Operator Clouds: It's The User Experience...

Hal Steger : Thinking Out Cloud
Hal Steger
Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Funambol. 20+ years of marketing & product management experience at high-growth, innovative global software companies.
| This blog is about personal cloud solutions, technology, trends and market developments. Its scope is to comment on and discuss several aspects of personal clouds.

Operator Clouds: It's The User Experience...

At the risk of dating myself as well as using a semi-crass word, one phrase comes to mind in light of the recent launch of a major U.S. carrier cloud.

"It's the economy, stupid"

Except in this case, it would be:

"It's the user experience..."

The "economy" reference is to a famous line from the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, in which the economy was clearly the main issue, although the incumbent president was dancing around it, for obvious reasons.

In this case, it's not known what the incumbent (the U.S. carrier) was thinking, but it is obvious from the reception to its launch of its personal cloud that someone is also in a serious state of denial.

Let me make this clear to all companies thinking about offering a personal cloud service:

It's the user experience...

Or rather, the user experience is a required, but not a sufficient, condition to make a personal cloud service successful. Why? This is a lesson from marketing 101, if the dogs don't eat the dogfood, it doesn't matter how many dogs you can feed. This is especially true when the 'dogs' (i.e. personal cloud users, and I love dogs so I am not disparaging users) have a choice, and in this case, the 'dogs' have  over-the-top (OTT) personal cloud alternatives. A carrier that goes to market with a substandard service is violating rule #2 of marketing 101, which is that the worst thing you can do is to advertise a bad product. Better to bury it or not go to market at all.

With this week's launch of a personal cloud service from a major U.S. carrier, it appears that there is a trend, and it is not favorable. The other major U.S. carrier also launched a personal cloud service late last year, and it, too, received poor marks from users, as can be seen in the app stores. A third data point is one of the largest operators in Europe recently launched its personal cloud service, also to a chilly reception.

So, is the moral of the story that operators are inherently unable to offer a good personal cloud service?

For those who do not follow the industry, this would be a reasonable, knee jerk reaction. But the answer would be completely, 100% wrong.

It's the user experience that matters. In all three cases where these major operators went to market, they tried to cut corners by providing a service that was non-competitive in terms of the service's user interface, capabilities, quality, impact on device battery life, and so on.

In contrast, and to set the record straight, one of our customers, also a major European operator with 200M+ customers, launched a personal cloud service recently and has seen upwards of close to a million users in just a few months. The service is working well and users are extremely happy. Why? It's the user experience... (plus a few other things, that are a topic for another blog post).

I'm not writing this to disparage other companies, the point is that operators can be highly successful with a personal cloud service, they just need to ensure they go to market with a service with a good user experience. Readers of this blog know that this is more easily said than done, but it's also not rocket science.