Breast Cancer & Software

The Susan G. Komen "Stomp for the Cure" was last weekend. I've been doing this event for about the last 8 years as it covers both my love for snowshoeing and supporting breast cancer research. But this year has been different with the fiasco of Komen cutting off and then restoring funding of Planned Parenthood, in what was viewed as a very political move by some of it's leadership.

What does this have to do with Software. Well it's about how an organization can confuse it's mission for it's self. There was no confusion for their donors, the mission was women's health and not the Komen foundation. The talk at the snowshoe was all about how they would not have participated if the funding was not restored, with many still very ticked off at Komen.

Back to software. I suspect this is the same thing that happened to Microsoft in the mobile market. They used to own the smartphone segment and being Microsoft, it appears they expected the market and developers to stay with Microsoft. They didn't. The iPhone was easier to use, beautiful and provided a larger benefit to users. When the developer tools were released developers flocked to create apps for it. Even though developers needed to learn a new language, libraries and framework (Objective-C, Cocoa, etc) they flocked to it. Microsoft mobile fortunes dried up.

What was Microsoft's mission in mobile? It appeared to be "because we are Microsoft" which does not mean a lot to consumers or developers. Apple's mission appears to make products that are easy to use and beautiful to look at and hold. Beauty evokes is a strong emotional response, you don't see may weeds in vases for valentines day.

So what is Google's mission statement. Surely it must be more than "not Apple and not Microsoft". And RIM? They used to be enterprise security and communications, but that appears to be not enough anymore.

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