Two years ago, when Dustin Moskovitz announced he was leaving Facebook to start a new company with fellow-Facebooker Justin Rosenstein most people thought one of two things: He’d had a falling out with Mark Zuckerberg or he was just crazy. What could be more exciting than Facebook?
Moskovitz, of course, was Zuckerberg’s college roommate and co-founder of Facebook. If you get your Facebook history from Aaron Sorkin, he was the guy coding away in silence while half-naked girls did bong hits. If you get your Facebook history from, you know, things that actually happened, Moskovitz outlasted any other co-founder and easily played one of the most pivotal roles in the company’s early years. As such, Asana will get more attention and scrutiny and maybe even hype than most business software startups.
But here’s the thing: Asana deserves it. As it turns out neither of the suppositions for Moskovitz’s decision to leave were right. Moskovitz and Rosenstein just had a really big idea: To fix how people collaborate on projects and work in teams. Something that has so far been unfixable despite billions spent on developing an implementing collaboration and communication software. Something that may be so rooted in the idiosyncrasies of human behavior that it may not be fixable.
But Asana’s opening salvo is pretty impressive. There’s a full demo of the software in the video below, from Asana’s recent friends-and-family open house, so I won’t belabor the features here. (Screen shot is below.) Hear the pitch from the founders yourself. The company is still in private-beta, and it has a 1,200-company waiting list to get an invite. It’ll be opening up more over the course of this year. Asana has raised just over $10 million from several angels, Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
For me, Asana is the most exciting company to spin out of the early “Facebook mafia”– despite the runaway hype of Quora and Google’s jaw-dropping $120 million offer to buy Path. Then again, I’m sort of a business software nerd. I’ve been waiting for this “new generation” of enterprise software companies everyone keeps talking about and mostly feel like the open source and software as a service generations were a let down. These companies changed the way software was priced, delivered and implemented, disrupting old giants, and that’s no small feat. But product-wise, the reinvention of these categories wasn’t as dramatic as salesmen-oriented CEOs would have you believe. Yammer certainly got closer than most to delivering on that buzz phrase “the consumerization of enterprise,” but it was mostly by applying what was working for Twitter to a work-safe, secure app.
But Asana is strikingly different than other collaboration software. Part of that is timing. “I think that web technology has developed to a point where you can have a really great experience in the browser, better than you can have in a desktop app,” says Benchmark’s Matt Cohler. “The Asana team spent a fair amount of time investing in the underlying framework and technology to take advantage of what you couldn’t do a few years ago.” And part of it is because Asana is one of the first business software products re-thought from the ground up by twenty-somethings with no background in old-style enterprise sales and frankly, not too much experience using enterprise software in the workplace.
But here’s what jumped out at me watching it: You can tell Asana was co-created by one of the founders of Facebook. There’s that almost hubristic mission: To fix how people work together and make the global work place a better, more efficient, less frustrating place. “It was a precondition to leaving Facebook that I wasn’t going to start something that was just about chasing money,” Moskovitz says. There’s that Facebook-like obsession with efficiency, organizing inherently messy, social things with newsfeeds, updates and clean design. Pragmatism and data-driven decision making rule the company. Frugality is important but not everything. Asana’s engineers– the Gods of the company– get a $10,000 budget to pimp out their desks. Moskovitz shrugs and says he thinks it should be more, but couldn’t come up with anything they’d need that would cost more than $10,000.
And like Facebook’s early obsession with being a “utility,” Asana wants people to live in this app throughout their work day. Like Facebook did away with the clutter and needless page view clicks of the MySpace world, so too is Asana obsessed with speed. They know that if the software is the least bit cumbersome to use, employees won’t use it. Like Facebook, Asana sees its eventual customer base as, well, everyone. They hope people won’t just use Asana for work, but for things like wedding planning. The two wanted to build this product because managing teams at Facebook was such a chore. In a sense, Moskovitz says he’s still working for Facebook, because he’s still trying to solve the problem he was trying to solve there. It just so happens, he’s also trying to solve that problem for every company in the world.
But all that said, this is in no way another “Facebook for the enterprise.” There’s no list of friends, no events, no photosharing. Asana isn’t about making the workplace “fun” or making it social for the sake of social. Its not about organizing your social graph. It’s about helping people work together more efficiently– cutting out reliance on email, cutting down on the need for those endless meetings, easily assigning and tracking tasks in one instance that is always up to date, because unlike those lame corporate wikis, people are living in the app. Moskovitz and Rosenstein are clear: If they don’t accomplish that, they have failed.
A long time ago, when World War II ended, two things happened. Two brand-new superpowers emerged, the United States of America and the U.S.S.R., and the world very soon organized itself into two camps. As this power shift happened, Great Britain lost its preeminence as a world superpower.
Hobbled by the heavy expenses of the war, Great Britain couldn’t muster up the economic heft needed to hang on to its superpower status. Not long after, the dominoes started to fall. It had no option but to give India, once its crown jewel, independence. The British Raj came to an end. And soon after, the British Empire came to an end.
That little snippet from history is less a political comment, but more as my way of trying to give some context to the mobile industry. All great empires come to an end, and perhaps today, we are seeing the beginning of the final days of Nokia, world’s largest mobile phone maker and the company that, among other things, championed the very idea of a smartphone.
