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FierceWireless: I hear from developers that there are so many platforms that they have a hard time choosing which ones to work with. How do they decide? Most are not large enough to build for all the platforms.
Wyatt: The developers are in big demand right now. Nearly everyone on the planet has announced that they are starting an app store or starting an ecosystem program. We have been investing in this for three and a half years now. MotoDev has seen tremendous growth during that time. We spend a lot of time asking developers what they need to make their lives easier. What tools do they need? Are they going to have access to the system and APIs that they need to develop a rich solution?
I think you get a lot of enthusiasm from the developer community with cool technology, but you get applications from the developer community when you have a solid business model. That's where the Android opportunity is significant for developers. There is a single platform across a very large number of devices going into every corner of the world, and that makes the addressable market much more interesting. That portability is going to be an interesting component for the developer community. They get great tools, rich APIs and a simple path to get there. I think that is the triad of how you enable developer community and ecosystem.
FierceWireless: What do you think of the app store trend?
Wyatt: I am grateful to some of the pioneers in the app stores now. For the longest time the biggest problem we had in mobile was accessibility. Developers had to build an app for a phone for a carrier in one market. It was completely inaccessible to them. It was that specific. That's why you had small developers that were struggling to make money. That fragmentation made the total addressable market inaccessible.
The app stores we see now have done a good job of showing developers a clear path to market and educating end users and building the mind share within the user base that this is another computing screen. I can add games, I can add productivity apps. I think that is a good learning curve.
When we look at the market, it is so diverse between what you need on a clamshell device all the way up to what you need on a touchscreen device. I don't know that every software developer in the planet will fit into a 30/70 business model. It's somewhat naïve to think the mobile ecosystem will be that simplistic. Ongoing, we see some developers that will combat some of the pressure on their business by doing ad-subsidized or subscription-based models.
Our focus is on the enablement of the developer channel. Retail is one of them. Ad-subsidized is one of them, so is subscription and finally enterprise. We want MotoDev to be a place where developers can get access to all different channels and, depending on the customer, they have an easy way to get to them through the right channel.
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