Note: It is Spring Break week here in Western New York, (for the school-age kids anyway), and while I will still be working and traveling to Washington D.C. for a conference, this week will be busier than most. So this week on the blog I'll be mostly sharing some quick hits and short takes on things I spotted or found interesting. Actually, come to think of it, that is pretty much every week. Anyway, if you are on Spring Break this week, I hope you have a great little vacation!
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Earlier this week I offered a quick (and not really orginal or novel) take on the Facebook-Instagram deal, where I pointed out that the really interesting part of the purchase was not the extraordinary purchase price, ($1B), for a company with no revenue and no real plans to create revenue, but rather that Instagram was able to build a user base of over 30 million with only about a dozen employees. Sure, Instagram is a really simple, single-function type application, but to have that many users that quickly with an incredibly small team is really remarkable.
So today's Spring Break series take is the second interesting angle on the deal, and that is the question of the diminishing importance of 'traditional', (i.e. sit down at a desktop or laptop, fire up an application or browser to use), type applications at all? If Instagram could build a $1B business completely on the iPhone, (I know they have an Android app now, but that was a very recent development), why would aspiring developeneurs think that building for anything but the iOS/Android platforms was a solid decision?
At least on the consumer side certainly, mobile platforms seem to increasingly be all that matters, Facebook itself acknowledged their risk and exposure to mobile by both their admission that they have not been able to monetize mobile access to Facebook, as well as with their Instagram buy. Recently Facebook head of mobile developer relations James Pearce said "Mobile is the epitome" of social. If Facebook were built today, it would be a mobile app."The numbers? Facebook currently has 425 million mobile users (compared to 825 million total users).
So in a climate where the most popular social applications and networks are predominantly mobile-based, and in a time where these consumer-oriented applications continue to become tools used for business and enterprise purposes, I think it might be time to wonder if the next big breakthrough in enterprise or workforce technology won't be from creating fancy iPhone versions of the same old tools that employees are tired of using, but rather from the creation of something entirely new, built as a mobile application, with not one shred of concern about 'users working in the office on PCs', and none of the baggage that often accompanies creating 'mobile-friendly' versions of what we have always known.
We have talked for years about the next 'Facebook for the enterprise', is it time to start talking about the next 'Instagram for the enterprise?'
Happy Thursday!