Oh, Charlie. Charlie Kindel, that is. He used to work at Microsoft. He still has Microsoft in his blood as he tries to explain why Windows Phone 7 hasn’t taken off.

I thought about posting this over on Google+ or Facebook or Twitter, but I like the way MG Siegler is treating it. All the stupid stuff goes on the blog and all the important stuff goes on YouTube, Tumblr, or Google+. Heh.

MG mailed Charlie’s post back with a “way too late” headline and pointed out that apps do matter.

It’s worse than that. Sorry Charlie.

I had dozens of people here for several events this weekend. Phones came up in nearly every conversation. Not a single person brought up Windows Phone 7.

While watching TV I was reminded again of why: it’s all about apps. Yeah, Charlie, all that other stuff matters a bit. You know, what Carriers decide to push and all that. But only if the customers are willing to go along with the push.

See, I used to work retail and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t unload crappy products on consumers. They generally are smarter than that.

One thing I learned working the counter at several Silicon Valley consumer electronics stores is that there’s only one thing people really care about when it comes to buying things:

Not looking stupid.

Now, let’s look at the ads on TV right now. There’s all sorts of people saying to get their app, including the local TV news departments. Do they talk about Android? Yes, of course. iOS? Of course! Windows Phone 7? Hell no. RIM/Blackberry? I haven’t heard that in an app advertisement in, well, forever.

So, when a consumer goes into a carrier store to buy a new phone, what is going on in the back of her/his head?

Android=safe.
iOS/iPhone=safe.
Everything else=not safe.

Why? Because all you had to do was come to my Christmas parties to see why. Everything around you showed that having an Android or an iPhone was “safe.”

When I go around interviewing startups I hear over and over that they are staying away from anything that isn’t Android or iOS based.

That means that any product not based on iOS or Android isn’t “safe.”

End of discussion. Until RIM or Microsoft changes that belief among app developers in a demonstrable way Microsoft will continue to struggle.

And don’t tell me that Nokia is gonna be able to change this in the developing world. Anyone who is on Twitter now can watch this search:

https://twitter.com/#!/search/apps

Go ahead. Put that search into a good Twitter client. Every second or two a new Tweet gets made. Now watch how many of them talk about anything but iOS or Android devices: nearly none.

I watch this search every day on StreamBoard on my iPad.

It shows why Charlie is so wrong: apps do matter and matter big time and TODAY matter more than carriers. UPDATE: Charlie claims he didn’t say apps don’t matter. Just that they don’t matter for his discussion. I disagree. Here’s why: Carriers are no longer hungry for a competitor to iPhones the way they were back in 2009. So, the “lever” to the market will NOT be carriers. But Android and iOS DO have a “lever” called developers and apps.

That will not change in 2012, no matter how much Microsofties (or ex-Microsofties) wish to hide from that problem.

At LeWeb last week former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt was asked by an audience member why the coolest apps come out on iOS first. Apps like Flipboard and Instagram. He answered:

“”So my prediction is that 6 months from now, I think the question
is exactly right right now, and 6 months from now, you’ll say the
opposite. Because ultimately applications vendors are driven by
volume, and the volume is favored by the open approach that Google is
taking. That there are literally so many manufacturers who are working
so hard to distribute Android phones globally, that whether you
like ICS or not, and again I like it a great deal, you will want to
develop for that platform, and perhaps even first. So think of it as a transition over the next 6 months.”"

Thing is, that doesn’t measure up with what lots of app developers tell me, and it doesn’t measure up with what you can see in the street.

Right after that an entrepreneur walked up to me with his app, which looked like Instagram. He wondered why the press doesn’t cover apps not designed on iOS. I said “come with me.”

We walked around the street at LeWeb. First person I ran into was Ayelet Noff. She is one of Israel’s top community connector types. Runs a blog called “Blonde 2.0.” But that doesn’t really explain her role in the tech scene.

“What kind of phone do you use?” “iPhone.”
Next up? Cathy Brooks, who does the same thing in SF? “iPhone.”

This continued with person after person until we got about 10 people. I think we saw one Android phone, nine iPhones, and no WP7′s. This was a crowd of European entrepreneurs and tech passionates.

“Had enough yet?” I asked the entrepreneur.

This matches what I have seen at conference after conference. Last year I spoke at the Where 2.0 conference. This is a conference with tons of hackers and mobile passionate developers and leaders. 80% of the audience used an iPhone.

Last week I had dinner with Loic LeMeur, who runs LeWeb. I watched him closely at dinner. He only used his iPhone. But when I started talking to him about mobile he quickly pulled out an Android and a Windows Phone 7 device. But it was obvious to me that his favorite device was iPhone. Do you think we talked about apps that only existed on WP7 or on Android? No way.

