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.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 8:03 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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