INNOBLOG

Well, one commenter wrote that my sentence-long analysis of Nokia's acquisition of Symbian in this post was too simplistic. I agree. Innosight Senior Partner Steve Wunker, who worked at Psion in the 1990s, had the following thoughts:

Ten years ago, a bevy of companies shocked the communications industry when they announced the formation of Symbian—a for-profit consortium that would transform the PDA software of Britain’s Psion PLC into a platform powering high-end smartphones.

Back then, these smartphones were gleams in engineers’ eyes (the first—Ericsson’s Project Pamela—was the size of a small book and never commercially produced). But, almost unanimously, industry analysts foresaw them taking over the premium tiers of the mobile market and requiring a common software platform for the third party developers who would create the applications that users would demand. At its peak in August 2000, equity markets valued Symbian at nearly $10 billion.

This week, Nokia bought out the remaining shareholders of Symbian for about $410 million, and immediately declared it would give away the software code to a non-profit Symbian Foundation.

Was this tumble because Symbian produced a bad product? Not at all. By most measures—system reliability, power consumption, etc.—Symbian’s mobile operating system is the best on the market.

Rather, the world changed in ways very few industry analysts expected. A decade ago, intelligent people reasoned that the processing power of the mobile would start catching up to PCs, and so people would start to demand PC-like functionality on their phones. Moreover, the mobility of the phone would lead to many unique applications being developed for this platform.

Read the rest on Scott's Harvard Business blog, Innovation Insights.

A Wall Street Journal article yesterday described how Android—a mobile phone operating system pushed by Google and more than 30 partners—is encountering some unforeseen difficulties.

These struggles aren’t actually that surprising. Chapters 5 and 6 of The Innovator’s Solution describe how pushing performance boundaries almost always requires that a single company control critical interfaces.

Google its partners are betting they can create a modular mobile phone operating system that anyone can pick up and use. They hope that Android makes it simple and cheap for third-party developers to encourage the use of the Internet on mobile devices, which will result in more advertising revenue for Google.

However, the Android team is still fine-tuning the operating system. Developers report being frustrated because they no sooner optimize an application for Android than the operating system changes. Getting a single Android-powered phone out the door for T-Mobile USA is sucking up almost all of Google’s Android-related resources.

Imagine how different it would be if Google was aggressively pushing its own phone forward (which it very well might be doing behind the scenes).

Read the rest on Scott's Harvard Business blog, Innovation Insights.

Lillian Zhao

When I first was told that Mocospace was getting VC backing in early 2007, I skeptically thought: “Who’s going to use another social networking site?!”

Eighteen months later Mocospace has grown to become the leading mobile social networking site in North America. With more than one billion mobile page views per month, it’s holding its own against incumbents like Facebook (which has more than 300,000 mobile page views per month).How did Mocospace become so popular?

What I didn’t realize when I first heard about Mocospace was that it has a powerful, disruptive business model that has successfully targeted a new distribution channel (the mobile phone) and a new customer base (non-consumers of existing social networking sites). This disruptive business model has propelled it to a leadership position in mobile social networking.

New Channel

Mocospace was one of the first to create a social networking site specifically designed the mobile phone. There is a subtle though distinct difference in how people use social networks on the PC vs. the mobile phone that stems from the basic differences between the PC and the mobile phone –- the PC is a static, multi-function device, whereas the mobile phone is an always-on, always-connected, communication device.

Mocospace realized this early on, and optimized its features for the jobs-to-be-done of a mobile phone user: instant communication, quick entertainment, killing time, and staying socially connected. Mocospace offers every type of communication (chat, IM, mail, messaging, micro-blogging and even voice-messaging) in one place. Other entertainment options include games, rating other people’s photos, watching videos, contributing to forums (my personal favorite are the ‘yo mama jokes’ in the jokes forum). Mocospace’s “friend finder” application also serves members’ job-to-be-done of meeting new friends and staying connected with existing friends.

Mocospace’s strategy is different from the incumbents, Facebook and MySpace, which emphasize content rich user pages and graphic-intensive applications –- all awesome features that work great on a PC’s screen, but are too cumbersome to navigate on the phone. As such, they’ve naturally chosen to use the mobile to extend a subset of their online features. However, MySpace’s initial strategy was to charge users an annual monthly subscription, shared with the carriers, to use their mobile site. That strategy was not overly successful and has now been de-emphasized.

In contrast, Mocospace’s site is extremely mobile-phone user-friendly, as all functions have been optimized for the small screen and numeric keypad input. For example, it leverages icon-based navigation and limits the amount of words and excess visual distractions per page. The results are clean, easy-to-navigate pages.

Meeting the needs of nonconsumers

Mocospace’s functionality serves the jobs-to-be-done of a previously untapped market: nonconsumers of existing social networking sites designed to be accessed on the PC. A large portion of the US population doesn’t have constant, private access to a PC with a broadband connection, for a variety of reasons that could include on-the-go lifestyles, economic limitations, and/or remote locations. However, most of these users have a mobile phone. Some use unlimited data plans from carriers like Leap Wireless and MetroPCS, in lieu of a PC. This eclectic group of urban youth and mobile workers were the early adopters of Mocospace. They didn’t have PC access 24/7; but they had mobile access 24/7.

While Mocospace has clearly done extremely well to date as a mobile social networking site, I still wonder if it can sustain its leadership position. Despite impressive monthly growth, will it be able to continuously grow its user base to solidify its dominance in the mobile social networking sector? Or will incumbents Facebook and MySpace, or even a new start-up, take the mobile lead away from Mocospace? If so, how will Mocospace’s strategy’s change?

Time will tell. And, I am scheduling an interview with the founders of Mocospace soon, and I'll be sure to ask about these issues.

Watch for the “Voices of Disruption” interview with Mocospace co-founder, Justin Siegel, in the July/August edition of Strategy & Innovation.