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iPhone Open Season
It's the first week of the iPhone rollout, which is set to
occur with the usual surrealistic flair of everything to
emerge from Cupertino. The Steve Jobs strategy couldn't
be more clear: win Apple converts at the peripheral periphery;
bring new customers on board with iPhones, iPods, iTunes and
eventually they will need a become a full fledged Macolyte.
Resistance, as they say, is futile.
What Apple doesn't seem to recognize is that market still loves
choice. The iPod is great, but it's a ton easier to get other audio
and video formats onto other players. iTunes is simple to use but
the catalog just doesn't compare with what we used to have on
Napster and what we can still get on allofmp3.com. And the iPhone
is really fantastic, except that it's locked to AT&T's wireless network.
The fastest way to innovate is by limiting consumer choice. "You
can have the Model T in any color your like", Henry Ford famously
quipped, "as long as it is black." Real options for the marketplace
are made possible only by standards organizations, interoperability
testing, and long-range thinking. This is slow and not sexy.
Apple can't stand either.
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