Re: The N900 Strategy and Why the iPhone is So Hard to Beat
 

I think Apple themselves have admitted that the iPod sales were dwindling mainly due to mobile phones being able to play MP3 files, which brought them into the mobile phone market and their huge profits. The app store took a long time to appear and was by popular demand, so that was another stroke of luck for them.

Agreed.

I don't know about American cars as they aren't very popular in Europe, but Lexus is owned by Toyota who fit your profile perfectly. Audi also have their fingers in different pies, the high end is Lamborghini, for VW it's Bugatti, and for Fiat it's Ferrari, for example.

Re: The N900 Strategy and Why the iPhone is So Hard to Beat
 

This would be cool if it were true. But when introduced, the iPhone was unsubsidized for a year @ $599. I can't remember, was it a failure that first year?

You don't know what you're talking about. That also goes for other things you said in your thread but your blinded-by-hate inaccuracies are as boring as they are annoying. Get a new tune or next time I won't be so nice.

Hey, you finally made a true statement!

Re: The N900 Strategy and Why the iPhone is So Hard to Beat
 

Okay, I explicitly said in the very words from my post that you quote that the U.S. traditionally has not been the most important cell phone market. So I don't know how you come to the conclusion that I'm implicity assuming that the U.S. drives the global cell phone market. I'm just trying to look at the actual situation that has actually come to pass, rather than taking some sort of ideological stance for or against the U.S. (or any place else, for that matter).

Here's what the Business Week article said in full on this point:

It didn't have to be this way. There's no "implicit" or "natural" force driving things to be this way. But by accident of the iPhones massive popularity, which has completely changed the cell phone market (everyone is coming out with large, touch screen driven, more desktop like phones now) and by accident of the equally massive popularity of the Apple app store and the money that can be made from it, developers have gravitated there. The phenomenon exploded in the U.S. and for better or worse, the U.S. has suddenly moved from being one of the less important cell phone markets to the center of stage. The growth of Android, which is supposed to pass Apple in the next couple years, will only further compound this effect.

It seems like every time someone makes an analysis of the market situation and the forces that are driving it, which acknowledges how much influence the U.S. can have on it, people get offended because they assume it's some kind of U.S. cheerleading. I'm not recommending or defending what's happened. I'm just trying to think about the actual dynamics.

The idea that Nokia is somehow more virtuous or a good "global citizen" is deeply naive. When it comes down to it, it's not about number of handsets sold and it's not about population size and it's now about geographic area covered. It's about money. Nokia cares about nothing more than the bottom line, just as much as Apple. If Nokia engages in some sort of project like Nokia Life Tools, in India, to "empower" people in argriculture, that's just pure PR. They're trying to make people so hooked into and used to their products that they become indispensible. This is no different froom Apple giving educational discounts on their products to students at universities. Get to people early and young, get them hooked. Frankly, I think the insidiousness of the PR side of marketing is even more loathsome than straight forward advertising, precisely because people are duped into thinking huge corporations actually care about people. It's perverse.

And in the end even if Nokia wanted to be virtuous, purely out of the goodness of its corporate heart, they would still be effected by the forces that drive the market. Once everyone starts wanting a large touchscreen driven phone, iPhone or not, once everyone is hooked into the app store phenomenon, Nokia has to respond and follow the trends or they'll lose market share to those who do (HTC, Android, iPhone, Palm, whoever) and become irrelevant. So that's why what's happened with the iPhone effects everyone, for better or worse. I'm not endorsing this, I'm just trying to analyze it.

Re: The N900 Strategy and Why the iPhone is So Hard to Beat
 

I'm willing to buy that Apple's strategy my have long term vulnerabilities. But it's a little hard to see how you come to the conclusion that an economic downturn will effect them badly, as a high end product company. First of all, the high end products actually tend to be effected the least in downturns, because the people with the most money are least effected by downturns and can keep spending. Secondly, the actual reality right now in the worst economic crisis in decades it that Apple is having record profits. It seems like reality belies whatever argument one might want to make about it.

I think Apple's future as a high end product manufactuere with a niche (albeit a pretty large and hugely profitable one) will depend on it's ability to continue to innovate and stay ahead of the curve. Apple has profited from taking ideas, putting them together in a newly appealing way, and doing it first. Let's not forget that it was Apple that popularized the graphical mouse driven desktop, with multi-tasking. Of course, it's a lot of pressure to keep pulling these kind of innovations off. And Apple has had some flops, for sure. And whether or not Apple will survive someday without Steve Jobs seems like a big question too.

