Questions UnAnswered
Some questions are better left unanswered
“How are you getting along with your new iPhone5", I asked to someone who recently switched to an iPhone5 from a Nokia. Out of the usual replies, he mentioned the lack of a communication centre. A place where I could go and see all my conversations. I agreed and said, “The problem is . .. the approach, it’s channel wise. So you pick the “Channel” first, e.g. “Messaging” or “Facetime” or even the “Phone” app then you select the connection(People). Whereas a better design would have been connection wise. Where you start from the connection, (Person in this case) and then you see ALL your conversations irrespective of the channel/medium with them”. I then told him about the “Smartr” app and their acquisition offers.
Our discussion further gave me a lot to think about. I won’t say Apple wouldn’t have thought of it or couldn’t achieve this.But under what situations this move makes sense for Apple?
The war for being your “GoTo” technology provider is not new to us. And the war has expanded way beyond our smartphones. They all want to provide solutions to problems that sometime dont even exist. Their biggest strength as well as the prize is their eco system. It’s kind of interesting as once quoted by Tim Cook, “Better(more) apps will result into more downloads which will again result into better(more) apps.” This is proven to be totally true, people are buying Smartphones, TVs, Gaming Consoles etc. based on the availability of their favorite apps. Nokia has been buying “Promoted Tweets” to urge a version of Instagram for a long time now. So, for app developers to be able to solve problems with better/more apps, Apple needs to “keep” those problems. Google provides a complete suite of apps for the iOS platform. Almost an operating system as people label them. They exist because of certain problems in the iOS (maps etc) but at the end of the day it translates into a win for iOS as I can experience Google apps without leaving the iOS platform.
What do you think? Are those problem left unresolved . . intentionally? Comment on . . .
