My partners and I hosted our quarterly CEO dinner last night. It was a great event. The theme was mobile computing and our two speakers were Tom Conrad from Pandora and Satya Patel from Twitter. Tom and Satya provided some great insights. Thanks also to the 60 CEOs who attended and participated in the lively Q&A discussion as well.
Below are some of the key themes that emerged from the dinner:
1. In the next 3-4 years, we will see more hybrid experiences on mobile devices: part mobile web-based and part native application. For example, we may see search, the ultimate web-based application, driving application based results. We will still be downloading apps but maybe these apps will render from the web to add flexibility – we’re already seeing lots of this in popular apps such Facebook and Twitter.
2. Android phones will be the feature phones of the future. Feature phones will get a lot smarter.
3. With regard to competition, there are two fundamental truths in the consumer internet world: 1, consumers are lazy and, 2, any app that is used at scale has attained this scale by doing one thing really, really well. It is hard for competitors in other businesses to compete with this focus. Despite this, saying no is the hardest thing to do as a head product designer – being so focused can get boring, but knowing when to embrace the needs of subsets of your audience and when not to do so, is one of the keys to success.
4. China will surpass the US as the number one mobile market in terms of application downloads and usage across iOS and Android by the middle of ’12 (courtesy of Flurry CEO, Simon Khalaf)
5. The size, growth and enthusiasm of the Android user community outweighs the challenges of managing Android development and supporting the myriad combinations of Android builds, phones and carriers.
Thanks again to those who participated, and a special shout out of thanks to Tom and Satya for their enlightening comments.