PC writes...
Many think that Steve Jobs is the man. I happen to be one of them, a dedicated follower of all things Apple. You'll be hard pressed to see me without my MacBook Pro, iPod (4g or shuffle) and white earphones stuffed into my lugholes. At home, it's Mac Mini and iMac. I am fully Apple-d up.
This is quite a transformation for someone who spent 10+ years in corporate IT working with Microsofts offerings. I'd never touch an Apple Mac...especially because our CTO had one and it caused us endless headaches trying to get it to work on the corporate LAN.
But that was before the days of (in reverse order for me) Intel Macs, OS X and the iPod. I'm their dream customer...the full iPod 'halo' effect really hit me. Got an iPod? You need a Mac! Cool, where do I sign up?
So, like many others last weeks Apple Expo Keynote was eagerly anticipated. You'd need to have been on Mars not to have heard about the big announcement...the iPhone. A redefinition of the mobile phone industry - a phone, an iPod and an internet communication device, all in one. Great stuff, just what I need...I think.
What followed was maybe unheralded in the tech industry. The iPhone was on the front of most daily newspapers, the hottest topic on tech blogs and covered by all and sundry. Everyone was talking about it...it is soooo cool. You just have to have one. Or do you?
Jobs claims that the iPhone will revolutionise the phone industry and therefore should we consider this to be disruptive or a discontinuous innovation? Can the iPhone really redefine the phone industry?
Let's break it down. A music playing phone with 4 or 8Gb storage. Nothing new...Sony Ericsson and Samsung have these already and 8GB is weedy for music and especially video.
An internet communication device. Eh? You mean a PDA or Smartphone? So, we're talking Blackberry, XDA and the other smartphones. OK, nothing new.
So, with the little we know about the iPhone we can distil that the underlying functionality is far from new. Why the furore then? Well, the implementation looks to be ground breaking...the advancement to digital (in the physical sense) interaction will be a massive leap forward if it works. Apple are masters of the UI (user interface) and nobody comes close to them in this respect so we can expect it to be pretty damned fantastic. But the question remains as to whether it will really work...for technophiles it will, but for regular phone users, business users?
But there are bigger clouds on the horizon, especially in Europe. In the US the iPhone will be sold exclusively through Cingular/AT&T. So, if you want one, it has to be on their network. There's no unlocking, removing the SIM and jumping on another network, so the iPhone seems to be tightly integrated to the carrier. Also, you are locked into a two year contract, whether you want it or not and the phone will cost you $600, not including calls.
How would this work in Europe, and specifically the UK? £350 (rumoured) to buy the phone? Whoah, I normally get mine for free, so how would the network subsidy model work...would it work at all? Are my calls included in that? Can I keep my existing number?
And just how will Apple get themselves into the UK market? A single, exclusive carrier? All the carriers in the UK are tight with the big boys in the phone market - Nokia, Sony Ericcson, Motorola - so how peeved would these guys be if an exclusive deal was made to sell the iPhone? Would the network operator be prepared to jeopardise their existing agreements? What defensive mechanisms will the phone manufacturers employ in retaliation?
So, many more questions are thrown up by the iPhone than it answers (no pun). I have no doubt that it will revolutionise the mobile industry, if only in the aesthetic and usability domains...restructuring the market is a much harder job.
Of course Apple have redefined markets in the past. The digital music industry has been revolutionised largely by the iPod. The personal computer market was in part shaped by the Apple Macintosh. But the phone market is way more mature, way more structured and fiercely competitive. Jobs has a fight on his hands.
So, disruptive. Probably not. Discontinuous. Likely. DO I WANT ONE. Hell, yeah - and after all, this could be Jobs trump card...people will buy one because it is cool.
PC
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1 comment:
I am mightily impressed by iPhone. As you point out Peter the features are, in themselves, not that special, a lot of similar functionality is available elsewhere.
And yet.....
Apple has always been about user interfaces, integration, whole products. What is special (for me) about the iPhone is not what it does, but the way that it does it. Nokia managed a similar feat in the early mobile phone market - they developed the best user interface and everyone else had to be different but could not better Nokia's interface. The Finns specialise in design and ergonomics, the result with their 'phones is "Nokia Thumb". Apple have managed the same trick with current iPods: you only need a thumb to operate it.
All computers are pretty clunky in how we use them. Forever tied to an input device designed specifically to slow you down - the QWERTY keyboard. Pen and paper have been around for a long time. There has been some effort to use pens as input devices with some success too. Not much has been done to emulate how we flick through a book, be it addresses, a novel or an academic text. If, as you say, the user interface works then we are potentially into a new era where the computer starts to properly mimic analogue devices that we relate to easily in the real world. At last.
I am a heavy iPod user and this new development is exciting. Within a few years the storage capacity will be more usable. It is ironic that when the first iPod was launched 5GByte was an enormous capacity. iPhone launches with 8GByte and it feels like a small capacity. Times change....
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