Other things I’ve noticed. Folks who study the app market, like Distimo, say that Android users won’t buy apps.

That gets discussed behind closed doors in Silicon Valley VC funds. Note that famous VC Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers has an iFund (they fund lots of famous iOS apps, including Flipboard, etc). When I asked Matt Murphy whether he was going to have an aFund or a WP7Fund he quickly answered “no.”

When I talked with Path CEO Dave Morin a week ago:

He told me how hard it is to build beautiful apps on Android. Tonight I asked him what the numbers were like?

“80% iOS, 20% Android,” he texted me.

Now, to be fair, not every developer sees these kinds of results. Bobby Ghoshal, CEO of Flud, says he saw more Android users than iOS users. The problem with his results is that he had a very strong competitor on iOS (App of the Year in 2010 on iPad, Flipboard) while his app had nearly no competiton on Android. Let’s see what happens to Flud when Flipboard moves over.

One major reason, by the way, that Flipboard continues to be Apple’s darling is that it hasn’t yet done an app for another platform. Developers tell me that Apple is much more likely to reward you with a “featured” spot if you stay iOS only. Path is one of the most public examples of a company breaking Apple’s unspoken rules and getting away with it (so far).

When I recently interviewed Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard, where he showed me his new iPhone app, I tried to nail him down about Android. He deftly didn’t answer the question:

What does that mean? Well, last week I was in the car with 955 Dreams CEO Kiran Bellubbi shortly after he learned that Apple had named his app, Band of the Day, as runner up for iPhone app of the year. He told me his servers were near melting down with thousands of downloads per hour.

Which gets me to the final point. Here’s why Eric Schmidt is wrong and will continue to be wrong: virality coefficient.

What is that? Well, it’s the ability to tap into an early user base and get that user base to tell other people about it.

Meet Paul Davison. That’s him on the left. He has an app that’s still in stealth. I accidentally learned about it at a geek party today in San Francisco. I watched him work the room and get everyone in the room on his app. Nearly every person in that room was an iPhone user.

He has not yet gotten funding. His app will be the hottest thing at SXSW next year. I can’t wait to tell you about it. I took a picture so I could remember the moment I first got on this app but I was also watching how the San Francisco network works.

I wasn’t the only one watching the reactions and laughs that Paul was getting. Users, even though they were asked to keep it quiet, kept heading over to other parts of the party to tell their friends that they had to see Paul’s app. All had iPhones. I think I saw only two Android phones at that party and no Windows Phone 7 devices.

Watching this was me and a group of VCs. They asked for the app and business cards.

See, what do VCs look for? Virality coefficients. This is why they poured so much money into Facebook so early. The virality coefficient for that was about what Paul was getting today. In other words, one user is likely to tell four other users about this app. That’s extraordinary. Just listen to Eric Ries, author of the Lean Startup, tell me about why getting a high viral coefficient is so important to businesses.

But it’s worse than that. Because investors want to see sizable adoption before they will fund any app, you gotta do the hard work that Paul was doing today: showing your app around and hoping that someone picks it up and starts spreading it around.

Will that happen with Android? It can. There are more handsets out there than on iOS. But, in my experience, it’s very hard to get the kinds of virality that you need to get funded on non-iOS platforms.

It’s also much harder to get the press, the folks who run the Apple store (they watch the press too and use it as a guide for what they should pick), and the VCs to take you seriously if you aren’t on iOS.

I don’t see this mix changing much. In fact, as Loic told me, he has moved back to iOS because of this and other reasons. That means that Google has its work cut out for it if it wants the sexy cool apps written for it first.

Now, when I talk with experts who help launch companies, like Mike Schroeder, who works at LaunchSquad, he says that Android is coming on strong. His clients, like Thuuz, a sports enthusiast app, are seeing about 65% Android/35% iOS and he’s pushing his clients to do Android and iOS together.

That’s good advice.

Now, who really is hurt by all this? Well, RIM is completely out of the game. No developers I know are building RIM apps on go-to-market entries.

Microsoft continues to struggle. It’s very rare to see a WP7 app demoed anywhere (LeWeb shows why, the only WP7 devices I saw there were owned by Microsoft execs/employees, or by app developers who were paid for their development).

Consumers who haven’t bought iOS devices will feel hurt, but generally only the better apps will get pulled over from iOS anyway, so are they really hurt? Well, only if they care about being on the bleeding edge. Most users don’t care so much, if they did, Android wouldn’t have the marketshare it now has.

So, all this really means is if you are struggling to get adoption, you have to care and if you like arguing OS’s out, like I do, then you’ll care. The rest of it will come out in the wash.