After Apple and Google changed the rules of engagement of the mobile industry, Nokia has found itself becoming less and less relevant. For nearly four years, it has been in denial when it comes to the software-centric mobile platforms (and ecosystems). Nokia has failed to respond to its rivals. All it did was talk and talk and deny that Apple was a problem.
Low End Low Blow
Every single time, I took Nokia to task, I was flamed in the comments, with many arguing that it was still a very big brand in Asia and Africa and it had the volume. And, yes, Nokia was big in India. It was making so much money in India and other emerging markets that it failed to realize that it was beginning to lose ground in Europe. Moreover, the Americans had shifted mobile’s center of gravity to Silicon Valley.
Almost two years ago we wrote about the emergence of MediaTek and low-cost Android smartphones, which were eventually going to kill everything on the low end of the handset business. Nokia, my rants not withstanding, failed to realize that it was a frog that was being slow-boiled at the low end by the MediaTek-based phones and by Apple’s heat lamp on the top.
Just this week, Strategy Analysis came out with a report that both Nokia and Samsung were getting a lot of competition at the low end of the market from Indian handset makers with exotic names like Lava, MicroMax and Spice. These companies are going after very cost-conscious buyers in rural India, which incidentally is a massive market.
“National pride is a factor, but when people spend almost 4 percent of their annual income on a mobile phone, they are going to make purchase decisions based on what will get them the most for their money,” said Tom Elliott, Director of EMCS in a news report. How much do you want to bet that India won’t be making that much money for Nokia!
Indian and Chinese manufacturers know that they have a massive market, and they can use their domestic strength to springboard to other markets. Indian phone companies are looking to expand to Africa and other parts of Asia, so why shouldn’t Indian phone makers harbor such ambitions? It also goes for the Chinese brands — Huawei and ZTE are already making a killing. Nokia, which has ruled the emerging (phone) markets for so long isn’t going to rule them — its raj is over.
Ctrl+Alt+Del
Now let’s look at today’s deal: Microsoft and Nokia.
Earlier this week, I wrote a post about how companies have a tough time trying to reconcile with change. Make no mistake: Nokia is a great hardware company with awesome logistics capabilities. As a result, it makes perfect sense that it should focus on its core strengths, and it is doing so by teaming up with a partner who has the desire to spend billions to build an ecosystem. The problem is that it is picking the wrong partner.
There has been a lot of emotional outpouring on the Microsoft-Nokia partnership, so I won’t repeat much of it. Instead let me explain why picking Microsoft is the wrong strategy. Windows Phone 7 is a nice and interesting platform. Its difference has gotten it kudos. What it hasn’t been able to do is get a lot of developers. And despite all the public boasting, it doesn’t have that many users: only 2 million shipped sold. Those quibbles aside, Windows Phone 7 has a much bigger problem.
Four years ago when Apple launched the iPhone, it essentially defined the metaphor for a very touch-centric, smartphone world. Later when it added apps, it only reinforced usage behavior. The subsequent launch of Android OS and Android-based phones were a reflection of the user experience that had been popularized by Apple.
Today, from an average phone buyer’s perspective, Apple’s and Android’s UI is essentially the standard that consumers expect from a smartphone. Do Microsoft and Nokia truly expect that people will learn yet another new behavior? I think the two companies are being overly optimistic in their belief that their UI is going to catch fire with consumers just because Nokia is putting Windows Phone 7 on its smartphones. It is akin to buying a sports car today, hoping to pay for it with by winning the lottery on the weekend.
In a colorful note today titled “Ctrl+Alt+Del,” RBC Markets analyst Mark Sue asked the question: “This is a major reboot and it will take some time for Nokia to offset the decline of its Symbian devices with Win7 phones. Will this be a true partnership or will bickering stall the process before the first phones are shipped?” The bickering he is talking about is between happy friends today!
Mountbatten of mobile
So am I faulting Nokia for partnering with a third-party OS? No, I am not. In fact, if they were going to make the move away from their own proprietary operating systems, then they should have opted for not just Microsoft OS, but also for Google’s Android and whatever else is out there. Today Microsoft, Android in a few months, and whatever comes next — that would have been the right strategy. In other words, take a page out of Samsung’s playbook. It would have allowed them to have scale, have multiple market entry points and essentially leverage their core DNA: their ability to make good hardware and use their logistics to push it into the market.
Now imagine if the market gives Windows Phone 7 on Nokia a big thumbs down. What happens then? Curtains?
I can’t but feel that Stephen Elop, the Nokia CEO, is the Lord Mountbatten of mobile, essentially overseeing the slow and sure demise of this once proud company that ruled the mobile planet. In a few years, we will look back and see Nokia as yet another mobile brand, jostling for market share with the likes of Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, Motorola, the Chinese, the Indians and Apple. It will have the history, it will have the pomp and circumstance — it just won’t have the power.
The Raj is over!
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
- Nokia’s Tie-Up With Microsoft Won’t Help
- Mobile OSes Are No Longer Just About Mobile
- It’s Time for Nokia to Embrace Android
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