Data usage on smartphones delivered mostly by Wi-fi

By 2015, Juniper analysis predicts that 63% of data will be delivered to smartphones by wi-fi and femtocells versus over the mobile networks (here's Silicon.com's Cheat Sheet on femtocells).

The quantity of data required will be 14,000 Petabytes (1 Petabyte = 1 million Gigabytes). This is an eye boggling amount of data - equivalent to 18 billion film downloads or 3 trillion music tracks. This is 'chunky' - Apple recently purchased 12 Petabytes of data from Isilon Systems, rumoured for video storage for iTunes.

There are two opposing effects here in mobile data:

• users using wi-fi for browsing / increased wi-fi penetration
• fixed to mobile substitution - ie people pitching their fixed line data connection for all mobile data connection

So the net effect is pretty big data chomping, but not as bad as mobile world feared some time ago.

Your local personal info bubble - kinda

I originally discovered Bump Technologies via a BBC article entitled 'Business cards side-lined by digital contact revolution'. The article sited an example of two people meeting and 'bumping' their phones to share a business card with each other (ie physically bumping their phones together).

Intrigued, given that the concept was close to my own start-up of some years ago, Midentity, I researched bu.mp at little further: Bump provides the ability to share information within a local physical place, completely ignoring all the connectedness on a smartphone: 3G (or 4G even), Wi-fi etc.

Or so I thought.

In reading their FAQs, Bump appear to provide the most complex solution imaginable.

• Step 1: The phone (fitted with an accelerometer ie senses movement) senses that it has been 'bumped'
• Step 2: Phone sends what's being shared (a contact profile, photo, proposed business meeting etc) to bump's servers.
• Step 3: The matching algorithm listens to the bumps from phones. This calculation includes the location information (you need to turn on your GPS in order for this to work) and characteristics of the bump event (whatever that means!).
• Step 4: For exchanging contact information (and possibly other data types), confirmation is required by sender + receiver before info can be exchanged.

The FAQs state that: If you are bumping in a particularly dense area (ex, at a conference), and we cannot resolve a unique match after a single bump, we'll just ask you to bump again.

Boy, doesn't all that sound complicated? What about turning on Bluetooth and waiting for a particular file and auto-accepting it?

So is your local personal info bubble? This is a concept I remember excitedly chatting about in San Diego with Mark Bowles, the founder (perhaps co-founder??) of Staccato Communications

Sidenote: Artimi, a high-profile company based here in Cambridge doing Ultra Wide Band, merged with Staccato to become Veebeam)? 

Well yes, but given the complexity, to quote Spock, "but not as we know it, Jim".

User Centric Design

Over the last couple of days, I have been discussing a product feature with a  friend who runs a start-up in Silicon Valley.

On the subject of the finer details of the user process flow, there were a variety of opinions (are there always??).

I summarised, 'At the end of the day, there's only one opinion that matters, not Fred's / Bill's / James's, the user's opinion.'

This reminded me of the Practical Rules for Product Management. I repeat the ones relevant to user design here:

• RULE 8:  Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant.
• RULE 9: The building is full of product experts. Your company needs market experts.
• RULE 12:  The answer to most of your questions is not in the building.

Product Manager's Playbook

CPMN
The Cambridge Product Management Network held a interactive session entitled 'What a Product Manager does on the first day / week / month / quarter in their new role' on 24th March, 2011 lead by me, Arthur Meadows.

The session was attended by Cambridge's finest and highly experienced Product Managers and together, we built a 'playbook' of recommended steps / milestones for new Product Managers as they start their new role.

The results are available here, Product Manager's Playbook. Consider this to be a Product Manager's personal project plan.

BIG Hint: This answers that age-old interview question: 'What will do if we hire you'. Also, this follows nicely on from my article 'How to hire a Product Manager'.

Advertisers spend £1 in every £4 on the internet

The Internet Advertising Bureau in the UK (in conjunction with PriceWaterhouseCoopers) publishes its bi-annual advertising spend study.

Here are some headline figures that made me think:

• Online advertising’s share hits 25%, as advertisers spend £1 in every £4 on the internet. That represents £4 billion!
• Social media boosts online display by 27.5% on a like-for-like basis to £945 million. 
• There was nearly 200% surge in display advertising in a social media environment (on a like-for-like basis) and 91% year-on-year (absolute growth) in video formats. 
• Paid-search continues to perform strongly with growth of 8% year-on-year on a like-for-like basis to £2,346 million, representing 57% of total online spend (61% in 2009).
• Mobile advertising has experienced a 'staggering' 116% year on year growth (on a like for like basis), up from 32% in 2009. (Arthur: don't get excited, it is only worth £83 million, so 'staggering' is over egging it!)

