About a year ago, I came across a curious controversy by a CEO of a small expense management company Expensify. It’s pure geekiness but the comments by the CEO created a heated backlash, and it created enough of a furor in Nerdland that I took notice. True to the adage that there’s nothing like bad publicity, I decided to check out their product. I loved the simplicity of the site, and its mission. And I was excited when I discovered that they had mobile apps (who doesn’t these days?). But they didn’t have one for my phone (Windows Phone, they had apps for iPhone and Android). After playing around with the site, I saw a couple of bugs and reported them. Being a startup, someone got back to me immediately via email, acknowledged the issues and promised a fix. I also let him know that I was more likely to use the application if it was available on my phone. Now the controversy was essentially about whether or not you should hire someone who develops for Microsoft platforms and here I was asking for an application from a Microsoft product using the same development methodologies (.Net) that caused the controversy in the first place. Let’s just say I thought I was essentially pissing in the wind to ask for support for my phone. But the person at the other end of the line was respectful and seemed open to the idea. And it occurred to me that given the pareto principle, it was likely that few people gave feedback and I might make up an inordinate chunk of their feedback-giving public and I had asked for a concrete thing to make me a happy customer. In other words, if only 4 people gave feedback that month, including yours truly, and at least one of them (me) asked for support of the Windows Phone platform, that would be 25% of the feedback giving population for that month.
Whatever. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and I went on my merry way. Fast forward to today. I go back to Expensify’s website and there is an application for Windows Phone app to be downloaded (and I did)! I really don’t know if I was part of the reason they did it. It’s more likely that I was not, however there are tons of web apps that don’t have a Windows Phone because the platform is still not well penetrated in the market. That Expensify had one was the result of some prioritizing of the scarce resources of a startup and not mere chance.
This got me thinking. What if there was a way for early adopters of a platform to let their voices be heard in an inordinately loud manner? This kind of internet activism is fairly common for political issues (See SOPA) but not for technology companies. In fact there is a word for it in political circles, astroturfing – feigning a grassroots movement. Here’s how I imagine it could work – everyplace you have a download link for a mobile app, you would have a badge that showed up that let you submit feedback to the vendor that you wanted the app developed for your phone platform. This kind of feedback is highly valued by startups because few people bother to give it. In market parlance, it’s an outsized signal for them in a world where the signal to noise ratio can be really low. This kind of ‘platform activism’ could potentially move the needle in prioritizing applications for new platforms. And it would be legitimate – all you would be doing would be to give people a voice and an opportunity for expression about the web applications they already use every day that they wanted on their mobile platform.
Astroturfing is especially effective when the advocating community is super invested in the outcome of the activism and can be reached fairly easily and homogenously. Fortunately the Windows Phone cohort is exactly that and they all carry their phones around all the time. Some thought has to be given to a cheap and effective distribution channel for enabling this kind of ‘speech’, but it can be done.
You heard it here first.
Postscript:
There is an implicit assumption here that web apps need to migrate to the phone. But ofcourse we’re also seeing the opposite where mobile apps eventually migrate to the web. It’s much harder to astroturf applications you don’t have on your mobile platform without being intrusive. On a broad scale, most cool products will have both web and mobile apps. For now, it’s probably true that the preponderance of gravity is on web apps, but as that shifts, an astroturfer has to get pretty ingenious to continue his world changing work. Of course this method could equally have been applied to WebOS and can be applied to the upcoming Windows 8 platform.
Post postscript:
How would you actually do this? a) create a verb in the Windows Phone mobile browser that essentially says “I want this as an app” that can be used on any website – it will be aggregated with customer comments and delivered to the web app management/contact email b) create a ‘support Windows Phone app’ and put instructions on how to be activist on it. c) Push to download a browser helper that will paint a badge on all mobile download links that will send “I want this as a windows phone app” if a Windows Phone app is not available. Thought of a good way to astroturf (Windows Phone) platforms that I haven’t written down? Drop me a line.
