Who’s Building your Brand’s E-Presence?
Scenario 3: Company-X likes to delegate its offerings, and that’s about it
Company-X has seen success in its retail locations for quite some time. A trusted, “big-box” vendor of consumer products and services, they’ve outlasted some of their recent competition in a difficult economy.
They’ve also put a significant push behind their online offering as well, a complementary site and e-commerce solution which generates a good amount of sales.
Unfortunately, this is where they fall short of some of their competitors. Unlike Apple, Target and Amazon: they don’t actually offer an official mobile site or desktop application. It’s either the store or official site.
Their consumers who visit their site on their mobile phone wait sometimes up to 30 seconds for their homepage to load, even at enhanced 3G speeds. As a result, comparison shopping or simply checking to see if their local store has an item in stock is extremely difficult, often involving several page-loads and back-and-forth navigation.
They’ve recently ventured into resolving this with an official API, but that’s where it ends. Despite repeated consumer requests for a mobile site or native mobile application, Company-X has opted to rely exclusively on the development community to build these solutions for them.
In querying Company-X on their development goals and intentions behind the API, the company’s representative explained that they’re not looking to dictate what they should officially offer consumers: it’s “up to” the developmental community to come up with those solutions on their own.
This type of delegation can be dangerous: the development community feels as if they’re doing all the work for the company providing the API and the company is simply benefiting from the community’s work. Most developers also believe that their work should only compliment pre-existing, official offerings by companies.
More than six months (at the time of writing) have passed since Company-X announced the API. A current query on iTunes App Store for any applications utilizing this API renders no results. With no applications available this long after the API was launched, it’s a safe bet Company-X’s approach to community developed-solutions isn’t working.
Next Page: How does all this affect the consumer? And what’s a Brand to do?
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james…
good article chris.
I believe that APIs, when done correctly, with the proper support, vastly increase a companies value in the developer community, and through them the public in general.
A strategy that i find interesting is that some companies are limiting the API usage to particular vendors, in order to prevent over saturation of multiple applications that do the same thing.
Jason Grant…
There is a big fight going on at the moment for the ‘developer community’.
The Open Source scene has been hijacked by big corporations to harness the power of ‘cheap labour’ which feels like they are independent, while locking themselves into working with a particular API (i.e. Google Maps, Microsoft Search API, etc.).
What this leads to is a new form of a ‘corporate lock-in’ which most people (bizzarely) call ‘open web’ it cannot be further from the truth.
Ah well I could go on and on about this.
Chris F.…
Thanks for the input Jason! I’ve particularly noticed this trend in the past few months, which in part prompted me to write this article.
I wouldn’t go as far as saying that corporations are “hijacking” the Open Source movement, since the nature of OS is to adapt it freely regardless of the end goal. However, there isn’t merit for a corporation to look to the community (”cheap labour”) as a means to accomplish their own internal goals. In the example of “Company-X,” I can already see that their goal hasn’t been met as I still haven’t seen any real-world deployments using their API.
My needs for a mobile site aren’t there. If they’re not creating it (and they haven’t, in this example), they’re leaving it to the developers to create it. Nobody has done it yet (and I really don’t have the time to do it myself), so I’m one of the many consumers that are left out in the cold.
Target and Walmart, on the other hand, have recognized the need to provide their consumers with a mobile version of their site, and I’ve used them often – even when I’m in their stores.
The key here is not relying on the development community to do the work that you should be doing. If there’s a demand for your consumers to have a mobile website, for example, then you should be developing it as an official offering — not looking to the development community to do it for you.
Jason Grant…
I agree.
There is much to be said about the entire API thing.
One of the main ‘thinking points’ I am rotating around these days is that the whole notion of an API can already be heavily implemented through things like URL structures and widgets and should be reusable in any context.
My ‘angle’ of comment was based on the idea that even though a specific URL is enough of an API, big corporations like Google create an API instead to ‘get developers bought’ into learning the API and developing with it.
Once that becomes a ‘trend’ companies start hearing about it, so they start buying into it and then the whole thing goes out of control until a bubble is reached.
In the process of reaching the bubble bursting point many corporations start thinking along the lines ‘if we don’t have an API we are going to be dead tomorrow’, etc. etc.
Same happened in Web1.0 bubble when ‘everyone had to be online or else’ and the same is happening now where ‘if you are not on Twitter your business is dead’ model is being taunted around.
APIs are just one of the big buzz words which we are going to look back on in time thinking ‘what was the fuss about’. The same thing as what will happen with Twitter.
Oh boy, I have really tried to cover every topic in one here!