Other stats

• By December 2010, the UK’s active online user base had grown to 40.3 million. 
• 47% of at home UK internet users access the internet with a connection speed of between 2Mb and 8Mb. 14% access online with a connection speed of over 8Mb. (Source: UKOM APS/Netview December 2010).
• Social networks now account for 25% of the time spent online in the UK. 

LinkedIn has 100million users

Congratulations to LinkedIn for punching through 100 million users recently. I received an email from Reid Hoffman, CEO, as one of the first million users (actually I was one of the first quarter of a million users) to say thank you for spreading the gospel in the early days.

Here's the blog post announcing the milestone. And here's a page full of stats on LinkedIn's members. For me the most interesting is 1.3+ billion connections between our members - clearly it depends on how you determine what a connection is (does it include a post in a Group for example?).

All good news when you consider that LinkedIn has filed for IPO in January this year. Key figures: Net revenue in the first nine months of 2010 was $161 million, with a profit of $10 million.

Cambridge Startup Weekend

I attended the Cambridge Startup Weekend over the past weekend.

Startup Weekend is an intense 54 hour event which focuses on building a web or mobile application which could form the basis of a credible business over the course of a weekend.

There was a huge amount of enthusiasm and excitement at the event for building products and businesses. Here’s the format:

1. 150 people registered to attend
2. On Friday evening, 45 (yes, forty five!) people pitched their idea in 90 seconds or less
3. Each attendee is given three votes to choose the concepts that they like
4. The top dozen ideas or so re-pitch to the audience
5. Each person in the audience then joins a team of their choice and starts
6. Mentors and grey beards are on hand to provide guidance

There were a couple of ideas that I liked – interestingly enough, two of these ideas received virtually no votes. Of the ideas that won through to the second round, I couldn’t see any that would really have any commercial viability. (I admit that I didn’t contribute any ideas of my own.)

What WAS really apparent was:

• All the companies need to start by concentrating on their business strategy first, before writing a line of code. From the judges’ questions, it was clear that this is what they were interested in.
• The intersection of technology and markets is the heart of Product Management’s role. This event would have been more commercially successful if there were more PMs knocking around. However, their presence would have deflated the enthusiasm of the budding entrepreneurs which is the exact opposite of the required outcome!
• Although, I arrived late at the adjudication ceremony and I didn’t get to see all the final presentations, it was interesting to see how the businesses morphed over the weekend.

In the end, I teamed up with a couple of PhDs doing digital identity from the University of Newcastle. See their announcement of Identity Deployment of the Year (IDDY) 2011 Award from Kantara. It was great because they brought me up to date on progress on DiD in the last 6 years that I haven’t been paying attention. I shared some knowledge with them about the early days of DiD.

Interestingly, not much has changed – the big problems in identity haven’t been solved. Many of the participants have changed their business model though. The industry body, Kantara, has taken over the mantle from Project Liberty - not quite sure why Liberty died.

User Experience Commandments

I was discussing some UI concepts with a buddy in California when I uncovered this gem of a site on Web Design: 10 Usability Tips Based on Research Studies.

Cameron Chapman refers to these as tips, but some of these are way more important: veritable commandments of interface design.

Here are my comments on these commandments / insightful advice or Tips that need clarification:

Tip 1: Forget the "Three-Click Rule" 
Old theory (well, 2001):

The idea that users will get frustrated if they have to click more than three times to find a piece of content on your website has been around for ages. 

Today's Common Sense:

The focus, then, shouldn’t be on reducing the number of clicks to some magically arrived number, but rather on the ease of utility...... - don’t let the arbitrary three-click rule stop you. 

Tip 2: Enable Content Skimming By Using an F-Shaped Pattern
Analyses the ‘Heat Maps’ of user attention. Either the ‘Google Golden Triangle’ - most clicks are in the top left and a couple on the right hand side (The right hand side is where Google makes their money, of course!).

Example of Google Heat Map

Looking at this heat map, one wonders why anyone puts anything on the lower right hand side of their side – I suppose to look balanced.

