Even great Jobs nods
Ever since the poet Horace wrote of his irritation “when great Homer nods off,” critics have pounced on errors of continuity. One such will be admitted if Apple CEO Steve Jobs bows to mobile phone operator pressure and permits them to subsidise sales of the new iPhone 2.
Operators look to recover subsidy costs from advertising revenues generated by the iPhone. It is also likely that Apple will make concessions on its share of iPhone user revenues collected by AT&T in the States, O2 in the UK, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom.
The demise of Apple’s premium consumer pricing strategy is a believable gobbet amid the chum of rumour and leak whipping up the pre-feeding frenzy before this afternoon’s (1700 GMT) keynote speech by Jobs at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco.
Given Apple’s ambition to sell to sell ten million iPhones during 2008, having sold only 1.7 million so far, the move is overdue. What the previous “Rolls-Royce” strategy did was to open the door to increased sales by rivals Blackberry, Palm and Nokia.
Palm sold 833,000 Centros in the last quarter, up 21 percent on the previous quarter. But the big winner has been the Blackberry, with sales up 38 percent since the iPhone was introduced. RIM’s market share of US smartphones rose from 35 percent in Q4 2007 to 45 percent in Q1 2008.
By moving smartphones from niche business/look-at-me-I’m-so-important buyers to mass acceptance, iPhone created a new market, just as the iPod ushered in an era of mass sales for MP3 players. The coolness factor can only prevail for so long in the face of less expensive models.
What cannot be faulted is Apple’s brilliant handling of viral advertising hype in advance of every new pronouncement by Steve ‘Moses’ Jobs.
