The assignment this week, to propose a way to create service envy in the mobile developer space, made me feel kinda stupid. This was a somewhat difficult assignment for me to tackle as I am not a mobile app developer and have no idea what they might find enviable.
So I took another look at the “cool” mobile developer sites that we looked at in class: The iPhone’s dev site and the Droid’s dev site. These site’s are both beautifully designed but mean little to me as a layperson. The iPhone site at least offered an explanation of the process of creating an app that I could understand. AT&T’s site was useless.
Yet as I finally came to understand, we’re not talking about the website here. We’ve already discussed the many ways in which website’s like AT&T’s could be improved. But why would a person turn to AT&T as opposed to Apple or Verizon/Google to develop their mobile app? What’s the service they offer? This took a bit more research on my part.
I already knew that if you were going to develop anything for Apple or the iPhone, there would be some sort of inspection you had to pass before your app made it to marketplace. I didn’t realize you would have to pay for the privilege. If your app makes it to market, you can make money on it, but Apple takes a percentage.
If you want to develop an application for Android, it’s less restrictive but you have to use linux.
So a few things AT&T might offer that would be better than their competitors… They could (in an imaginary, fictional, fantastical world) come up with a software developer kit that crossed phone platforms. If you create an app for a Windows mobile phone, it would also work with a Nokia phone on their platform.
They could offer access to their services for free, or take a smaller percentage of the app sales.
Another thing they could offer is service. Professional advice for developers when they run into problems.
Or perhaps the ability for a programmer to program in any environment he or she chose.
However, the one thing I was not able to completely reconcile myself with over the course of this assignment was the entire idea of “service envy.” Not a small thing, I agree. The book says that in order for services to be desirable and create envy, they must help people communicate their values and develop an identity in the way products do. There are two things that bother me about this. First, in the context of this assignment and taking the definition in a more literal sense than perhaps was intended, I would think that a person’s identity as a mobile app developer would be much stronger than the service they use to develop the app, no matter how good the service. A particularly good or avid mobile developer would probably use all the services available and have comments and critiques of each. Second, in a broader context but perhaps still too literally, I’ve noticed how, in the digital age more than ever, our identities are supposed to be tied to products, brands and services, and I don’t think I like it. I have brands, I have products, I have services, and at times I sound like a damn spokesperson. It’s an effort to put into black and white an overwhelming amount of information. Good brands and services deserve loyalty, but do we need to go so far as to make them part of our identity?