Jakob Nielsen, that guru of web design, whose own site now looks Neolithic in design discusses an F shaped pattern.


More on this research at www.useit.com/eyetracking.


Tip 3: Speed Up Your Website
Microsoft’s analysis on their search engine, Bing, showed a correlation between website speed and satisfaction, revenue generated per user and clicking speed.

To get a handle on your site’s availability and speed, I used Webmetrics (Arthur's tip: they have a free trial). See also this case study that I conducted with them on the impact of moving to the cloud on page performance. (Declaration of bias: I used to work for Webmetrics)



Tip 4: Make Your Content Easily Readable

people only read 28% of the text on a web page and decreased the more text there is on the page.

Tip 5: Don’t Worry About "The Fold" and Vertical Scrolling

Hmm, this research is incomplete in my opinion. Cameron links to better article: The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing.

In my opinion, content the above the fold must be interesting and engaging to warrant more browsing FULL STOP / PERIOD.

People would rather scroll down a page or two to find stuff, rather than having to click on yet another link and wait for another page to load.

So DON’T cram ALL your content above the fold on every page.

Example: if you have a long article to publish, it is much preferable to have the article all on one page, rather than break it across 3 pages. (Don’t you hate newspapers when they do this – it really hinders skim reading!)



TIP 6: Place Important Content on the Left of a Web Page



OK, this advice is correct, but again, doesn’t go deep enough. YES, put your important on the left (doh!), but web users have become so familiar with the 3 column model of websites that they zone in on the middle 50% of any website.

• Left hand column is 15% wide and contains navigation and then ads
• Middle column is 60% wide and contains the meaty content
• Right hand column is 15% and contains ads exclusively.

So, my advice is to focus on the first paragraphs in your middle column – we’re back to the F-shaped Pattern above.


Tip 7: Whitespace of Text Affects Readability

Some obvious advice and some less obvious advice – see the post for the details - I won't cut and paste someone else's content verbatim.


Tip 8: Small Details Make a Huge Difference

…..how removing a button and adding a clear error message to avoid user errors in a checkout process increased revenue by $300 million in just a year. The first month witnessed a 45% additional sales attributed to the revision of the checkout process.

If you’re a start-up, there are SOOO many ways to improve any given site. It’s difficult to know where to start-up – you just gotta plunge in I guess…..



Tip 9: Don’t Rely on Search as a Crutch to Bad Navigation
Search, in this context, means search within a site not Google / Yahoo / Bing. Doh - obvious



Tip 10: Your Home Page Isn’t As Important as You Think

People deep link to you and your site.

Therefore, a higher focus on landing pages versus your home page can get you more bang for your buck in terms of conversion and user-retention opportunities.

How to hire a product manager

Having come back to the UK from US (where Product Management is much more mature discipline), I have been saddened (and, on occasions, appalled) by the level of ignorance of non-Product Managers about Product Management.

Having seen some pretty 'shonky' job advertisements for Product Managers, I thought I'd better lay out some guidelines for everyone's benefit: How to hire a Product Manager.

Comments welcome!

NFC in phones by replacing the SIM only

SK Telecom from Korea has embedded NFC into the SIM card without requiring any chipset in the phone. At the moment, the technology can only read NFC signals, but can't broadcast them. From BBC: NFC tags could make phones wallets of the future.

Read and broadcast is coming apparently.

Q: What's the impact?
A: Well, you don't need a new phone get NFC, just a new SIM card, so the barriers to adoption are much less.

Next generation Computer Interaction - Kinect Hacks

Microsoft Kinect is an extra bit of gadgetry that you attach to one's Xbox that does some cool things: it recognises your voice and it recognises that your movements. For non-gamers (eg me!), then this is a step-up from Wii - you have to hold a Wii to do the same thing. Have a look at MS's
Kinect trailer).

Well, clever geeks have taken this on board and created some pretty cool computer interactions.



My favourite is the Swim Browser  (see the video), which describes itself as hands-free browser. (Translation: a browser that allows you to surf the web by waving your hands around). It was the winner of 2011 PrimeSense/OpenNI developer challenge, so err..., other people think it's good too.

I sense that we are only at the beginning of this....

Nokia lashes itself to Microsoft for its smartphones

Last week, Nokia, that doyen of phone manufacturing companies, lashed itself to Microsoft's Windows 7 phone operating system for its future smartphones. Nokia is in the midst of turbulent times. Stephen Elop, its new boss of 5 months, sent his staff an memo on 11th February warning them that they were standing on a burning oil platform and risked being consumed by the flames. The firm will also get a new operational structure and leadership team, more of whom will come from outside Finland, aka ‘de-finnistration’.

