I spend my (work) life talking about mobile devices and mobile app developers. I have been pitched on more great app ideas than I can count, and nearly every week been blown away by ideas I never could have conceived. As part of this give and take with the developer community, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what will be the “next greatest thing ever” in mobile. I’ve said publicly now at multiple conferences, like MoDev East and DCWeek, that the next big opportunities for mobile are in health and enterprise.
With that in mind, I found David Aronchick’s recent article about how “Microsoft can survive the Phone Wars” to be really interesting, and (mostly) on target. Aronchick argues that Microsoft can excel in the mobile space by: 1). making sure that any hardware running Win8 is perfect, not merely ‘up to spec’, and 2). focusing on the developer community. He says “Anything but homeruns in these facets of the product will result in disaster”.
You can take much of what Aronchick has said here and expand it beyond his desire to see Microsoft compete successfully, and use it as a roadmap for all the major players in the mobile space – from Apple to HTC. But I don’t think he fully explores the two tiered reality of enterprise apps when he recommended that Microsoft not focus on “Winning Enterprises.” The next wave of successful mobile apps, be it on iOS, Win8, BBX or Android will be built by developers who build products that speak to consumers, but also satisfy the security, privacy and control elements that are key to enterprise sales.
For mobile health products, developers will need to make sure their apps comply with reams of regulations and numerous regulators like HIPAA and the FDA (just to mention two). Financial products? Think GLB, SOX and the new CFPA. Aside from regulations, companies have always battled to maintain control over what information they share with partners, and what information they protect from competitors. In a future where every corporation has its own internal app store, managing these moving pieces will be critical.
For mobile apps in enterprise, we need to successfully build apps that embrace both the “consumer” element of a great user interface, but also provide the kind of tools that IT professionals need to keep the whole operation working.
Mobile developers in enterprise or health need to address two audiences – the users that need a great interface that “just works”, and the lever-pullers behind the curtain for whom features like directory integration, security, granular control of information access, reporting and update roll-outs are key to their daily jobs. Aronchick says “Focus on consumers and what they want, not the IT department. (Hint: if Microsoft EVER starts talking about Active Directory as a winning feature, they are doing it wrong).”
He is right that we developers need to treat corporate users as consumers, but we will never see the big success stories if we don’t understand there’s an entire group within corporations for whom enterprise features are what they consume. Platforms and apps must must be able to talk about things like Active Directory integration as a winning feature, or we’ll never get permission to roll out the kind of rich content, high value apps we want to create.