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Apple's Strategy Behind iTunes Mobile Phone
vishnu writes "CoolTechZone.com is running a story that analyzes Apple's strategy with ROKR. According to the author, the phone disappoints, but is this Apple's way of testing a potential market. Quote: "There was nothing wrong with the creative cells of the designers at Apple; ROKR is simply Jobs taking a calculated risk. He doesn't want a cell phone that doubles as an MP3 player to become too popular as that would cut straight into Apple's bread and butter product, the iPod. On the other hand, Jobs knows for a fact that in the future cell phones will play a huge role in portable digital music; therefore, he is hedging his bets. He wants to give people a taste of what is to come but at the same time, he wants to project phones as an extension but not a replacement of a portable music player. He's consequently hoping to discomfort Apple's competition with a cell phone that has nothing but iTunes going for it."
Could this be a lead in to apple in the cell phone market? Or at least a partnership in that area?
If they just licensed software that could greatly cut into their profit margins and their control over the style which is one of the things that makes them so popular.
Evolution or ID?
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I specifically do NOT want a device that does more than one thing. In my history of owning devices that do multiple things, it is always the case that they do each poorly. It is less than the sum of the parts.
Also, sometimes I want to invest more money into one device (say, MP3 player), but don't care as much about another device (I actually don't use my mobile phone much at all, so I don't care). I want separate devices so I can upgrade independently and invest where I want more out of one device.
So maybe the market is moving away from someone like me, and perhaps everyone actually wants one device that does everything, but I don't. To me it's no surprise that the reaction to the ROKR has been poor, because it's a poor phone coupled with a poor MP3 player (100 song limit?). How is that supposed to result in a great device?
--- witty signature
Sometimes this type of strategy is called a "call option". This means that by working with Motorola to build an "iTunes phone," Apple can test the market for MP3-enabled phones. It's probably cheaper to work with Motorola in this way than it is to do the primary market research. The ROKR, even if it does not sell well, helps Apple and Motorola be better positioned in the face of the latest telecom trend (or fad) of converged devices, specifically music-enabled phones.
If the phone is a success, Apple has a few options. First, they can build their own phone and build it with their award winning industry design sense. Second, they could work with Cingular or another wireless service provider to become a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), similar to what Virgin Mobile (in the U.S.) and Boost Mobile do, and where Disney and ESPN are starting. Combining their ITMS with an MVNO presence would help them differentiate.
Motorola gets something out of it, too. The RAZR was an obvious choice to do this with, but I suspect the costs of that phone are pretty high, and Motorola does not want to make them higher. However, by putting this function on the uglier ROKR, the RAZR stands out better. The ROKR gets them in the store, but they walk out with a RAZR.
With the ROKR, what Motorola and Apple have done is changed the argument for convergence. Before the ROKR, a consumer might buy an MP3-enabled phone or a regular phone. The former had the potential to hurt iPod and ITMS sales, but the latter does not. If the consumer chose the music phone, Apple's role would be limited because the phone wouldn't be able to play ITMS purchases, and Motorola would be forced to compete with Nokia, Sony Ericsson, etc. So Apple and Motorola benefit from pushing the consumer towards a regular phone and away from convergence.
However, with the ROKR, the consumer will choose between the ROKR and the other music phones, if that's what they care about. And they may swing towards the ROKR because of Apple's >80% market share for online music (chances are they have bought a song from ITMS). But if they're concerned more with esthetics, standing in the store, they may look six inches over and eschew the ROKR in favor of the RAZR, and then go buy the iPod nano, which in terms of size are together smaller than most other phones.
So the ROKR actually weakens the position of other phone makers (who are pitching music phones) and pushes customers towards the RAZR and iPod nano.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
and i CAN only say that the author needs his head examined.. The phone was in fact politically hampered by both Mobile Operators who did not want to give up their own ring tone revenue and etc.. remember folks ring tones sell at $25 per tune not $.99 per tune.. Apple's Mistake was relying on Moto to swing the Moblie Operators their way.. A better tact for Apple would be to give acut of the $.99 to Mobile Operators and highlight the importance of selling a large amount of handsets for their Mobile service.. Even Russ B has stated as much in his blog and his yahoo blog..
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
I have a Nokia S60 Symbian phone with a 1Gb memory card and a mp3 player installed. It plays all the music i want without any DRM and/or artifical limitations and is a very good phone to boot. Can someone explain to me why this new ROKR phone is supposedly the next-great-thing-for-mankind when it does not offer anything new or better?
Perhaps someone could enlighten me but I'm still unsure why the ROKR is meant to be new and inovative.
