. What's worse, is that Nokia has publicly stated that the next device, whatever it's name, and regardless of whether its OS is called Maemo 6 or MeeGo whatever, is also going to be incompatible with the current one, and applications will require a re-write. This is no way to build a developer base.

So, what do we have to look towards to as application developers, trying to figure out what platform to target when working on our next mobile applications?

iPhone, a consistent, easy to use platform with a stable technical roadmap and little legacy baggage, but saddled with an unpredictable owner who's just as likely to deny you from doing business at all than to support you in it?

Symbian, full of legacy, and with a refreshed, incompatible platform to launch maybe next year?

Android, fast-growing, but already full of clunky hacks, and fragmenting faster than than anyone's seen before?

Or Maemo, approaching a state of polish but unable to maintain direction for the length of one device cycle?

I think we're all going to miss the days of Java mobile games development before this is over.

First thoughts about Balancion

Osma — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:15:00 +0200

I got an invite to the Balancion personal finance application beta a week ago, and have played with it somewhat since. I've tried a few similar tools before, ranging from the finance packages of the banks I've been a customer of, to a few desktop applications. Until now, I haven't been sufficiently impressed by them to continue using any for any significant period, but I think Balancion might be one to stick around for a while.

Balancion solves the two issues my previous experiments have failed at: first, it covers the entirety of my personal accounts (or very close thereof), because it isn't limited to just the services offered by one bank (the failing of Nordea's, Sampo's and OP's packages, at least the last time I tried them), and second, it doesn't force me to spend my evenings manually typing in boring details, thanks to its tools for downloading the data from the banks and other institutions. Of course, that's just table stakes for the game, really, but my previous experiences have shown even that much is not a given in a market the size of Finland. I would imagine larger market areas have had more focus on this type of stuff - American banks seem to advertise compatibility with Quicken or MS Money - or now with Mint, the hottest entry in the area. German banks apparently have a standard for transaction data exchange. None of that has been available to individuals in Finland.

What currently lifts Balancion above the table-stakes minimum is how it deals with "uncategorized" expenses. Other tools allow searching for similar historic transactions and categorizing all of them at once. Balancion applies that to the future as well, and learns to recognise more and more stuff as you go. Setting the books up for the first time does require a few hours of clicking around, but it gets less and less manual as time goes. That's what makes it a joy to use (as much as any financial application can be a joy, that is!)

At this point in the beta, it's a bit limited; just tracking income and expenses, plus a few (quite useful and informative) visualizations of the same, which already can be helpful in recognizing big expense areas and saving money. However, I'm looking forward to seeing more of the budgeting, expense management and investing tools in the service. It's pretty clear how this can develop and where the opportunities for the business lie. The crucial question is, how can Balancion add partnerships and cross-sell features while retaining the trust of the users. Thus far, their communication indicates they understand how important this will be to their success.

I'm not terribly happy about the way Balancion authenticates me, though. The email/password login is standard, though I'd prefer to use OpenID to avoid managing one more password. What really bugs me are the mandatory "security questions", which they require to be able to change the password. Such questions, especially since they were limited to two out of half a dozen pre-selected questions only reduce security (seriously, it does not take much investigating to figure out the maiden name of my mother). If this is what their security advisor Nixu truly has recommended to the team, I'm disappointed in Nixu as well. Anyway, I answered the questions with something random - so now I can't change my password at all. This probably was not what they intended.

For anyone interested in this category of services, I would recommend checking out the venture capital pitch presentation of Mint.com, the US equivalent of Balancion. If you want to try out Balancion yourself, ask me for an invite here in the blog comments or by tweeting @osma.