Yes, this is why I think Google/Android is the one to beat. Google whole business is built around highly integrated, well designed, web based apps and services. Add to that Chrome and Android, and giving the platform away for free, and it just hard to see others keeping up. Google has such a huge head start.

Re: The N900 Strategy and Why the iPhone is So Hard to Beat
 

I want to see Apple's "Profit" off of the iPhone when it loses exclusitivity from AT&T..

Re: The N900 Strategy and Why the iPhone is So Hard to Beat
 

Won't that benefit Apple and hurt AT&T? Isn't it AT&T that has exclusivity with Apple, not the other way around?

It seems like Apple benefited from exclusivity with AT&T to begin with, as a means for launching the iPhone. But now that everyone is clamoring for the iPhone, the end of the AT&T's exclusivity deal will only open the floodgates for Apple.

To me the only possible concern for Apple, as christexaport suggested, is that other carriers and AT&T themselves might not continue to subsidize the iPhone at the same rate. But I don't really see why they wouldn't, since the iPhone has been the most effective device ever and drawing in the most lucrative customers, who pay for the relatively expensive data plans and other services.

Re: The N900 Strategy and Why the iPhone is So Hard to Beat
 

I think you are right for this year. However, as processor power increases it becomes more and more feasible to run full browsers on a smartphone. At that point, it could become a Safari vs. Chrome vs. Firefox battle. The first smartphone that can implement this will take the lead (and I have high hopes for the N1000/Maemo 6 platform).

Still, Google doesn't care. As long as the smartphones are ending up at a Google web app, they make their advertising money. Android is just a strategy to force the smartphone market to make working in the cloud an expected feature of all smartphones.

Re: The N900 Strategy and Why the iPhone is So Hard to Beat
 

Yeah, those are good points. I would certainly love to see Maemo end up winning that battle (and hopefully maintaining it's more open source orientation). Although, as you point out, Google wins either way, which is why their strategy is so formidable.

On the other hand, I'm not entirely convinced that people want to reproduce the desktop experience, as is, on the mobile devices. It struck me recently that one of the reasons netbooks are so popular is not simply because they're inexpensive and very portable, but because they essentially have simplified the desktop (a little bit in the direction of platforms like Android, iPhone, WebOS, Maemo). I think people like the simplification. Interacting with the cloud through a web browser is kind of a mess. There are too many non-integrated options right now. It's confusing and a barrier to entry, for a lot of less sophisticated users. Interacting through a single portal, be that a website or a set of device integrated applictions, makes things easier for a lot of people. In this regard, a mobile OS that is highly integrated across applications and in the could, so that the distinction between browswer and desktop/OS is completely seamless, I think might be the most appealing thing to the mass market. Ironically, this was originally Microsoft's vision, until they got sued (for anti-competitive reasons) out of too deeply integrating Internet Explorer into the desktop.

In this regard, I found this video of Nokia's vision of mobile technology in 2015 really interesting:

http://www.slashgear.com/nokia-visio...video-1163237/

It's a vision of an extremely cloud/desktop integrated interaction with the world. I just couldn't help feeling everytime they say "Nokia" in that video, if they just substituted "Google," it would be believable. I don't see anything in Nokia's service and app portfolio right now that remotely suggests they could pull this off, whereas Google is already there in some ways. How is Nokia going to catch up? Do they really have the resources and developers to compete with Google in the cloud/desktop? Maemo is amazing and very forwad looking as a platform. But Nokia's cloud services are a bit lackluster.

Re: The N900 Strategy and Why the iPhone is So Hard to Beat
 

I don't know if Nokia can reach 300m service users they apparently want by 2011, but they are an innovative company so wouldn't write them off.

They have some interesting open source projects that link to web services like their mapreduce implementation (http://discoproject.org/) and I'm sure other closed stuff going on at their research centre.

Re: The N900 Strategy and Why the iPhone is So Hard to Beat
 

Dude, every corporation is out there to make money (and I don't see why that makes a corporation automatically evil), but there are many ways to do it, and always a difference. Maybe in your words, it could be said that Nokia is "less evil" than Apple.

However, when I go to the highlands of my country, where people still starve to death daily, and I see a cell phone tower with a ground station, that the people use to call outside, and coordinate the shipments of food and medicine, and when I climb said tower to discover that it was donated by Nokia, then yeah, my respect for them grows a lot.

Edit: Oh, and if you are wondering why I was there in the first place, well, the corporation where I work donated 10% of our quarter quota for us to go there and help with the relief work, and we were forbidden of doing any publicity about it. So yeah, all corporations are evil, right?