Sticker Shock

A little off-subject, but still felt this experience was worth sharing.  I'll get back on track next post.

My smart phone is an iPhone 5.  My carrier is ATT.  It's been a great relationship since the iPhone first came out.  Sadly, I think it's coming to an end.

My two-year contract expired on June 1st...ATT informed me immediately that I was eligible for a phone upgrade and a new contract.  Exciting news, as I've had my eye on an iPhone 6-Plus.

Last week, I decided it was time to grab that new iPhone and renew my contract.  My wife came with...we're on the same plan and she is also upgrade eligible right now.  The local AT&T store is right around the corner, so we dropped by on the way out to lunch, figuring this would be about a 20-minute deal: cool new phones, new contract, and then off to lunch.

The experience did not quite work out as planned.  As you're probably aware, subsidized phones and 2-year contracts are on the way out with the wireless phone carriers.  More on that here.  So we were hit square between the eyes with sticker shock.  We were told we could buy new phones outright or pay in installments (including about $100 in fees...aka interest...over a two-year period).    Pretty significant bump in hardware out-of-pocket costs.

To add insult to injury, the price of carrier service has gone up around 33% for the same service levels as our own contract.  Regardless of whether we opted for a "Next" plan or not, the monthly outlay came out to the same amount.  And I thought data access was getting less expensive...

We left ATT in pretty short order and decided to try the Verizon store next door.  No help there...the numbers played out exactly the same.  The only difference was the branding of "Edge" rather than "Next".

Sprint tried to do better...they actually matched the level of service and price of our old plan.  For the first year.  Then they recovered that cost in the 2nd year.  So, over a 24-month period, the three major providers came out with the same price for service.  Contract, no contract, "Edge", "Next", or whatever...prices up 33% regardless.

We checked out Best Buy's $1 phone deal too.  I won't bore you with the details, other than to mention that the deal would not have saved us a dime on hardware or service over a two-year period.

Where I live, we have two more options.  T-Mobile and Boost Mobile.  Having checked T-Mobile, I've learned that they're leading this trend in higher service costs.  And their coverage map for my area is really spotty.  Boost Mobile, on the other hand, is offering substantially better pricing on service...which leaves me wondering how they do that, considering that they're leasing infrastructure and air time from Sprint in order to provide those services?

So, to sum up, I've learned two important things:  1) subsidized phones are now a thing of the past, and that smart phones (especially Apple smart phones) are expensive; 2) carrier providers are raising costs pretty substantially.  I suppose this is the cost to the consumer of finally converting perceptions of smart phones from a "cool new thing" to a necessity of modern life.

A few days have passed and I've now managed to talk my wallet down from jumping off a ledge.  We've made the decision in our house to hold the line on cell phone costs.

The sticker shock has made my old iPhone 5 look much, much better in my eyes.  I may just keep it until it dies. Or perhaps switch to the much lower-priced 'Droid-based OnePlus?

As far as increased provider costs, I imagine I'll be lowering my data plan and depending on the ever-increasing availability of free wifi.  Once that becomes less practical, I'll have to consider options...maybe switch back to a "dumb phone" and reconsider carrying a wifi-enabled tablet?  Yuk, that even sounds ugly :(

I suppose I've known for years that cell phone sticker shock was coming...but that doesn't make it any easier to deal with now that it's here.

Old Folks Boogie

And you know

That you're over the hill

When your mind makes a promise

That your body can't fill...

             - From Little Feat's "Old Folks Boogie"

I think I'm must be over the hill...a grumpy old man.  There was a time when, faced with an app that failed to work as promised, I would fuss and fight with that app to make it work.  No more.  Now, in the event that an app doesn't work as promised, I delete it and move on try something else.  No patience anymore.  I continually tell myself that I'll put the "fixer" hat back on my head, but I just never get to actually do so.

Mobile apps are the best example of my impatience.  There are many mobile apps for any outcome I care to achieve:  mobile meetings, tracking my heart rate, listening to music, taking notes... Plenty of alternatives.  So, when I run into an app that fails to work (or even fails to meet my expectations), I immediately junk it and move on to the next choice.  No effort, no feedback to the app developer, no nothing.  Just junked.  As my newest daughter-in-law would say: "ain't nobody got time for that".

In today's market, there is an expectation that apps just work.  Buggy apps die quick deaths in the market.  Reliability is not something special now...it's simply a requirement to get a seat at the table.

Classic example.  Last week, I was in Kansas visiting my new granddaughter.  Having taken our pet dogs on the trip, I wanted to find the local dog park.  Google Maps failed to find the dog park recommended by my son...the town in Kansas is just too small for Google Maps to fuss with.  Waze took me right to it.  Any guess as to which app is still on my smartphone and which one got junked on the spot?

Of course, there is a downside.  If everyone took my approach, the developers would never get feedback on their app from the field.  So their app would never improve.  But I have a "grumpy old man" response for that too.  So what?  Why should I be the beta tester?  Build something that works in the first place.

So yeah, I have that grumpy old man attitude when it comes to apps...especially mobile apps.  It either meets my expectations or gets kicked to the curb without further thought.  If I don't immediately get the outcome I'm expecting, I move on.

What about you?  Are you another member of the figurative "grumpy old man" or "grumpy old woman" club (no gender bias here - we accept everyone)?  Or are you willing to provide feedback and work with an app to help make it better?  Respond in the comments.