That said, Eric Schmidt will have to face more of these questions because Android isn’t changing the game that I can see. iOS is still king for early adopters.

UPDATE: Brian Hall asks “Are Android users simply cheap?”

Hi Dave and Fred,

Dave, I’ve been away from your RSS for a while now. Heck, I’ve been away from blogging. But I’ve been thinking about what you told me when I visited you in New York. You weren’t going to read me on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook. Why? You like reading RSS (you should, you helped bring it to the world).

Fred, you told me that I was nuts to give up my blog (I told you I had left it for the better engagement of Google+). You told me that it is dangerous to not own a place with your own name on it, on servers that you — at least in theory — control. Didn’t think it was gonna work out for me to post my content solely on Facebook or Google+ (both of which now have blog-like features and feeds).

I pushed back, noting that the ability to gather engagement is way off the charts on Google+ and, even, on the revamped Facebook (about a month ago Facebook added a new feature, called subscribe, so people can subscribe to my feed there without being my friend and they also gave us the ability to post long posts).

I also told you about Flipboard and how it’s changed my reading behavior. No longer do I use RSS-only news readers. Today I can see Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, RSS, Facebook and much more aggregated together in Flipboard.

Now Dave doesn’t like the paginated world of Flipboard. I imagine he won’t like Google’s Propeller (a tablet-based competitor to Flipboard), that’s rumored to be coming this week, or whatever Yahoo is doing, or whatever Feedly, AOL, Pulse, Flud, CNN, is doing.

I still remember the day when Dave first showed me how he likes reading blogs. He likes a simple feed where new stuff shows up at the top of the page, or, even better, in his outliner (for those who don’t know, Dave invented a lot of outlining technology that most of the industry has long forgotten about, but Dave still likes reading, and blogging, in an outliner where most of us just read Facebook or Twitter).

But something happened over the past few weeks that’s gotten me reenergized about RSS. What is it?

Well, Google, in its new “focus on Google+” strategy, has announced that it’s dropping some features from Google Reader. Mostly the social stuff.

Now THAT is interesting! One reason why I left Google Reader (and RSS) is because Twitter and Facebook just became dominant in the world of news. For instance, look at my Twitter news feed of news articles from major news brands around the world. Stick that into Flipboard and you have a world-class newspaper that NOTHING can match.

This change in Google Reader is going to be very interesting to watch. Yes, I see that lots of people are up in arms about this change (funny enough, I read that on your own blog at Scripting.com).

Lately Dave you have come into a number of different conversations. The famous Silicon Valley investor, John Doerr, yesterday, told me he found your writings to be as interesting, and smart, as ever. He’s not the only one who’s said that lately.

So why this note. I’ve decided to live most of my life “inside Mark Zuckerberg’s and Larry Page’s trunk.” It’s a damn nice trunk, too.

Acutally, I see it more of a dark force. It sucks all data toward it. Both Facebook and Google are like black holes.

I’ve decided to live on the dark side of the force, inside the black hole.

Why? For a few reasons:

1. I don’t have a business model to protect. I just need to be where Rackspace’s customers, and potential customers, are. Increasingly that’s inside Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ (yesterday at Y Combinator’s Startup School person after person came up to me and talked about a post or two I’ve made on Google+ or Facebook).

2. I don’t care whether my words, or videos, survive into history. Heck, the first few years of my blog, from 2000 to about 2003 aren’t available anywhere anymore and that hasn’t really caused me too much pain.

3. Everyone knows multiple places to find me, so I don’t care that one company could delete me anymore, either. Remember when Facebook deleted me for about a day? Well, now, if they tried that it would just help out Google+ (and vice versa). And if both of those got together, I still have my blog. Heck, even if the entire social media system decided to try to block my words I’d find a way to communicate. Now my rolodex is good enough that I’d be able to get airtime even on old-school pro media.

But I keep coming back to what the value of RSS is. Dave, you nailed it when you said it travels through firewalls (in other words, those put up by governments, like in Iran and China).

And, there ARE some things I want you both to read, even if you decide never ever to set foot into the black holes of Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.

So, I’m going to start participating in the RSS world again. Maybe just as letters to you two. See, one reason that my blog has gone dormant is I just was having more fun inside the dark force of publishing. RSS isn’t as addictive, nor as social, nor as conversational anymore and that’s where I’ve chosen to live my life.

This is why the new Google Reader strategy intriques me. Sometimes I want to write a long ass piece where I don’t need to interact so much. Heck, I might even turn off comments here. Might even become, hate to say it, anti-social here, since there are so many better places to have a quick, real-time, low-friction, conversation amongst friends (both Google+ and Facebook are serving that for me, far more than here).

