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Shampoo, Sushi, Snapchat, and Enterprise software are products we use, buy and sell. Retail stores, restaurants, smartphones and internet are channels are “channels” or “destinations” via which we consume, buy and sell products.
(Bear with me here. I am going somewhere with this.)
Products and channels are very inter-linked. More often than not, a lot of product development is defined and influenced by the channels to be used for their distribution and consumption.
For instance, traditional advertising companies built their advertisements (products) keeping TV networks (channels) in mind. Traditional tech companies like Microsoft built their products keeping desktops and browsers (channels) in mind.
Whenever the product companies have to transition from their old channel to a new one, there is always some trouble. Successfully transitioning to a new channel involves redesigning the products to fit the new channels. But, during the transitional period, most companies take their old products, tweak them and put them through new channels. This almost never works out well for the consumers.
Think about the early apps. They were basically websites wrapped into mobile apps. The experience sucked. Traditional advertising companies and news publishers were/are struggling to move from websites and TV networks to mobile. Moreover, during the time these companies transition, new products pop up that are designed only for new channels. Think Buzzfeed and Snapchat.
This entire blog post was precipitated by a tweet which was precipitated by another tweet. Funnily, these tweets reminded me of my tweet and a blog post that M.G. Siegler wrote a while ago.
Siegler wrote —
Here’s what it boils down to: despite Apple touting the thousands of apps already created for Apple Watch at launch, I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of them are either bad, unreliable, completely non-performant, or some combination of those three things.
I’ve tried well over a hundred of them at this point. Maybe 5 percent are decent. And 1 percent are good. The odds are not in your favor.
And that’s not necessarily developers’ fault. As we all know, the SDK is severely limited at this point. The Apple Watch apps, for all intents and purposes, are really just iPhone widgets. So best to think of them that way, as Arment alludes to. At most, they should probably be very simple remote controls for your app.
Funnily in my mind, those lines make a lot of sense even if you replace Apple Watch apps with “bots”. Not literally, but conceptually. Think of chatbots as the new channel and apps as the seemingly old channel.
Facebook has announced that developers have already built more than 11,000 chatbots. But, most of these bots are just “chatty apps”. Most bots are just back-and-forth conversational versions of what UI-based apps or websites can do. I have tried a lot of chatbots so far. And, most of them don’t seem to be ready for mass adoption. And, I don’t think it’s entirely developers’ fault. The underlying messaging platforms still offer limited technical flexibility. So, these chatbots should probably do a great job in doing a very simple thing really well or in acting like an extension of an app for now.
I also think because so many of us — developers included — are still figuring out how this device fits into daily life, there’s a lot of quick experimentation going on. And most of that seems to be taking iPhone ideas and porting them to the Watch. That’s the wrong call. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.
Most of the developers seem to be porting apps into bots. And, thats a wrong call. A lot of experimentation is going on. And, thats a great thing. I don’t think chatbots will really go mainstream until we get “Snapchat” or “Uber” of conversational apps.
I essentially riffed off of another post. But, it made sense to do so to draw parallels. And, to show that the future is not bleak. Regardless of what you might think, Apple Watch has been successful. And, by extension, its apps have progressed a lot. Messaging platforms are pervasive and we will have good products built on top of them. They wont be merely apps ported to conversational interfaces. We just got to wait it out.
