Should there be a partnership or a buyout between mobile operating systems?

A lot has been written about how the top three mobile companies should configure themselves. I’m talking about Apple, Google and RIM. Which one is better and which one is worse, who should die first and who’s second.

I think all those views (although have some degree of veracity in them) are too absolutist in the sense that things are not black and white. But also, it depends on the point of view of each person and their own experience.

All platforms have their own strengths, if they didn’t, neither of them would reach to the place they’re right now. Some value is the end user getting from them.

Here’s what I think in short words:

Blackberry OS

Is the oldest of the big three (even though Windows Mobile has a long history) but that doesn’t make it a looser. Been the oldest brings a lot of experience to the table. One of the biggest and strongest fields of Blackberry is their enterprise market capabilities. It has lots of good features built in that satisfy big companies like the White House. Lots of features has been incorporated into Apple’s iOS trying to get into this market, but adoption has been slow. As I said in the beginning, Blackberry has lots of experience in this field.

Besides been a leader in the enterprise market, Blackberry has fair good market share of the consumer market. This comes by a good reason: there are features that millions of people feel attracted to when buying Blackberry, one of them being the BB Chat. See as this simple and common capability, available on the Internet since its own birth, is one of the top features. Again, experience. I still don’t know why Apple didn’t launch the first day with a feature like this.

Apple iOS

It has a domination of the consumer market. The ease of use makes it a winner between people that have never had a smartphone.

Also, one of the biggest advantages is their App Store that has thousands of good applications. And more coming in with innovative features. This makes it a winner for usability and in the area of solving daily issues.

Adoption in the enterprise market has been slow, advancing a in small steps, but it’s coming.

Android

Also the usability here is a big winner. A fast growing market of applications makes it look interesting against Apple and Blackberry.

The biggest advantage of Android might be their price. As it’s an open source platform, carriers and phone makers don’t have to include royalties in prices bringing the phone’s total cost of ownership down.

Conclusion

I think all three has their own pros and cons. Neither of them should abandon their technologies for adopting the other. They have their own bright spots.

Even more, there could be some partnership between them if they want to consolidate and reduce costs. For example, a partnership between Android and Blackberry could integrate Blackberry enterprise features into Android giving it the experience and technology know how to become a unique platform that combines consumer and business capabilities.

Who you think should partner with who?

Announcing Screen Capturer Tool

As part of the development process of RequestSpot, our help desk software for multiple departments, we’ve created a tool that lets users capture a region, a window or the full screen of their computers and edit the image as needed. With the edit options, you can:

• Create rectangles, circles and lines
• Arrows
• Markers
• Everything with the colors you need

After editing you can save the image in JPEG format or copy it to the clipboard for further processing, send it to an email or paste it on a document.

The best part is that we’ve made the tool, the screen capture software, available for free so the community can take advantage of it. If you want any more features, just contact me and I’ll try to include it in the development schedule.

Why do a SharePoint installation and implementation?

Yes, you have to do it. No, don’t ask more questions about it. Yes, you will
need to learn a couple of things, and some of your colleagues are going to
refuse using it, but you have to. In the long run, you will increase your
organization productivity and you won’t be able to live without it.

Some of the things you’ll get:

• Central document repository: no more storing files on your local
  hard disk or on a shared folder in the network. With SharePoint you will be
  able to store documents in a repository accessible via web. When some other
  person needs to collaborate on the document, they can just go the specified
  web site, open the document, edit it and save it back to the repository. No
  more documents lying around.
• Document versioning: yes, will have a whole history of all the
  edits made on the document and go back and recover that version that you
  need.
• One search: search for documents and information inside documents
  from a single place. When you install SharePoint Portal Server, you will get
  the ability to search across sites and document libraries everywhere. Now
  you won’t loose a document again.
• Metadata fields: Add information about documents. Forget about
  folder hierarchies for classifying documents. Add metadata fields for
  describing and searching.
• Forms: create a repository of standard forms used in your
  organization. Training requests, purchase orders, expense reimbursement,
  etc., etc., etc. Create and publish them in SharePoint.
• Sites: create special sites for collaboration. A site for the
  sale department, human resources department. For that new project we are
  starting.
• Collaboration features: create calendars, meeting spaces, assign
  tasks and create contacts around documents and other objects of the
  organization. Everything integrated in one site created for that purpose.
• It’s the future: yes, it is. We will have one environment,
  invisible in the background, where all our documents will live and all the
  collaboration information will be stored. Today is called SharePoint.

Of course, this are just some of the things you will get when deploying
SharePoint. There are a lot of other things you can do with it and customize it
to your needs.

After your implementation don’t forget to go a step further with workflow.
Add document approval and routing to those documents and forms in SharePoint
using our product, Procx. With it, you can really streamline processes and
really do more with less. Go, give it a look at our
SharePoint Workflow
site and our InfoPath
Workflow site.

You need to increase the productivity

Productivity has been key factor of growth of companies now days. When
organizations can’t reduce more costs and you have others rising, in which you
cannot have a direct influence, the only way to increase profits is getting into
productivity.

When people ask me to define productivity, I respond a four word sentence: do
more with less. That’s it. Process more insurance claims without increasing
personnel, find company documents and information more easily without wasting
time, automate processes and relocate employees to perform value added
activities in the business, handle more loans without increasing officials, find
new channels of delivering your product without investing lots of money.

Technology has been playing a huge role in productivity, especially
information technology. Today organizations have a portfolio of software
products available online that can automate almost any part of your company.
Identify your needs, look for manual routines that employees do and think how
you can improve that part of the business and which software can help you
achieve your objectives. A small increase in productivity can yield into high
profit values.

Start measuring your process

How can you really know how your company is doing if are not measuring
processes? Do you know how many support requests are you getting from users per
month? From what area are they coming?

If you go to the customer service representative, do you know how much time
is lasting for giving the customer a definitive answer on their problem? There
is no way we can improve these type of services if you are not taking measures
of the process. By doing so, then we can think about augmenting our customer
satisfaction index or reducing the amount of errors that a product has when
going out to the streets.

In this

article by Seth Godin, he makes a call to people to stop being afraid of
taking care of processes. Yes, we know this is a routinary thing, but it is a
strategic value to our business against competitors. If I’m more efficient
internally, I can handle more jobs and customers with less the cost of similar
organizations in the industry.

So, stop for while envisioning what your company will be in the next three
years and take care of those processes that customers and employees are
complaining right now.