Mobile Meditations

We are feeling pressure to enter the mobile space. Everyone else is doing it, so we should too.

As a parent, I tell my daughter that "everyone else is doing it" is not a good enough reason to do something. But as an IT business, we find that our customers sometimes cannot evaluate us on our own merits. Instead, they need proxies to help them decide if we are good at what we do.

Proxy evaluation is sometimes hard to avoidable: I don't go into the kitchen to assess a restaurant; I look at the menu, I assess the ambiance, I rely on word-of-mouth.

So I understand the well-meaning advice that we have to enter the mobile space, to make some of our customers comfortable that we are keeping current and that we are still good at what we do. I understand that more and more people seem to rate a technology company by acquiring that company's free smart phone app and trying it out.

I have even decided to take this piece of advice and to put a mobile app or two on the docket for calendar 2012. I have also decided that discussing this decision will give insight into how we make decisions about what we do and how we do it. This will also serve as an example of an issue that is common in our practice: when something seems obvious at a high-level (create a mobile app!) but is actually quite unclear at the level of action (what kind? how fast? how expensive?)

Specifically, entering this arena raises a number of questions:

• What is the goal?
• marketing
• remove a negative (reassure customers)
• revenue
• demonstrate competence in this field
• What kind of app?
• client for a server? eg Facebook app is a UI to their server
• native app? eg native camera app
• combination? eg some games with a multi-player option
• What business model?
• free? (loss leader, eg banking app)
• freemium? (give away something, charge for more)
• for-profit? (straight up product)
• For which platforms?
• IOS only?
• Android only?
• Both IOS and Android?
• stand-alone, Wifi, 3G/4G, some combination?
• smart phone, tablet, both?
• What market?
• extend our product line to mobile?
• create a separate mobile app, perhaps an add-on to someone else?
• both?
• What development environment?
• native to target platform
• use a virtualization that runs on multiple environments

As our thought process matures, I will return to this topic to record how we decide and what we decide.