An informed and thoughtful Wired article on the mobile market by John Siracusa. I can’t find fault with John’s thesis that a prerequisite to big success in mobile is that your product has to be on offer everywhere that consumers want to buy — further that today the carriers control the consumer’s access:
(…) There’s only one thing for it. Apple needs to get the iPhone on more carriers as soon as possible. Nowhere is this more important than in the US, where the iPhone is available on just a single carrier—one that’s decidedly not the market leader. The only way for Apple to eliminate the distribution and marketing advantage currently enjoyed by Android is to make sure that everywhere an Android phone is for sale, there’s an iPhone sitting right next to it that will work on the same network. Only then will Apple get a fair shot at selling based on the things it can actually control: the hardware and software of the phone itself. At that point, it can—and should—diversify its iPhone product line just like it did with the iPod in the last decade.
Do read John’s complete article. Personally, I think mobile is the critical future for competitors like Apple, especially for the hyper-growth (“developing”) part of the planet.
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