Surrender as a strategy

Out and about at the weekend I encountered some of my friend’s kids. In a small church hall I was temporarily being “entertained” by a 11 year old twin girls using their ipad. I was curious if they knew about social media. I was helping them connect the ipad minis to the internet by tethering my phone while their parents were doing something else. 

They explained that Facebook was for old people. Like me I suspected they wanted to say but were being polite. What about Snapchat I asked? Apparently that is “for kids”. This was the authoritative view of the 11 year old experts. I then asked what they used. It turns out that it’s all about Instagram and iMessage. Everyone is on iMessage. 

The next day a friend of mine was talking about her daughter’s Christmas present. Her 16 year old needed to update her iPhone so where could you get a cheap one. I told her such a thing didn’t really exist why didn’t she get an Android phone like the £200 value phone that mam was using. It was explained to me that her daughter had to have iMessage because it was the only thing the teens were using at school apart from Instagram. We talked about refurbished iPhones to get a good deal.

Thinking about this I noticed no one mentioned Skype. The mums mentioned using Whatsapp between the adults but Skype wasn’t even raised. 

The next generation seem already lost to Microsoft due to their strange consumer strategy. However, they have the enterprise cloud and they don’t seem to mind surrender as a strategy.