Splashtop's Cliff Miller explains "point solutions" model

My old friend Cliff Miller, of Splashtop, took the time to respond to my post Splashtop, a different take on remote access technology to help me understand the elements behind its strategy that lead to the product portfolio it is offering today. Here is a segment from his message:

• Our mobile app customers discover our apps through Apple App Store, Google Android Market, HP App Catalog, Amazon App Store for Android, etc.. Users rarely, if ever, discover our mobile apps through coming to our website. Our mobile apps (Remote Desktop, Remote Browser, Whiteboard, CamCam, XDisplay, and Touchpad) have consistently been top-selling apps and have enjoyed very high user ratings (4.5+ stars) - so we know our customers are able to discover, install, and enjoy our products.
• Splashtop indeed is a powerful cross-device, connectivity “platform,” where many usage models and products are built on top of it. Our goal and interest is to unleash the innovations from among our 200+ employees internally. Here are a couple of examples:
  • Touchpad: One team came up with the idea of leveraging the Splashtop platform to turn your iPhone into remote control, and we launched Splashtop Touchpad on App Store. Touchpad became the #1 iPhone app in France on May 23, 2011, beating all iPhone apps.
  • XDisplay: This app was conceived by another team, and it became #1 iPad utility app in Japan and Taiwan. It was even featured on the cover of a hair style magazine in Japan (go figure!).Similar stories apply to Whiteboard, CamCam, Remote Browser, etc.
  • The beauty of the Splashtop platform is that many applications and usage models that can be built on top of it without a huge team. We believe this is the best way to unleash the creative energies of our teams, and we are glad to see the apps are attracting tens of thousands of happy new users every day.

• Splashtop OS and Splashtop Connect are “PC OEM bundling” products. Over 100 million PCs, from HP, Lenovo, Dell, Acer, Sony, Asus, LG, etc. have shipped computers pre-bundled with these products.

It is clear that Splastop is using a non-traditional, smart handheld device focused sales and distribution model. Rather than offering a few, well integrated products, the company is selling point products through App Stores. The goal, it appears, it making it easy for potential customers to find the individual features they require. This, of course, explains the rather long list of individual products that deliver a single solution.

When that view is taken into account, the company has demonstrted a great deal of creativity in coming up with different ways an individual might want to use a system-to-system communications platform and offering a product for each use case.

That being said, many of these base capabilities would be of interest to medium and large organizations. They are much more likely to be interested in a highly integrated offering as mentioned in the original post.

Thanks, Cliff, for reaching out and explaining more of the detail behind the product packaging strategy.