Xprtly - Extreme Coolness

Something cool happened today…something extremely cool.  Xprtly was released into public beta.

What in the heck is Xprtly?  The best way to describe it is a cloud-based support platform, with a mobile application and a web interface for administration.  The idea is to connect users with support personnel who can respond to issues as they arise.  Xprtly also allows for data collection of both user and support personnel behavior, plus analytics of that collected idea - which can result in improved support performance, identification of additional training areas for both users and support personnel, and reductions in total cost of ownership for enterprise software.

Admittedly, my description doesn’t really do Xprtly justice.  Check out the website here.  Watch some scenario videos here and here.  Get a rough idea of how the mobile app works here.

As luck would have it, I’ve had an early peek at Xprtly.  What’s cool about this app is that, especially for users, it’s easy to use.  Great UX.  Mobile app:  Log in, pick your preferred response method (email, IM, phone call, etc.), describe your issue, submit the request.  Done. Help follows.  Simple. Clean. Easy.

Now, I understand that internal support applications are not a new idea. But, IMHO, the ease of use (a focus on simple elegance) of the entire platform plus the built in reporting capabilities are differentiating factors.  Enabling users by applying a new design approach approach to an old idea.

Xprtly was developed for your phone.  But I also see it as a future candidate for wearable tech (including Google Glass).  

Don’t you love it when small companies do extremely cool stuff?  Check it out and let me know what you think.

14 for 14

So all the cool kids are sharing their predictions for 2014.  While I'm not much of a prognosticator, I thought it would be fun to share my own thoughts on the upcoming year.  If nothing else, we can all have a good laugh in 12 months over how poorly my crystal ball works.  Here we go:

1. The difference between fads and serious uptake will depend more than ever on whether we can figure out ways to add real value (better, faster, cheaper) for people and enterprises.  Wearable tech, big data, and the internet of things all fall into this category in 2014.

2. Enterprises moving to the public cloud will become a stampede in 2014.  The savings in total cost of ownership throughout the life cycle are just too good to pass up, security concerns aside.  Follow the money.

3. The combination of HTML5 and JavaScript for web development will continue to take the world by storm.  Frameworks (Oracle ADF, Twitter Bootstrap, Node.js) and design patterns make the builds easy and allow us to focus on the user experience design...which is the make or break point for web-based apps.

4. The differentiating factors for enterprise applications on the cloud will be:  ease of use, ease of services integration, ease of data integration, ease of simple customization, and cost.  Any product missing on any of these points will fizzle out, especially in terms of net new customers.  

5. Experienced enterprise applications customers, defined as those with more than five years experience under their belt, will realize that they’ve squeezed all the productivity gains available to them from automation.  2014 will be the year that the need for information from all that transactional data becomes the predominant demand from existing enterprise applications customers.  Which will make that ease of data integration point raised in #4 above a really, really big deal.

6. Hand-in-hand with #5 above, we’ll see a significant rise in 3rd-party reporting and BI solutions offering technology-agnostic “information as a service”.  Pentaho, Domo and Good Data are companies already well-positioned to take advantage of this trend.  OBIEE in the cloud could take off as well if the integration and pricing are right.

7. Somebody will finally figure out that your phone is not the right platform for complex reporting and analytics.  The phone, however, is a great platform for executing simple business transactions.

8. Oracle will continue with their transition from a database company to a technology company.  The transition will not be complete in 2014, but that’s not a worry…Oracle has the balance sheet to play a very long game.  And we will see concrete, measurable signs of their progress in 2014.

9. Oracle will also begin the evaluation of their numerous and somewhat disjointed array of products.  Those that make sense to the roadmap and those that make money will be separated from those that don’t.  Oracle management will begin working the exit plan for those in the latter set.

10. Technology consulting:  think consolidation and change here. Many implementers and integrators  will close up shop, unable to compete as the market continues to morph into a price-driven commodity space. Others will move into pure consulting plays, offering advice (road mapping, product selection, etc.) rather than implement/build services.  And some will shift into staff augmentation shops, offering services during workload peaks and specific projects.

11. Coupled with #4 above, we’ll see a significant rise in the acceptance and use of Integration-as-a-Service (“IaaS”); integration offered as a transparent service a la SnapLogic, Informatica Cloud, and MuleSoft.  One interesting angle in the mix, however…enterprise applications vendors will discover that a good API library will be a differentiating factor selling cloud-based applications.  SalesForce has this nailed already with their Salesforce1 platform.  

12. Enterprises will stop managing the mobile device you use as they figure out that the name of the game is managing resources, not devices.  As a result, any IT used by the enterprise will have to be platform-agnostic…’Droid, Windows, iOS, whatever else.

13. Watch for Amazon Web Services to lead an outpouring of new offerings from cloud vendors moving up the tech stack as the tech stack itself becomes less relevant:  platform-as-a-service (“PaaS”) and higher value services for enterprises.  Lots of returns available here in “adding value around the edges” of the enterprise.  This is another example of what I call the “gold rush business model”; check the history of any gold rush and you’ll see that it was not the miners who got rich, but the businesses selling supplies and services to the miners - adding value around the edges of the mining operations.

14. Oracle Fusion Applications will build more momentum in 2014, especially in the HCM market.  FUSE...The simplified user interface, combined with the SaaS offerings, will prove to be a sweet spot in adding value while lowering the cost.

So, there you have it - 14 predictions for 2014.  Thoughts, comments, discussion, critiques are all welcome...at least until New Year's Day ;)