Interface Disruption
Can the Messaging User Interface eclipse the Graphical User Interface?
What is disruption? It’s one of the most overused terms in technology, but, for the essential primer, I refer to Horace Dediu:
Disruption happens when the strong are defeated by the weak…The strong can be defeated when the fight is unfair.
And when is the fight unfair? According to Dediu, when the challenger fights by “different rules” than the incumbent. So different, in fact, that the incumbent doesn’t recognize the challenge or take the fight seriously:
This quote (mistakenly attributed to Gandhi) describes it best: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The main test of asymmetry is to ask whether a challenger’s entry is ignored (or welcomed) by the incumbents. Most asymmetric challenges are not taken seriously because they initially benefit the incumbent. The side-effect is that it lulls them into a sense of security resulting in a lack of response.
While disruption is typically applied to businesses, the principles of asymmetric competition can be applied more broadly. Today, I’m interested in applying the theory to a new area: user interface design.
Incumbent: The Graphical User Interface
For decades, the User Interface king-of-the-hill has been the Graphical User Interface (GUI), or, as I would describe it to my mom, the “point-and-click” or “point-and-tap” interface. Most iterations of the GUI have familiar features: icons, menus, windows, and a pointing device.
The GUI has gone through two major eras, both kicked off by Apple. The Macintosh was the first mass-market personal computer with a graphical, windowed interface, enabled by the mouse. The iPhone brought multi-touch to the world, making the manipulation of on-screen objects far more direct, because this time the pointer was attached to your body.
Both the mouse-driven and the finger-driven GUI enabled entirely new platforms and the creation of massive new companies. Mobile apps, in particular, have brought software to nearly every person on the planet. But disruption theory posits that at some point a technology becomes “good enough,” and further attempts to improve it, by adding features and capabilities, begin to “over-serve” the customer. In other words, once a technology reaches a certain level of quality, improvements to it don’t meaningfully impact the user.
The question I would ask is: has the graphical user interface reached that point? Are apps “good enough,” and is the world ready for something simpler and easier to use, even if it’s less capable initially?
Challenger: The Conversational Interface
The conversational interface, or the “messaging” interface, or the “chat” interface (on the right in the picture above), is worse than the GUI in several important ways:
There’s little opportunity for visual customization, like special buttons, controls, or navigation.
Because the conversation proceeds chronologically, it’s hard to maintain persistent functionality. Buttons and action items are “washed away” as the conversation moves forward.
More complicated smartphone sensors and capabilities—like the camera, accelerometer, GPS, and payments—are inaccessible until allowed by the messaging platform.
So, on their face, “chat services,” (which is what I will call software that runs in a messaging interface) are vastly inferior and will be defeated by “apps,” proper. But the messaging interface does have a few key advantages:
Messaging apps, like iMessage, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Kik, and Telegram, are the most popular apps on smartphones. Messaging interfaces are therefore the most broadly understood.
Communication is a “first-class citizen.” (Obviously.) Talking to other people is what messaging apps do, and thus messaging apps can orient wholly around communication/connection with other humans.
Messaging is inherently “real-time.” While apps are mostly solitary affairs, messaging apps cry out to be shared, participated in, and collaborated on in real time.
I submit that these asymmetric advantages—simplicity, simultaneity, and a focus on communication—are more important than the obvious disadvantages around interface flexibility. To frame the discussion in disruptive terms, smartphone apps’ graphical user interfaces are mostly “over-serving” users’ needs, and there’s an opportunity for an asymmetric entry into the market.
The importance of chat services’ focus on communication, in particular, cannot be overstated. One could make the argument that the majority of software enables human communication in one way or another, and embedding software inside an interface designed explicitly for communication is the obvious next step. To quote Ben Thompson, who called messaging “Mobile’s Killer App”:
Given that we are all humans and crave human interaction and affection, we are more than happy to give massive amounts of attention to messaging, to those who matter most to us, and who are always there in our pockets and purses.
It’s only natural that developers will want to be on the platform where users are spending most of their time, and that platform is messaging.
What Happens Next
Way back in 2011, when Siri was first released, Dediu wrote an essay positing that Siri might be the next “revolutionary user interface” that reshapes the technology industry. He proposed several reasons for why Siri might be the next disruptive hit:
It’s not good enough
There are many smart people who are disappointed by it
Competitors are dismissive
It does not need a traditional, expensive smartphone to run but it uses a combination of local and cloud computing to solve the user’s problem.
Keep in mind that being “not good enough” and creating “disappointment” are positive traits for potential disruptors—asymmetric competition is usually dismissed.
In my mind, these arguments apply just as well (or better) to messaging interfaces. And if we accept that messaging interfaces will disrupt graphical ones, the obvious follow-up question is: what happens next? Which companies will rise and fall and which industries will be transformed?