I use a Treo as a phone and have 2GB of space on my SD card (less a few MB of applications) for MP3's or OGG's, WMA's etc... and of course being a Treo I can do a hell of a lot more than just phone and music. There are also many phones that have memory card and MP3 support, so what's new? The fact that you can use iTunes? YAY - big whoop!
Surely I must be missing something here but the number of already existing phones that can play MP3's with up to 2GB storage that function better than the ROKR is outstanding! Perhaps if they'd included their 'iWheel' navigation (or whatever they call it) and gone for ease of use then perhaps my opinion might be different.
Haydn.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
Y'know, the phone is probably just Apple's way of getting in a sucker punch on Motorola. "Sure, we know style, trust us... you want the phone to be like..."
There was some bad blood a while back, was there not?
It's the most likely explanation I can come up with, at least. Apple tends to be better in what they put out, and Moto has impressed me in a number of their phone products in the somewhat recent past.
I love it. Apple involves themselves with a total clunker and people are trying to spin this as genius.
People, even Apple screws up on occasion. They better come out with a good phone within 6 months, or this is an unmitigated failure.
> when one will do, his calculated risk is not calculating enough.
This is conventional wisdom today (particularly in the tech industry), but I don't think it's necessarily true.
The problem is that a converged device assumes that the technology advances slow down enough that you can release the converged product on a cycle that corresponds to the lowest common denominator of the two technologies. Imagine an example where the - means development and + means product release. And we have two products A and B.Even if it requires no R&D to integrate the two, you can see that the converged device AB has a few options:The product releases slow down until the two technologies can be released together. Or you can do more rapid product releases, but the technology will in the converged technology will lag that of the stand-alone device for certain product releases.
If the two technologies are pretty mature, then that may not be a problem, but with rapid advances, the converged device just doesn't make sense.
We've seen similar things today. Many people have been eschewing general purpose PDAs in favor of more specialized devices, such as Blackberrys or iPods, because of the technological advances and the fact that a special purpose device will have a better user interface than a multiple purpose device.
As for carrying two devices on one's belt, when you get into the iPod nano and the RAZR phone, the devices are so small that many people won't care anyway.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
The reason why I wound't buy the RORK...ROKK...ROKR... whatever thingy is, it's a phone with some iPod in it while what I want is an iPod with a phone in it.
Yeah. Let's cut the crap about intentionality, "what Steve wanted", and look at what he got:
A) A device that has all the drawbacks of cellphone provider monopolies
B) It also gives the user the battery life of an "always on" phone
C) The need to connect to a PC for its music player functionality.
D) The need to use the vendor's network for all its cellphone functionality.
E) iTunes software, without its most intuitive interface element.
F) a crippling 100-song limit so the thing does not compete with iPods stuff.
This, folks, isn't some diabolical marketing strategy; it's a real turd cooked up through design-by-committee. Forget the convergence arguments for a second -- they don't apply. This is as convergent as one loud family and one filthy family living in a duplex: the filthy ones don't get any sleep, and the loud ones get sick from the roaches.
I love how people stretch for marketing. The ROKR's massive marketing will drive people to better products like the RAZR and the iPod nano? Yeah? Or how about a Nokia and a Creative Zen? People are going to buy the ROKR, warts and all, for access to Apple's exclusive catalog? Or maybe, now that Apple's in bed with Motorola for at least a few months, some other online music provider will take the ROKR's failure as an opportunity to team up with a successful cellphone maker, and use the leverage to increase their own catalog and market?
Give me a break. I'm with y'all when you need to look for an intelligent explanation for decisions, but every corporation makes some dumb decisions; and, no offense, but Apple's made some really dumb ones in the past. Some folks there are like the kid whom researchers put in a white room filled with horseshit. He jumps in, and starts digging with hands, feet, teeth, everything, and digs furiously. After about an hour, the scientists ask him why he's digging.
"There's gotta be a horse in here somewhere!"
Keep looking.
Because of ROKR, Apple now has Itunes running on java, which would be the third OS for their application. I think that is a pretty good risk to take.
I had to hack the phone to get OBEX working across Bluetooth and file transfers between the phone memory and the TransT Flash card (currently only 128MB, damn those things are small) because Verizon decided those functions weren't needed. I also built had to build a headphone adapter to go up from the 1/32" connector on the phone up to a standard 1/8" jack. It looks ugly, but it works.
I even use iTunes to fill my phone. I use a smart playlist that limits the selection to about 115MB (to account for file size varaiances). I get rid of the songs I want, add the ones I like, and iTunes keeps the file size right. Then, I can select all the songs, and do a direct drag-and-drop onto the OBEX exchange window, and things copy over. Unfortunetly, there are some driver issues, as it will cough on certain file names and sometimes just stop transfering for no reason.
