John C. Dvorak disagrees with me on the potential of iPhone.
Dvorak makes a good point about the pace of innovation in the mobile industry which Apple would be very wise to note:
These phones go in an out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months.
Surely someone in Cupertino must be saying “iWhat? Doesn’t he think we thought of that?”. At least, I hope they are.
Dvorak continues:
What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong.
That is exactly right. iPhone is a big bet. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad bet.
Risk and opportunity, two sides of the same coin. If Apple’s right, the world is at their doorstep. If not, NOK may be looking better in a few months…
MarketWatch ran a story out of AT&T’s CTIA keynote yesterday on the wireless industry seeing opportunity in ‘three screens’.
Of course this three screens idea is nothing new. The importance of TV and mobile phone screens joining into the computer screen fun is something that’s been anticipated, discussed, and written about in mobile circles for years. What is interesting to me is that, perhaps for the first time, there is a company in place that has a reasonable chance to simultaneously capitalize on all three screens: Apple.
Mac sales are doing well. Apple TV has launched. And iPhone has already generated more than 1 million customer inquiries to AT&T three months before it even launches.
If done right, the elegant and simple Apple way, these products taken together represent a tremendous “three screens” opportunity. With iTunes as the digital hub, content can be consumed on any of a consumer’s three screens, when and how they want, at work, at home, and on the move.
One could argue that Microsoft has a similar chance with Windows, XBox 360, and Windows Mobile. The interoperability between the three, however, is not as streamlined and therefore not as consumer friendly as the Apple solutions, which are cleanly tied together through iTunes. And according to news reports, Xbox Live has something like 6 million users versus more than 100 million iTunes users, giving Apple a very significant advantage in the number of eyeballs potentially leveragable across all three screens.
The opportunity is tremendous. Heck, even the Chairman of the FCC seems to get it. I sure hope Apple fully realizes it by providing developers with the access they need to all three screens.