There’s two areas I’d like to explore—the impacts on big companies, and on startups.
The Big Boys
Two companies seem poised to harness the disruptive messaging wave in the United States. (WeChat has clearly won the space in China.)
The first is Slack. The Slack team has bet big on chat services for the enterprise, putting up a directory and aggressively marketing the expansion of their messaging platform. Communication is at the core of the way corporations function (again, obviously), and Slack is well-positioned to be the preferred way for developers to distribute messaging-based software to companies, large and small.
The second is Facebook, or more specifically Facebook Messenger. While the chat platform got off to a rocky start, the Messenger team is adding features quickly and seems to have real ambitions for the platform. As a developer, this is what I’m betting on. They have the audience, the leadership, and the vision.
Who stands to lose the most from interface disruption? The obvious answer is Apple. While Google has benefitted from the Android ecosystem, it is technologically and culturally well-poised to take advantage of a new interface that requires less design effort and more cloud + AI capabilities. (Although I’m not sure what their business model in a chat-service driven world might be.)
Apple, on the other hand, has made a tremendous investment in apps as a key driver of iOS uptake and lock-in. If something else takes their place, particularly if it’s cross-platform, one of the best reasons to buy Apple hardware, packaged with Apple software, will be gone.
The Apple leadership seems to be aware of the messaging opportunity, as iOS 10 allows developers to make, essentially, mini-apps that run within iMessage. But, like “regular” mobile apps, the new mini-apps require a full-screen GUI to function well. And they don’t embrace the disruptive potential of messaging—communication isn’t a key part of the interface and developers can’t send messages to users directly. Apple’s vision for messaging is iOS apps you can launch from your keyboard.
Services that use messaging to communicate with users, not GUI apps within the iMessage keyboard, are where the opportunity lies.
Will Apple respond directly to the disruptive threat of messaging-based software? Do they see it as a threat at all? Or are they falling into the classic incumbent’s trap, as described above by Dediu?
Most asymmetric challenges are not taken seriously because they initially benefit the incumbent. The side-effect is that it lulls them into a sense of security resulting in a lack of response.
Apple likely sees messaging platforms as benign or beneficial. More capabilities in messaging apps means that more people have more reasons to buy smartphones. And more demand for smartphones is good for Apple’s business model. But, in the long run, messaging apps will do more and more of what apps do, and the importance of Apple’s operating system advantage will diminish.
Apple may be facing a particular variant of “The Innovator’s Dilemma”—I’d call it “The Platform-Owner’s Dilemma.” Microsoft faced the same problem with the advent of the web in the late ’90s and ’00s, as onerous and expensive desktop software was supplanted by web apps. Why would a developer take the massive time and effort to make and distribute a Windows email client when they could make Gmail (or Hotmail, or Yahoo mail), which runs in everyone’s browser, doesn’t require physical distribution, and can be updated and improved on a daily basis? What to do when the capabilities provided by your software platform over-serve developers and customers?
The Startups
To mangle a Jeff Bezos aphorism, “Your disruption is my opportunity.”
When the means of producing a compelling product become quicker, easier, and cheaper, startups rush in. And the messaging disruption will be the greatest leap forward in ease-of-software-development since the World Wide Web. In fact, despite the recent hype cycle, I think most people are drastically underrating how big a leap forward the messaging revolution will be.
As a mental exercise, go through the most popular apps in the most popular categories and think about whether or not the need they serve—i.e., the “job to be done”—can be served in messaging:
I need to get somewhere
I need a date
I need some food
I need to buy something
I am bored
What are my friends up to
I want to learn something new
What is happening in the world
I’d like to receive status updates from celebrities
All of these needs can be served as well or better in messaging. More excitingly, new interfaces allow for new solutions to new problems—there are human needs not on this list that messaging services will satisfy.
As if that weren’t enough, chat-based services are significantly easier and faster to make, and much easier to share and “install.” Having been an app developer, I can say from experience that the 30–60 seconds it takes for someone to find, download, install, and sign up for an app is a significant hurdle to adoption. Signing up for a chat service is as easy as “signing up” for a webpage—click a link, and you’re done. If that’s not a recipe for a massive swell of new software products, I don’t know what is.
In closing, I refer to Peter Thiel’s advice on how to build something that’s a major part of the future:
It’s like surfing. The goal is to catch a big wave. If you think a big wave is coming, you paddle really hard. Sometimes there’s actually no wave, and that sucks.
But you can’t just wait to be sure there’s a wave before you start paddling. You’ll miss it entirely. You have to paddle early, and then let the wave catch you. The question is, how do you figure out when the next big wave is likely to come?
If you’re a small startup interested in catching the messaging wave, I’d recommend you start paddling now.