Simply, this gives me a MP3 player when I wouldn't have one. Of course, I didn't buy a cell phone just so it could be a MP3 player, but it gives me one on the cheap side.
Exactly. This seems so obvious to me too. You need:
- a display
- an input device (at least voice, probably written too assuming voice recognition doesn't do away with it)
- some processing power
- some storage
- networking (gsm, wifi, etc)
The only (technical) reasons to bundle more than one of these in the same package is to reduce overall form factor or to provide a wired pathway for bandwidth/security reasons.
We've got bluetooth headsets, we're able to plug usb stick/flash storage into things. What would it take to have a wirelessly-accessible hard drive in your backpack/jacket pocket?
And of course, the real payoff here is that you have your portable versions of all of these things, but you should be able to walk up to and use and "public" devices (e.g. large screen, full size keyboard) and have them automagically work with your programs, your data, your network, etc.
Kind of like the PC architecture have standard components and busses (ISA/PCI/etc). Manafacturers can manafacture to the interconnection spec, reducing the O(n^2) interoperability problem to O(n).
So...what would it take? A "bodybus" specification? PCI-over-wifi?
Duh. Isn't it obvious that what I want is a modular device? I don't want one (relatively) huge, heavy, and chunky device; I want several slim light ones. I also don't want to have to carry all of it with me all of the time, and I want to be able to mix-and-match pieces.
For example, one day I might need to take notes, so I take the 4x6" tablet interface. The next day I don't, so I leave that at home and use my wristwatch-like display instead. The day after that I have a meeting at a R&D lab which won't let me bring in storage devices, so I leave the hard drive module in the car (but I still have the bluetooth headset and tranceiver, so I can still get phone calls). The fourth day I decide I want to upgrade to the next-gen wireless standard, so I replace only the tranceiver.
Can't do that with a Treo, now can you?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Also, I would add GPS to the networking bit -- it shouldn't involve enough extra hardware to make it its own module.Wireless USB.That's a little harder, because you've got issues like security and getting it to pair with your particular system and such. Either you'll have to type in your IPv6 address/domain/whatever, select yourself from a list of "near" devices, or use some sort of token (e.g. swiping a magnetic strip card, plugging yourself in [non-wireless], etc.).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Well, I'm sorry you have no reading comprehension skills! It was obvious that I was talking about modular devices because that's what the post I was originally replying to was talking about. What the heck else could "UNIX philosophy for mobile devices" be referring to, anyhow?
Anyway, perhaps "might" was a poor choice of words. How about this: I could take the 4x6" display on days when I would use it, and leave it at home on days when I would not. In my case, that would mean taking it to school, but not to my girlfriend's house, for example. It's pretty damn easy to predict when I'd need it!
Moreover, with the Treo I'd be stuck with a shitty, small screen when I needed a big one and when I didn't need one at all. The Treo is suboptimal in all situations, whereas my idea is optimal in all except the case where you can't decide whether you need a display or not.
And guess what! We're talking about modular devices, so you aren't limited to having a medium-size display or nothing. You could also choose to use a 2x3" PDA-size notepad device, or a head-mounted display and a Twiddler, or a full-legal-paper-size tablet.
Speaking of choice, you could also pick from a variety of storage device modules, just like iPods: big high-capacity hard-drive-based models, as well as smaller flash-based models. No matter which you pick, they'd still work with your display and your tranceiver and whatnot just the same.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Wait a second. I suddenly realize that you seem to think I'm talking about some kind of pluggable single device, like a laptop with drive bays or something. That's not what I'm talking about at all! I mean "modular" in the sense that the modules are completely separate devices. They're only connected by a communications protocol, and can be put in different locations around the body.
It's not "all with the same pocket-sized device;" it's quite the opposite! It's all with separate pocket-sized modules that are designed to work together.
My concept supports both a large hard drive and a small flash drive in the same way that you could put a 20GB Archos or whatever in one pocket, and a 32MB Rio in another.
I suppose that the closest thing to what I'm talking about is actually this, although it's way too clunky and Borg-like (then again, it's a research prototype, so that's understandable). It's not quite comparable, but the general idea that you should take away is the concept of the different circuit boards being distributed in different locations.
By the way, before you claim that that's not what I said before, recall that the original post was talking about getting his PDA (device 1) to talk to his cellphone (device 2). Multiple devices! Apparently you didn't understand what I was talking about, and considering that everyone else in the thread did, I think that says something about exactly which of us is truly the idiot!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz