Jul 4, 2007 Jul 6, 2007 Thursday July 5, 2007
-
Faster iPhone faster! Kill!! Kill!!
My challenge here is to write the one zillionth iPhone story (and MY third) without repeating too much what has been written before or failing to include at least a couple new items which -- trust me -- you'll find below. This column is mainly about how to properly manage the introduction of a disruptive technology, which is harder than most people would guess. It's also about how Apple plans to make this an iPhone Christmas. Being better is not enough, as Steve Jobs learned at least twice before with the introduction of the original Macintosh computer and later with his own NeXT computer. Both of those products had spectacular introductions, rave reviews, and boffo initial sales, which shortly thereafter fell off a cliff. That's the way it is with many new technologies: you can't rely on early adopters alone. There are some people who will buy almost anything that is new, but there aren't enough of those people to help most companies bridge the sales gap that follows a fantastic introduction after all the true believers have bought and the rest of us haven't yet made up our minds. It hurt the original Mac, but then Apple had Apple II sales to rely on. It darned near killed NeXT. It HAS killed many a start-up. Steve Jobs has learned a lot about product introductions in the years since NeXT and nearly all of it comes into play in the way he has managed the iPhone introduction. Here are the rules, if you are keeping score: Set expectations. The iPhone was announced months before it shipped. This was not only because FCC filings would have outed the phone anyway, 90-120 days before it shipped, but also because you have to get people in the mood to buy something that costs $500-600. Months of anticipation helped the hype and helped the sales. Deliver on those expectations. Early reviews are generally pretty positive for the iPhone. It's not enough for the thing to be pretty; it also has to work. Follow up on any problems. The fact that Apple sees the iPhone as a hugely important platform for the future can be seen in the company's decision to give a top-of-the-line iPhone to every Apple employee, even part-timers. This is frigging brilliant. EVERY Apple employee becomes an iPhone evangelist. EVERY Apple employee participates in ongoing stress testing and customer feedback. You can bet that every technical problem will be addressed quickly, simply because the entire company will be experiencing these problems. Have no shortages. Apple is a big company that makes millions and millions of gizmos. The success of the iPod has made Apple the Big Kahuna with Chinese manufacturers, which shows in the complete lack of product shortages despite the success of this rollout. The expected gray market pretty much didn't happen for exactly this reason. Have an upgrade plan for the future, which is to say Christmas. Yeah, what about Christmas? Apple couldn't risk introducing the iPhone at Christmas. They had to get all the bugs out before Christmas in order for the iPhone to be a risk-free gift. Knowing that the phones work, and work well, people can get used to the idea of giving them as gifts. That's one reason why it is easy to predict that iPhone sales for Christmas will be robust. Only for Steve Jobs "robust" is not enough. He wants iPhone Christmas sales to EXPLODE. How do you make that happen? Well, you could lower the price, but don't expect that. Apple WON'T lower iPhone prices before (or probably even after) Christmas. I would expect AT&T to eventually come up with some sort of two-year iPhone subscription deal that effectively lowers the price, but even that won't happen until after the holidays. Incentives don't happen until incentives are needed and with the iPhone they aren't needed yet. The trick to spurring even greater holiday sales is to make a good thing better. It would be nice if Apple and AT&T could come up with some little extra boost for Christmas sales like, for example, a software upgrade. That was pretty much inevitable, don't you think? The idea that the iPhone could go even three months without a significant firmware upgrade would be ignoring the reality of modern consumer electronics. Apple or AT&T will have got a few things wrong that will require a firmware upgrade to fix. And while they are at it, I'm sure the companies will add a feature or two, like TRUE 3G DATA SERVICE. It is my understanding that Apple and AT&T are planning a fall rollout for full 3G iPhone service, with technical trials already underway in certain AT&T markets. AT&T's (formerly Cingular's) 3G uses a technology called HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), which is a combination of GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) and EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution). It provides average mobile data download connections between 400 kilobits per second (kbps) and 700 kbps. Not as fast as any of us would like, of course, but the new service will be 3-5 times faster than the current EDGE network alone, making your iPhone suddenly 3-5 times faster than it was before, right? I think so. The question here is whether 3G is already built into the iPhones shipping now or whether it will require a new model? Given that it is coming so soon after the iPhone introduction, I can't believe that even Steve would make us buy new phones. It is very likely that a firmware upgrade will awaken the 3G within all you iPhone owners. And there's that bump needed to make Christmas iPhone sales explode. Nobody likes the slow performance on the EDGE network, so jacking up the speed by 3 to 5 times will give people something more to talk about as well as making it even easier to give an iPhone to those you love. We'll get excited all over again. Actually, AT&T really has no choice but to move to 3G with the iPhone, given the problems iPhones are creating for the EDGE network (see this week's links for more). And what we're getting excited about is much more than a phone or a media player, it is a whole new computing platform. Talk to anyone with iPhone experience and they'll tell you it feels more like a computer than an iPod or a phone. This is Apple's platform for the 21st century that I am sure we'll see revved and augmented in a variety of ways carefully over time. It won't replace desktop or even notebook computers, but this iPhone platform, properly augmented and with the help of Moore's Law, has a chance to do some major market-share grabbing from old Apple partners/competitors, notably Microsoft. Take THAT, Bill.
-
MacNotables #747: Andy Ihnatko on the iPhone, the Macintosh and What They Have in Common
Andy Ihnatko went from being a star in the iPhone universe to falling about 200,000 people behind because of his TV appearance schedule during the iPhone launch. He's back to re-estalish his position, explaining what the iPhone and the very first Macintosh have in common, some of the less-publicized features of the iPhone, his impressive speed test results with the virtual keyboard and more. Andy talks about why he wants better Bluetooth, a headphone jack fix and why and blames MacNotables host Chuck Joiner for crashing his iPhone. (more…)