In 2G and 2.5G phone era, Nokia were all conquering: they perfected the 'candy bar' phone and made an elegant user experience, built on sound technology. As users ventured beyond calling and texting to surfing and dedicated applications, this design started to creak. The advent of touch technology really demonstrated that Nokia had lost its golden touch.

Further details of the partnership: Microsoft's Bing will power Nokia's search services, while Nokia Maps would be a core part of Microsoft's mapping services.

On reflection, this announcement isn't too surprising. Stephen Elop formerly head of Office Products at MS was recruited as Nokia's CEO 5 months ago. He will have the historical and cultural capabilities to make this marriage work.

The tech press have been making a big deal of this announcement. But let's not forget that Nokia still makes about one third of the world's phones and remains extremely powerful in the developing markets of the world. Any phone manufacturer would be delighted to swap places with Nokia.

This isn't a company in crisis, but it does need a kick up the pants. Phone manufacturing today is much more about providing the building blocks for an ecosystem and less about filling the end-to-end solution with single solution technology.

In this respect, I think that, of the two front runners in the smartphone battle, iPhone and Google's Android, Android is better positioned, as Apple remains draconianly closed. However, I do believe that Apple will open its iOS to a greater degree within 18 months' time. RIM's Blackberry remains in trailer in the race and will most probably remain niched in the enterprise market.

Microsoft are likely to be VERY pleased with this new relationship. Historically, it has spent colossal amounts of money on mobile development, with little real traction. Access to this mobile giant (I refuse to call it a dinosaur yet) will bolster its credibility.

However as Rory Cellan-Jones writes in the BBC news story:

The cruel verdict from some is that two turkeys don't make an eagle .... This is a huge moment which could shape the future of an industry.

However what did make me sit up and think was the Economist's analysis (Nokia falls into the arms of Microsoft) and the analysis below of market share vs profits (source is credited to Asymco)



Incumbents are receiving a battering from Apple (particularly Nokia), which is fleecing the profits in the industry. We're likely to see an increasing number of partnerships and acquisitions to counter the Android + iPhone duopoly. I believe it also augers the end of European telcos doing handset manufacture.

One nagging thought: what are the implications for Japanese highly advanced mobile technology, now that the ecosystem battle has superseded the device wars??

Product Management in small technology companies

CPMN
Last month's Cambridge Product Management Network monthly meeting was a gem. Rob Davis gave an excellent presentation on Product Management in small technology companies (click this link to see slide deck).

What made it really interesting was that Rob distilled 10/15+ years experience in embedded software, hardware + software and purely software.

Key lessons learnt:

• Be brave
• There's more than one way to skin a cat
• Just do it

Key Influences:

• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
• To / Who / We Provide / That / Unlike / Our Solution Question & Answer methodology
• Getting Things Done
• PresentationZen by Garr Reynolds

An excellent 'So what' Question and Answer methodology for Product Managers to keep in their heads at all times:

• To: Description of market segment
• Who: Have a particular set of characteristics
• We Provide: Name / Description of Product
• That: Yields specific user benefit / user function
• By: My customer implementing what steps or processes and paying what money
• Unlike: Competitors' offering

Next month's presentation on Pricing should be excellent - see you there!

iPhones are for dirty sluts

The Register, as well as being an excellent source of tech news, occasionally has amusing, well-written articles.

So this article, NY hookers cross street from Craigslist to Facebook, talks about a study by sociology professor (!!) that undercovered that Facebook has become the primary social software service now that Craigslist has shut down it Adult Services section last year.

However, the gem in the story is the reference to the value of the Blackberry brand.

This symbol of professional life [ie owning a Blackberry] suggests the worker is drug- and disease-free," Venkatesh [aforementioned Prof] explains. 

The article notes that:

Of prostitutes that own a smartphone, 70 per cent have BlackBerries while just 11 per cent own iPhones.

El Reg readers display their sense of humour in the comments on this story.

Contactless payments coming to the UK in the summer 2011

Near Field Communication is the swipe 'n' go technology that enables the ticket payment at the London Underground's barriers via the Oyster card.

Everything Everywhere is launching contactless payments in the UK this summer in collaboration with Barclaycard - see press release. The Register has some of the details of the technology - UK proximity payments by phone this summer.

Retailers that have signed up are: Pret a Manger, Little Chef and the Co-op amongst others. Obviously, this requires special terminals in store to make happen. AND this will require special chips in credit cards (and phones - more on this later on in this article) to work.

In short, in order to make all this work, lots of players have to have signed up to the concept and make a lot of investment.

• Firstly, the credit card providers have been shipping replacement cards to their customers with an embedded contactless chip. There are now 11.6 such cards according to this article from the BBC - Orange customers of Everything Everywhere get mobile payments.
• Secondly, credit cards with a pre-pay facility have helped. I find it amazing that pre-pay credit cards have take so long to come onto the market. Not sure why it has take so long - any comments anyone??
• Thirdly, retailers need to make the investment in the terminals in-store.

So quite an ecosystem..... coming up next, embedding the contactless chips into mobile phones - the long awaited m-payment revolution. But wait, contactless payments via mobile phone is a commonplace transaction in Japan.

The last time I visited Japan (5 years ago), a friend lent me an Suica-enabled phone, which allowed me to swipe through Tokyo's subway - fantastic. I'm told that if you wish to pay for something in a newsagent's in Japan, then Johnny Foreigner will be one of the few people that pays for sweets, cigarettes, etc with coins and notes, whereas the natives will be using their phones.

The mobile environment in Japan is very different to GSM world: the operators are tightly integrated with the handset manufacturers. Financial Regulations permit operators to run pre-pay services for services other than calling, texting and accessing content on their mobile phones.

Back to Europe...
Pan-european mobile payment system, Simpay, failed in June 2005 (see Simpay halts mobile commerce project). There are a number of reasons for this, but mainly it was the inability for the ecosystem to coalesce around the concept.

This time around, competitive pressures are MUCH stronger. Apple, with its App Store, has shown the consumers will buy goods via their handsets and have done VERY well to cream off lots of profit from these transactions. The operators are very unwilling to surrender this potential revenue stream to a handset manufacturer - particularly Apple - that really turned the screws on UK Operators when it launched in this country - see O2 wins Apple iPhone deal - at a hefty price (from September 2007).

Also, Kenya's MPESA, a mobile wallet, has been an outstanding success - see this nice story from BBC.

My unbreakable rule of software releases

A company that I follow (unnamed, to protect the hard working!) posted this tweet on Friday lunchtime:

v3 is very close to being released, before the end of today, just not sure which time zone ;)

This reminded me of my own unbreakable rule of software releases, which those that I have worked with will tell you, I have broken on occassions:

Never after 3pm and never on a Friday and never, ever after 3pm on Friday.

Towards the end of any work day, then emotionally, there's a huge push to get this d*mn release out the door. This is the time when you slack off: you turn a blind eye to some bug-ette which (you know in your heart of hearts) could be a show-stopper; or you skip over a technical check during the launch process - the type of check that has never previously been a concern, but today, because someone else took a little shortcut elsewhere, this issue just catches you.

Friday is even worse, because you just don't want the prospect of release hell hanging over the weekend and to really drain morale on Monday morning.

My advice: JUST DON'T DO IT - it can most probably wait until the morning / Monday, when:

• everyone is refreshed
• everyone has had some time to mentally run through some scenarios that may have gotchas in them and to validate one last time.

My own scars
Yep, I have the scars of Friday release at 4pm. It was a stressful release that got pushed from the previous day. We were hard at it and finally released the shiny new version in the late afternoon. We hung around and checked and validated until 6.30pm. Then we went home. I checked on it again at 8pm that evening. Checked on it on Saturday late afternoon - all appeared fine, but the stats looked a little out of whack. Hmm, I thought, well, perhaps the boys changed something - I'll ask 'em on Monday.

Monday morning rolls around. The CTO has noticed the stats immediately, digs around and discovers the registration server had run out of disk space and had fallen over: no user could register for our service over the weekend. UGH!!!

Footnote
Another big disadvantage of doing a release out of office hours is that within your partners and hosting providers etc, etc, you run into the 'second line' problem. The weekend / overnight staff aren't generally as skilled or as quick (nice, big, sweeping statement here!) when you really need their 'first line' players (an ice hockey term) to sort out the problem quickly for you.

My number one software mantra

If you want it real bad, you'll get it real bad.

