Apple has the hardware, software, content and the user experience to tie it together with an intelligence that no competitor in any one of these industries can synthesize. As the future hurdles on toward smaller, more communicative realtime devices what is Apple missing? Becoming its own carrier.
How often do I buy a product thinking, if only Apple designed it. Because Apple doesn’t just build and box something. They think outside the product about how a person will interact with other things in their life. It is how the new iPhone 3Gs (speedy, beautiful) shows a new 3 MP camera, but the autofocus is augmented by tap to focus software using touch screen. Outside of the product pictures are directly brought in to iPhoto (comes with every Mac) and shared easily on the web. Back to the point.
What is clear at Apple WWDC09 among the 5200 others is how badly their no-show prime carrier is performing. They bring very little to this party. This lack of coordination is why Dell and Micorosoft prefer enmity to building a product superior to Apple. It begs the question. What if Apple were to become its own wireless carrier? Clearly at&t is not keeping up with Apple’s pace of innovation. The operator has inferior stores to buy product. If you have issues with Apple’s Genius bar – don’t even try to buy from an at&t sales person. At my local at&t store they actually told me to take the Apple iPhone outside of their store to open the box!
at&t offers one thing. As a regulated monopoly they convey their precious frequency on which Apple iPhone’s do their 3G traffic. Sprint may be the only carrier with nimbleness to go beyond being a pipe, but they signed with Palm. Verizon, with greater coverage could be even slower in bureacractic support than at&t. Operator’s do not live in a free market. They are afraid of the future. Their worst nightmare? To become the ”dumb pipe”. If they fail to innovate then they will earn both ends. Apple needs a great patner. Operators and handset makers may best simply end up following the piper sprinkling the seeds.
Apple figure’s things out. Putting capital and coercive FCC considerations aside, Apple could become the operator with the best wireless Internet services.
Jeff Jarvis’s basic thought experiment guide “What Would Google Do?”, admits that Apple is the exception to all of his Google rulings. So for the wireless world in which we are entering, where everything communicates and computes in smaller and smaller packages, might Apple add services to its operating plan. What if a carrier were as imaginitive and integrated with customer services and producst as Apple? I find myself full of answers when more and more I ask, “What would Apple do?”
Tags: WWDC09
