The New York Times has a massive piece on Steve Jobs, again. If you read beyond the usual stuff, and hype about IPod, you come to the real nugget of information at the bottom of the story.
bq. Last year, the company quietly added two new wireless standards, known as 3GPP and 3GPP2, to its QuickTime software for sending and receiving multimedia over digital cellular networks. Because Apple was an early leader in the Wi-Fi market with its airport wireless networking base station, the reasoning goes, the company may be hard at work on a line of digital mobile phones that would take the company into the fast-growing voice-over-Internet-protocol, or VoIP market. But if that is Apple’s strategy, Mr. Jobs isn’t saying.
Additional Reading: Incredible Importance of Instant Message Clients
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5:04 PM PT
NY Times Apple Highlights
Gen Kanai has condensed the recent iPod-centric NY Times rub-and-blub piece about Apple into easily digestible chunks:- Apple now has 78 retail stores (and one in Ginza, Tokyo that pissed me off yesterday) - Jobs did not back Newton nor General Magic -…
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5:04 PM PT
Huh?
Just because they may enter the mobile phone market doesn’t mean they’ll be a VoIP player.
OTOH, ever since the first iPod appeared several years ago, everybody has been waiting for Jobs & Co. to enter the phone market.
I think an Apple phone would blow the market apart. If they learn from the lesson of the iPod, and start with enough capacity, Apple could be a major player in several years.
The cellphone market ranges from 400-500m devices per year, and each passing year the replacement market grabs a larger share.
What this could do for Apple:
10m units in 2-3 years @ $400 (per smartphone) == $4B in revenue.
A gross margin of 25% == $1B large, very large.
PS. Hmmm, how much per song download will the carrier get?
None. Carriers will literally beg just to be able to sell the damn thing.
PSS. If we watch how Apple has successfully entered the consumer software market, what does this say about the future of little guys selling goofy business apps for $5-20 a pop?
One last question.
How much of a cut will the carriers get from the xyz@mac.com hosting service?
Wow the carriers really are just dumb pipes after all!!!
5:04 PM PT
The Newton indeed, received little support. The iPod, though, has grown, and development has come as much through user (”customer” or “consumer”) channel feedback as it has through internal developmental increments.
That notwithstanding, the question for an Apple-based wireless phone system seems to be this: will it be another “our format only!” clubby sort of product, or will it be percieved as a mass-market cross-platform model, capable of competing –that is, to provide service to all– on a level playing field?
The marketing and tech savvy are there at Apple. The question is whether or not the product will be for the few or the many.
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