This was told to me by the Manager of Documentation (hmm, you can tell how long ago that was, by the title), when I was a young tester in Dallas, Texas.

(It sticks in the mind better, if you imagine it said with a Texan drawl!)

There are only 12 Kinds of Television Ads in the World

In 1978, Donald Gunn, the creative director for the Leo Burnett, the advertising agency took a year's sabbatical and studied the best television ads he could find.

He determined that all ads fall into the following categories:

Demo ad:	Visual demonstration of a product's capabilities
Show the need or problem:	Demonstrate the problem and then show the remedy (eg a dropped mobile phone call)
Symbol, analogy, or exaggerated graphic:	Same as (2), but the problem is a feeling, so the problem of pounding headache is symbolically represented as a drummer pounding a bass drum.
Comparison Ad:	Compares product with competitors
Exemplary story:	A short narrative is played out, which illustrates the product's benefits (Jenny's school play is tonight, but there's a stain on her costume. What will mum do?)
Benefit causes story:	Shows a series of scenarios all because the central character adopts the product
Testimonial:	'I had that problem until I used brand X'
Ongoing characters and celebrities:	the use of a recurring character, or celebrity, can help cement a brand's identity into the viewer's brain. eg the Energizer Bunny
Symbol, analogy, or exaggerated graphic:	Same as (3) but it demonstrates the benefits of the product (rather than the problem)
Associated user imagery:	People achieving brilliant things all because they use this product
Unique personality property:	A pitch from the founder or endorser (eg James Dyson for vacuum cleaners, Remmington for electric shavers)
Parody or borrowed format:	The use of the product is parodied, so that the product is tied to parody. The ad relies on the user understanding the parody

Original article by Seth Stevenson at Slate.com. Go to the site for examples of each ad.

Sports stars twittering – common sense anyone

The BBC last weekend discussed Twitter in the context of sports stars and footballing brands. Twitter ye not?

As with any new technology, it has a cycle of early adoption by individuals who understand on how to capitalise on it, some initial success stories. Then others adopt the technology and after some time, use it inappropriately (more likely naively). There’s a fall out which attracts the attention of the authorities – in this case the Football Association who manage football in the UK. 

Ignorance of the technology terrifies authorities and they try and shut it down. Attitudes like this below (from BBC's website) aren't helpful: 

QPR manager Neil Warnock has subsequently banned his players from using Twitter to talk about club matters.

"I've had a word with the lads about this: they can use Twitter all they want as long as it has nothing to do with the club," Warnock told the Fulham Chronicle.

The ability for individuals to openly publish has been around for a long time, twitter is an easier way to do this from a mobile device.

Fortunately, the FA would appear to have a mature view on the subject: 

It is understood the FA sees social media no differently to other public forums and has strict rules on alleging bias or questioning the impartiality of officials. 

I hope (and assume) that all new players receive induction about publicity, speaking to the public and the press and have clauses in their contract which talk about bringing their club and game into disrepute. Clearly, players want to establish their personal brand, but they play for a team and represent the sport. 

The FA’s policy towards twitter is (and should be) exactly the same – nothing wrong with a refresher on policy and also nothing wrong with having a PR refresher with the players, encouraging them to adopt the technology and how to use it to their advantage.

App Store - a concept not a brand

According to the The Reg, Microsoft disputes Apple's 'App Store' trademark.

I have gotta agree with MS here.

Without doubt, Apple own the most famous 'App Store'.

Others exist of course: handset manufacturers building ecosystems around their devices. Indeed, I recall some ecosystems trying to collaborate together to make their apps deployed on one ecosystem simple to deploy on others. 'Write once, run anywhere' mantra. (Can't find the link at the moment.)

The elephant in the room is Microsoft. They have Microsoft Marketplace which seems to have gone through an evolution or two, according to Wikipedia.

In 90s, surely this could have been the mother of all App Stores, as Microsoft could have leveraged its incredibly powerful developer network to promote developers' software to each other and the world.

Heck, the thing could have had virtual currency with:

• e-commerce store for all apps that ran on MS platforms
• developers purchasing software components from Microsoft and each other (Indeed it could be possible that MS could defer licence fees for developers purchasing its software until the software made money on the e-commerce store)
• advertising
• reviews + forums
• ....

Perhaps this existed and I missed it or perhaps MS missed the elegance of the concept completely, but I bet Microsoft are kicking themselves for not building a really solid wall to nurture their developer community.