On this WWDC day

[Peter Korsten]

Andrew Robinson schreef:

> 2008/6/10 Peter Korsten <peter at severity-one.com>:
>> Andy Tarpinian schreef:
>>> and what is so impressive about say the E61i over the iPhone? I'm
>> The keyboard. It's full QWERTY.
> 
> so is the iphone's... and I'm willing to bet the autocorrection is
> streets ahead on the iphone.

Eh... the iPhone does not have a keyboard. It has a touch screen. I'm 
talking about a KEYBOARD. I don't know if the E61i has auto-correction, 
I haven't found it (the menu structure of the E61i leaves a lot to be 
desired).

>> My E61i was definitely more expensive than the iPhone 2 is...
> 
> hard to compare like with like, given the differing contracts, but the
> E61i looks to be the same price here as the original iphone, and
> that's with a limited download not the unlimited iphone package.

Oh wait, $200 is including a contract. Forget it. I think it's illegal 
in this country, so I was looking at the retail price. Which obviously 
doesn't exist in case of the iPhone.

>> ... the
>> typical smartphone corporate customer just goes to the mobile operator
>> that gives him the best deal, whether that includes Apple or Nokia or
>> RIM or whatever.
> 
> Well, I don't know if this is true outside the UK, but the only
> operator that gives unlimited data is the one selling the iphone,
> therefore the one with the best deal is the one that has them.

We have flat rate. In fact, we had to implement throttling because some 
people were downloading 50 GB with their mobiles phones. :)

>> I think that Apple still doesn't understand the mobile market, and
>> definitely not the mobile market in Europe.
> 
> I couldn't disagree more, Apple know exactly what they are doing, and
> they cleverly leveraged the iphone exclusivity deals to force the
> operators to play ball.

Nope, they don't. Don't let Apple fanboy-ism get in the way of good 
judgement (like with the tens of thousands of downloads of the SDK, that 
was a good laugh, with almost more iPhone 'developers' than actual users).

See, the thing about mobile providers is that they get chosen by the 
services they provide, and at what price they do this. Their are 
different groups here: some will switch their prepaid subscription at a 
whim, if another provider has an introductory offer. For the market 
we're talking about, they are totally irrelevant.

The customers you want to gain and retain are the high-value contract 
subscribers, and an iPhone is a very good incentive for those. But it 
has proven that whilst Apple's strategy worked (to an extent) in the US, 
it didn't work in Europe, for the simple reason that high-value 
customers want a high-value device, and quite frankly the iPhone 1 
sucked in that regard.

Another mistake they made is that they consider Europe to be a smaller 
and more densely populated version of the US. There isn't even an 
operator that has an opco (operating company) in all major markets. And 
what works in Germany, may fail completely in Italy.

So now they're trying the business approach, but again the top models 
from Nokia (RIM, I don't know) have a lot more features than the iPhone 
2. So that's not going to work either.

Mobile operators so far have dictated to phone manufacturers what they 
wanted in their models. Apple tries the other way around, and my 
personal opinion is that their carefully crafted image isn't going to be 
enough to carry customers over.

And again, if they can't penetrate the corporate market, the iPhone 2 is 
going to be the same under-performing (in terms of revenue) product as 
the first version is.

- Peter