Recently in Mobile Category
Like the rest of the country, my last six months have been spent reading every bit of tattle that snuck out from Apple HQ about the iPhone. My biggest concern was that, as a Cingular customer the iPhone would be off limits to me until my contract was due for a new device. That I wasn't kept from buying this amazing new phone is the least heralded but one of the most significant impacts of Apple's entrance into the mobile phone market.
Before last Friday, if you wanted the latest cell phone you either needed to pay retail, know an importer from South Korea, or be eligible for the discounted price. The cell phone retail market is based on the idea of device price competition and price competition means discounts. Free. $29.95 with a two year contract. Get the phone and we'll throw in a pretty case. These gimmicks enable the authorized retailer to unload his or her inventory of devices and take their cut of your contact with the big cell provider.
In this market, the manufacturers are largely cut out of the process and their hard-fought brands are undermined. The Motorola RAZR is a perfect example of this cannibalistic process. Three years ago, the RAZR was hot. It was a new sexy product that everyone wanted. More importantly, an increasing number of people were willing to pay a premium for a slim sexy device that didn't do more than the average phone.
As quickly as it came on the scene, the glamorous RAZR fell from its perch. It became available on almost every network and they began competing with each-other to see who could offer it for less. In no time at all the RAZR was being given away for free. Its cachet was gone.
The RAZR came out of nowhere for Motorola and they have since failed to understand what happened to them. Subsequent devices have lacked that special something. The "Q" fell flat. The KRZR, and its unpronounceable brethren, barely registered. Now Motorola is planning a RAZR 2 in a desperate attempt to resuscitate their brand.
My point is that Motorola's predicament is not entirely their fault. It is that they cannot exert enough influence on sellers in the marketplace to hold a price point that will keep people coming back for more. They design for glamour and end of in the discount bin.
Apple realized this and forced At&t to play nice. Instead of presenting the customer with two prices, full retail and the discounted contract price, Apple brought the iPhone to market at one price: retail.
This move prevents the kind of death spiral that killed Motorola's brands. But it also does one more thing: It let's people like me buy iPhones.
Because retail is the only price offered to everyone, anyone is able to purchase the device. This matters because it allowed not only me, but literally everyone I know to either buy or try to buy an iPhone. That's why they sold out all over America last weekend. No matter how good the iPhone is, and it is amazing, it wouldn't have sold half as well if all the early adopters were penalized for buying one.
The mobile web isn't coming, it is already here. I use the web on my cell phone every day to check headlines from the New York Times, use Google Maps to get directions, check e-mail, and post to Twitter.
With the explosion in mobile web applications comes a new problem of domain name conventions. To solve this problem, a new top level domain (TLD) has been created. You can now buy your domain all over again as a .mobi to supplement your .com. But what if they don't match?
This issue hit home with me tonight as I logged in to Bank of America and learned that they now offer mobile access to banking information. This presents the challenges of the mobile web in stark relief. Here you have data that you want to access on the go (your current checking account balance) paired with information that you don't want to leak out at all costs (your checking account number).
As a user, I want the convenience of mobile access to secure data to be ensured with absolute trust or else it isn't worth the risk. I clicked to "learn more" and was shocked by what I saw. Instead of directing me to visit a familiar bankofamerica domain, it instructed me to give secret account information to www.bofa.mobi.
I am a savvy web user who shops online without fear of credit card theft and complete most of my banking transactions online. Yet this domain name switcheroo made me uncomfortable.
bofa. Really?
This got me thinking about the other mobile sites I visit. To see The New York Times on my phone I visit m.nytimes.com. To find picture from my friends I go to m.flickr.com. The same m. approach is also used at YouTube, Yelp, and Twitter.
.mobi is sold as a domain designed exclusively for the mobile web but companies need to be careful with this new TLD. Bank of America undermined the trust I have in their web site by switching domains on me. Visiting bankofamerica.com feels the same as walking into a branch. This is hard-earned trust. bofa.com lacks gravitas, it sounds like a link I would see in my spam folder. Oddly enough, Bank of America appears to also own bankofamerica.mobi. Using m.bankofamerica.com might be more useful to them than throwing money away on .mobi domains.
With the iPhone coming many people seem to think that development of a version of the web exclusively designed for mobile devices is irrelevant. This doesn't seem right to me. First, most mobile users will continue to have devices that are phones first and internet devices second. As more and more "phone" users get web access, it becomes more important, not less, to think about how experiences can be designed for that context. Second, the iPhone itself encourages web development specifically for the iPhone. Apple's Safari web browser is being released for Windows under the pretext that web developers will want to make sure that their web applications work on the iPhone. The explosion of iPhone web apps since the announcement (and before the device is even available) speaks to the need for context in web interactions.
But for all of this to work we can't sacrifice the basics. Trust matters more than anything else. Let's learn from Bank of America's mistake and stick to the conventions. Your domain name is how your visitors know you. Don't confuse them with something else, just stick "m" on the front and go on about your business creating great mobile experiences.
Who is this guy?
