Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By David Aronchick

The enemy of my enemy of their enemy is still (probably) my enemy, but boy they sure have a chance to turn everyone on their collective heads.
 

I have an Android phone – the only reason I didn’t go for an iPhone was that (foolish me) I thought the 140+ year old technology of an actual keyboard might still be useful. I knew I was wrong when I hit the G and the H keys at the same time and my phone crashed. What an idiot!

(Image courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY_keyboard )

Anyhow, for the most part, it’s been more than solid – the app store is really filling in nicely, and with TouchDown , I’m almost to where I was 3 years ago with Outlook on Windows Mobile 6. But I am constantly on the lookout for anything that will make me more productive on the road. As a former Microsoft Employee, I was both surprised and amazed that they appear to have rebooted the entire franchise so successfully with WM 7. We’ll see when the devices hit the market (later this year?!?!), but it certainly looks like they’re back in the game. It’s almost like they got so far back in the race that people started to lap them and the lap counter lost count and thought they were all battling together.

 
But the thing that absolutely floored me was this announcement yesterday from Mike Chambers ( http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/03/09/flash-player-10-1-and-windows-phone-7/ via Ryan Stewart http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/2010/03/flash-and-windows-phone-7/) ):

There has been a lot of buzz in the mobile space lately, and I suspect there will be even more around Windows Phone 7 at next week’s Microsoft Mix conference . One thing I wanted to clarify as it may have been lost in some of the other news is that Adobe and Microsoft are working together to bring Flash Player 10.1 to Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Phone 7 Series.

I dont have an eta or other specifics right now, but it is something that both Adobe and Microsoft are working closely together on.

Holy crap. The ONE thing that both Android and the iPhone lack and MS is nailing it. I can’t remember the last time that anyone (let alone Microsoft) went right to the heart of what was missing in a market and delivered, when the other major players had skipped over the requirement (for myriad reasons).

Apple doesn’t like Adobe/Flash , and refuses to let them run on the iPhone. This despite the fact that Photoshop/Illustrator on Mac is one of the top reasons for ANYONE ANYWHERE to buy a Mac – apparently Apple forgot that when they decided to become “a device company” (READ: Sony). Google doesn’t like Adobe/Flash because it makes the Web hard to crawl, and they both want control of all those pretty Power Point presentations . Along comes Microsoft, who is frenemies with EVERYBODY, and they figured out how to deliver what people actually want – FARMVILLE ON YOUR PHONE.

Without Flash, Zynga (and the millions of other casual gamers) will have to rewrite every app they have for every new platform. With Flash, a billion new devices became their playground. What platform would you choose? The fact is, entertainment (usually video games and porn) drive everything, and, amazingly, Microsoft put aside their desire to offer a unique stack end to end and drive for what customers actually want. This doesn’t mean there aren’t six million ways for MS to not succeed here, but they’ve taken a huge first step. So what does this have to do with you?

A problem that many businesses face is that they get so focused on competitors, rather than their customers, that a lot of times they will miss a huge opportunity to change the conversation (or watch in horror as someone they were not paying attention changes the conversation for them). Here are some questions you should be asking yourselves every day:

·         Who are my competitors? (I almost skipped this question, but, trust me, lots and lots of business people don’t even have a good sense of this)

o   What customer scenarios are they targeting?

o   Do I have any chance to displace them with a “better” product? (Extra credit for a truly honest assessment)

o   Where are they going next?

·         What do our customers want? Think about this with no baggage whatsoever.

·         How ACCURATELY are my competitors getting at what the customers want to do?

o   Where do they get their money from? Where do I?

o   If I was starting fresh in this business, would I build the company I have today?

Competition is almost never about someone delivering an incremental new product that slowly sucks away your market. It’s the unknown unknowns that you have to be worried about.

 

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