Greetings all. I apologize for the unannounced long absence from the blog. In short, things got busy on the consulting and family fronts and I put the blog on the back burner for a while. Lots has happened in the last few months. One of the biggest news events that I have been waiting for has been Verizon Wireless’ release of the Blackberry Storm 2.
I had been waiting on this for a while as the more I used my Storm, the slower it got. We are almost back to the early Windows days when you had to reboot your servers daily to keep them running smoothly. I can only surmise that the issue has something to do with memory leaks or ill-behaved applications that do not release resources when they can.
Like many of you, I had been watching the blogosphere to see what fellow bloggers were writing about expected releases. The first date that felt real was October 21st. However, as the 21st approached, rumor had it that Verizon Wireless was delaying the release because of an issue they found while testing. This led to an interesting conversation with a good friend and fellow wireless industry veteran, Mary Foltz. (Mary is one of those rare individuals who has long history with a carrier (Sprint Nextel) and is also a founder of a company (Air Arts).
Beta programs. Yup, that’s right, the carriers should take a page from Google and launch hot new phones quickly under a “beta” program. These phones would be offered on the carrier’s developer web page with the stipulation that the phone is in beta mode, it may never be launched, and results may vary. ANYONE who registers for the developer page should be given access to this program and not just special partners. This allows the carriers to get some great pre-launch publicity, shake the kinks out of a phone before “public launch” and make their developer community feel special. Who knows, maybe they might even have applications developed for the phone on the day of the public launch.
Beta programs are a tried and true method over the last few years to get applications to market while setting customer expectations for something special, but also to expect issues. Having a positive reporting mechanism for issues will only increase the community feeling that they are special and valued and improve the beta experience. Personally, to get my hands on the Storm 2 a month or two earlier, I would have put up with a lot of “issues”. (Yes, I am a phone geek.)
Imagine if Verizon Wireless had used a beta program to launch the original Storm. They would have had a product to market to satisfy the core gadget hounds. Those hounds would have expected some of the early problems that were reported by Storm users. Instead of being negative publicity, it would have been part of the beta program and allowed Verizon additional time to correct these problems. I also guarantee that some of the problems that surfaced after launch were never identified by their testing houses. Two or three months later, after most of the bugs were vetted and worked out, the phone could have been released. By that time, expectations would have been set for any issues that were not corrected during the beta process and again, avoiding negative publicity and customer experiences. The net result – core gadget hounds get their phones early and are happy while the general population gets a much better phone that has been put through the paces.
Tags: blackberry, pda, smart phone, storm, storm 2, verizon wireless
