Call me crazy, but I think Apple have overdone the technology innovation, and undercooked the business model innovation.
A truly Machiavellian strategy would have been to create a cheaper mass-market iPhone whose features like Visual Voice would only work on a carrier who had licensed the complementary back-end from Apple (first carrier in each market gets a 90% discount).
So a really disruptive device would have cost under $200 retail; and done voice, SMS, photos and music.
And nothing else.
OK, I’ll let you have an alarm clock and a few games, if you insist.
Browsing and information services would be omitted — except to the extent needed to display WAP push messages etc. (We’re going to abandon the Japanese and Korean markets, there’s no growth left there anyway.)
The innovation in the UI would be in making those core communications functions as simple as possible; and improving the voice and messaging experience. This doesn’t need a massive screen, but it does invite improvements in navigating address books and message stores. Feature like Visual Voice would come from a canned Apple back end you’d co-develop with each of Lucent, Nortel and Ericsson to integrate with their existing voice switches, plus the usual suspects like Comverse for voicemail.
Everything else would be left out. All of it. Really. No wifi. No downloads. No Java. (I might even do a deal with the devil and license Qualcomm’s BREW under the hood.) 3G only for voice spectral efficiency. Especially leave out video and TV — they’re going to be important, but not launch-critical, and are battery-killers. SMS is the killer app outside the USA.
You’d then eat your way up into the higher-end features over time. Oh, and you’d gun to make every developing country where PC and broadband penetration is low Apple-centric. They’d make the progression path one that cuts out Microsoft. New low-end Macs would complete the range — basically a Mac Mini welded into an LCD screen. The real long-term threat to Apple is what Nokia is doing in India, but you can’t see that driving along Highway 101.
Oh, and I’m going to be contrarian and say that the closed nature of the iPhone is a feature, not a bug. Makes support costs manageable, and ensures feature integration is flawless. The iPhone as launched is not a smartphone, it’s a featurephone and fashion accessory. But the touch screen will turn out to be a liability: like programming a computer with only a 5V battery and piece of wire, in being able to do everything, you end up being excellent at nothing.
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iPhone? iThinkNot from Realtime Community | Unified Communications
I really haven't written much at all about the iPhone announcement. Ted caught my utter lack of excitment, but I'm going to elaborate a bit in this one post, and capture some links to others who both care more, and have more to say than I. In fact ther...
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Surely what we really want is not an i-Phone but a wii-Phone, a device with presence that does some of the things you were talking about in your "Disappearing Telephony" post a year ago. If Apple and Sony can get into telephony, why not Nintendo? See my post at http://www.veryard.com/industryanalysis/2007/01/i-phone-or-wii-phone.html
Posted by: at January 16, 2007 12:54 PMPromising looking strategy for a new entry into the phone business, but for whom?
Not for Apple in my view, as user interface and Mac synergies wouldn't be the key competence in conquering India etc. Apple's lacks the scale in distribution, the engineering competence on cost optimization, and their brand is not an asset either there.
To whom else could such a strategy fit? I don't know...
Fully agree that the closedness of the iPhone is a feature, and a correct choice in the beginning.
Although Jobs compared the iPhone with smartphones, he did not position it as one. Rather it seems to me that Apple wants to create a new category, which doesn't fit to the basic-feature-smart phone scheme.
(Java) games are the thriving 3rd party mobile applications, but games are hardly a critical factor for the iPhone's success in the beginning.
Since a healthy developer eco-system exists already for OS X, Apple is better off to gain first some experience with mobile apps and a level of iPhone sales that enable a 3rd party developer business case. Right timing to open up depends also on how the power game with the operators (carriers) develops.
I could imagine that they open up the platform for simple widgets (Javascript/HTML/CSS) in summer, but APIs for real code maybe 2 years later.
I also cannot imagine that a touch-screen user interface can serve well enough people's core needs for a phone, i.e. making calls and sending text messages. But since Apple claims to have innovated here a lot, I will hold judgement over back until I have tried it myself some day.
The point isn't to take over the market on the first swing. It'll come. The trickle down we've seen with all the other Apply products is already supposedly slated for the iPhone line, as well.
It's a smart move because they needed the first product to define and showcase the series, not push it. Imagine the oh-so anticipated iPhone unveiling being an Apple branded plus-one Nokia. That wouldn't have flown. Instead, they needed to come out with something that would take people's breath away, create and solidify their place as the ultra brand in the consumer's mind and then go after their wallets.
Posted by: at January 31, 2007 02:48 AM