To Fred Wilson: I’d love to unpack where you think the investment opportunities are in the new modern publishing world.

My own feeling? Developers really like the new Facebook “verbs” platform, but they see the value flowing only one way: toward Facebook. They are waiting for Mark Zuckerberg to make his verbs platform two way: their data goes into Facebook and Facebook writes checks, or pushes advertising back out through those verb interfaces.

If that happens I can see lots of startups getting on Facebook’s bandwagon and it might even justify some of the valuations we’re seeing for companies like Color, Path, etc.

I’d also love to hear if you think there’ll be an investment opportunity around companies that focus on RSS again (or, better yet, decentralized identity technologies). I’m starting to think that there might be and if I’m thinking that, it’d be interesting to hear if you are thinking the same thing.

I’m thinking that way because I’m meeting more and more people who don’t have a social graph, don’t care to have one, and, even, are actively not participating in Facebook or Google+ because they are scared of what those companies are doing with the data. They have no such fears around RSS and that’s why getting rid of the social features over on Google Reader might actually be a good thing!

Anyway, thanks for listening. This was mostly a way to get my blog’s pipes unclogged, so sorry for running on a bit.

Your friend, Robert.

Ray Chan, Co-Founder and CEO of Singboard, and his partners arrived at 500 Startups with an idea for a photo-sharing app. After initial feedback for the app was luke warm, however, things changed drastically. Based on the fact that, according to Chan, karaoke bars in the U.S. paled in comparison to their native Hong Kong, the team regrouped, came up with a new idea and Singboard was born.

“Basically, Singboard is where YouTube meets karaoke,” says Chan. “It is a much more improved experience of online karaoke…We will get all the latest and most popular music videos from YouTube, and we will overlay the lyrics on top of the videos, and the lyrics will provide a karaoke-like feature, so that you can sing along with it and enjoy a really good singing experience.”

Singboard’s technology streams different content at the same time, allowing you to turn off the vocals on a video and play just the music. You can choose from among the top 100 music videos on YouTube, and, because the service is on your computer as opposed to on a machine in a bar, you can stop, rewind and replay songs as often as you like. You can even record your own version of a song and share it with friends on Facebook or Twitter.

Singboard will likely be offered to users based on the freemium model, where you can play a certain number of songs for free but will have to pay a monthly subscription fee for unlimited access. The app is currently in private beta, but Chan says they are pleased with the initial response.

“So far the feedback is really positive,” says Chan. “People just want to have more songs so that they can find their favorite songs to sing.”

Are you a Karaoke junkie? Join our Google+ discussion to share your best stories.

More and more companies are starting to realize that managing business processes using spreadsheets is a cumbersome and inefficient way of solving problems. However, hiring a software developer to create an application from scratch that replaces the spreadsheets can be costly and time consuming. RapidBiz is a tool that eliminates the time and cost associated with third-party development by allowing both developers and non-developers to create applications quickly and easily.

“When people want to have something done right now, they have a tool set that allows them to do it, and better yet, it deploys it immediately to the web,” explains Terry Bird, Founder, President and COO of VACAVA, maker of RapidBiz. “So if you want to get that information out to your customers, your suppliers, your team, you can do that literally in a matter of minutes or hours today with RapidBiz.”

The RapidBiz interface features a simple drag-and-drop methodology where users name fields, tie them to the appropriate field or column in the database, click save and create their app. In addition to stand-alone apps, users can create apps that serve as extensions of their existing ERP solution.

“I think we all understand that ERP is great and provides a wealth of features and functions around the process,” says Bird, “but it can’t do everything for everybody every time. That’s where RapidBiz really shines is if you need to extend an existing solution, whether it’s ERP, financial or anything, then RapidBiz can probably do that very easily.”

While the tool is designed to allow anyone to develop an app, RapidBiz has consultants on hand that will help you through the process should you need assistance, or they will develop the app for you using the tool. Apps are 100% web-delivered on standard IE and Firefox browsers, and users can link to any database to which a connection can be established. Customers have already used the tool to develop a wide variety of applications from a global quotation process to a sales support system to a global supply management system just to name a few. Once your app is developed, deploying it is as simple as clicking a button.

“When we developed it, we knew that you couldn’t just do it so I could develop it and then I’ve got to hand it off to a programmer, and then the programmer has to deploy it,” explains Bird. “We didn’t want that. Literally all you have to do is change a radio button from in development to deploy or active, and it is now available on the web. And it’s available to whoever you give the URL to and who’s authorized to actually go after the app.”

Come join the Google+ discussion to talk about RapidBiz in-depth with us.