Smartphone Apps: Businesses Should Pass

Downloadable programs for smartphones are fun, but at this point they're too unreliable and unstandardized to be useful to small businesses

By Gene Marks

A few things I'm not going to do in 2009: I'm not refitting my house for solar. I'm not going to buy an electric car. And no matter how much my daughter pleads with me, I am absolutely not sitting through another Harry Potter movie.

Here's another thing I won't be doing: I won't be implementing a "mobile solution" for my business. And if you're a small-business owner, neither should you.

Want to buy some toys from the App Store or for your BlackBerry? Knock yourself out. Spend $50 on a little expense calculator or something that creates an invoice on your iPhone. Have some fun. But these are not companywide mobile business applications. These are playthings. You might as well download Bunny Farts ("just tap the bunny and smile"). It's just as useful.

I'm pretty sure solar energy and electric cars are going to be great things—in the future. And yes, running mobile applications from your phone will also be a great thing, someday. But we've got a ways to go before these kinds of technologies make sense for a business owner.

A Failure to Communicate

Take my last experience. One of my clients is a 50-person manufacturer in New Jersey. The company wanted to use its customer relationship-management software on its employees' BlackBerrys. One of the CRM vendors we represent recently launched a mobile application that promised to do just this. Naively, we sold it to this unfortunate client a few weeks ago. As of this writing, the application is still not working. Devices can't communicate with the server. Data aren't appearing as they should. Some devices get no data at all. I should've sold them a few farting bunnies instead.

Who's fault was it? The CRM vendor that wrote the application blamed "security issues" and pointed its finger at the BlackBerry server software. But BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIMM) reasonably argued that the devices worked fine and that it couldn't be responsible for a third-party product. Of course, the wireless carrier wanted no part of this mess. We pointed to George Bush, but that didn't work, either. In the end, all parties just blamed my company. And I deserved it. I never should've implemented this mobile app.

Another instance: Last week a guy came to my house to fix our oven. He worked for one of those appliance repair chains. He had a mobile application on his device to generate a quote and a work order. The poor guy's fingers were literally too large to punch the data into the phone. He kept making mistakes. And the wireless reception in my house is extremely poor, so the process kept slowing down and breaking. Ultimately he had to call in the information to his office, using my house phone. Another mobile app success story!

Love or hate Microsoft (MSFT), the software giant did create a uniform place to develop applications for the desktop. Now we've got Microsoft, RIM, Palm (PALM), Apple (AAPL), and Google (GOOG) running our portable devices. Sadly, developers just can't get useful business tools to work on them all. The market is so fragmented that no one software programmer can generate the kind of volume needed to create a seamless, simple, supportable, and—most important for us business owners—affordable application.

No Standardization

The infrastructure is also too expensive. The frustrated New Jersey client that suffered through the Blackberry/CRM mobile debacle also had to purchase a BlackBerry server and pay to get an in-house BlackBerry system setup. The whole shebang, including hardware, cost more than $10,000.

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