Fred Wilson Archives : Global Nerdy

We’re in the phablet era now

Click the graph to see it at full size.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson looked at research firm Flurry’s State of Mobile 2015 report and took note of the chart above, which shows that the greatest growth in time spent on mobile came from “phablets” — those large phones that blur the line between phone and tablet — and wrote:

There’s not a lot new in this data to be honest, but it confirms a lot of what everyone believes is happening. We are converging on a single device format in mobile and that’s driving some important changes in usage. We are in the phablet era.

Everything I needed to know about good user experience I learned while working in restaurants

At the Neilsen/Norman Group’s blog, Everything I Needed to Know About Good User Experience I Learned While Working in Restaurants lists the many things that you can learn from restaurants and apply to your applications, from designing for both new and expert users to interaction design and error handling to community management.

If you’re not familiar with the Nielsen/Norman Group, they’re the “Monsters of Rock” of user interface and experience. Their principals are:

Jakob Nielsen, who’s probably best know for literally writing the book on web usability,
Donald Norman, who’s written a number of great books on usable designs, most notably The Design of Everyday Things, and
Bruce Toganazzini, who’s done all sorts of UI work, starting with founding Apple’s Human Interface Group (which in my opinion needs to review its priorities).

The cautionary lessons of Evernote’s “5% problem”

Evernote used to be my go-to note-taking app in 2011. I worked across platforms, and I loved that I could start a note on my laptop, continue on my iPad, and then later make tweaks or addenda on my phone. But as time went by, it got buggier and increasingly less usable to the point where I abandoned it worse and buggier until I abandoned it in annoyance.

Their note-taking app got buggier as the company tried to expand so that they had offerings that would appeal to as many people as possible. Therein lay their problem: as their own former CEO put it, people at Evernote conferences would go up to him and say that they loved the platform, but used only 5% of what it could do. The problem was that there was a different 5% for every person. They spread themselves too thin, lost their focus, started half-assign their product lines, and in an attempt to please everyone, ended up annoying them.

Keep calm and carry on developing Android apps

You may have heard that the ongoing legal battle between Oracle (who own Java) and Google (who own Android, which is Java-based) has led to Google’s decision to move from their proprietary version of the JDK to Oracle’s OpenJDK. You may be concerned, but you probably shouldn’t be. It may cause headaches for Google and Android mobile phone vendors, but as Android developers, it shouldn’t really affect you.

As Android developer and online tutor Tim Buchalka puts it:

We write our code accessing the same libraries, and things just work. Of course its going to be a decent chunk of work for Google to get this all working so that we dont have to worry about it, but if anyone has the resources to do it, Google do.

…

What do you need to do as an Android developer? Absolutely nothing, its business as normal! You dont need to change anything in your development process and it may well be that when Android N arrives you won’t have to either. So fire up Android Studio, and get back to coding!

A story you might not know about Microsoft Solitaire: it was created by a summer intern!

Is Wes Cherry a bit annoyed that he never got paid to write one of the most-used applications of the Windows 3.x/9x days? He once answered “Yeah, especially since you are all probably paid to play it!”

First, Andy Serwer, managing editor at Fortune magazine wrote an article titled This Crisis Could Have a Happy Ending. In it, he calls this first decade in the 21st century “one big washout for investors” and “a lost decade”.

He also wrote:

I believe that in order for the market to achieve a sustainable advance that is above the mean, we are due for some unforeseen positive event or events. Think about it. In the 1990s stocks went way up because of an unanticipated revolution in technology, i.e., networking and the Internet. In this decade we had a slew of unexpected negative events – bookended by 9/11 and this current meltdown. At some point, and it may be a few years from now, we will likely be subjected to an unforeseen positive.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson used this article as a launching point for his article, A Lost Decade – But Not for Everyone. In it, he examines the stock prices of some of the big players on the Dow – 3M, Citigroup, GM, Intel, Johnson and Johnson and United Technologies – and declared the Dow “a mixed bag”:

A few disasters (GM, Citigroup, Intel), a bunch of so so stocks (like 3M) and a some winners (like J&J and United Technologies).

For the best examples, he says you have to look beyond the Dow, where you’ll find Apple (“still up 3.5x in nine years”)…

Apple stock price chart, 2000 - present

and Google (“still up 2.5x from its IPO in mid 2004”

Google stock parice chart, 2004 - present

Based on these observations, he writes:

When I think about what’s really going on in this "lost decade" it occurs to me that we are finally witnessing the impact of the end of the industrial era and the emergence of the information era. That’s not to say every "information stock" has done well. Intel and Microsoft have been a disaster. IBM and HP are down for the decade to date. But we also have to realize that the late 90s drove all information stocks up to crazy levels in anticipation of exactly this shift taking place. The market got it right, but as usual it overshot.

…

It will be stocks like Apple, Google, and companies we don’t even know about yet that will lead us back out of this downturn. And I bet there will be a bunch of companies from what we used to call the "emerging markets" that will lead us out of this mess. I think I’ll call them the "emerged markets" from now on.

Howard Lindzon, whom I met recently at Startup Empire, chimes in with his article, Has it Really Been a Lost Decade in the Stock Market?

If WE are to learn one thing from the ‘Lost Decade’ of S&P, Nasdaq and Dow returns is that any idiot can make money in an up market. It is the down markets that separate the winners and losers.

…

The ‘Lost Decade’ will spawn many great winners in the decades to come, and the smallest investor has the biggest chance to reap the rewards from a more level playing field of transparency, reduced supply, stronger companies. Don’t be cynical at exactly the wrong time.

…

It’s time to build the business of your dreams and quit hoping for anything else.

The underlying message in all three of these articles is that the businesses that will thrive in this down economy will address some kind of need rather than a want and be “underowned” and “non-leveraged” – in other words, small and not owing any money. Sounds like small businesses and startups to me.