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How Jobs Played Hardball In iPhone Birth
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Apple bucked the rules of the cellphone industry when creating the iPhone by wresting control away from normally powerful wireless carriers, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'Only three executives at the carrier, which is now the wireless unit of AT&T Inc., got to see the iPhone before it was announced. Cingular agreed to leave its brand off the body of the phone. Upsetting some Cingular insiders, it also abandoned its usual insistence that phone makers carry its software for Web surfing, ringtones and other services... Mr. Jobs once referred to telecom operators as "orifices" that other companies, including phone makers, must go through to reach consumers. While meeting with Cingular and other wireless operators he often reminded them of his view, dismissing them as commodities and telling them that they would never understand the Web and entertainment industry the way Apple did, a person familiar with the talks says.'"
If the 'consumers' feel they're being screwed by the cell phone operators, they don't need to purchase their services.
When people complain about , I always wonder - why are you buying their products if you hate them so much?
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oic you mean like the proprietary controls on the iphone, which locks you into cingular for 3 YEARS? retard.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I totally agree with your point of being able to "You can install your own apps on it". I am big fan of smartphones but despite liking iPhone i will NOT buy it because you can not run any software on it. Only apple made software or Mac softwares can be installed. Usually those softwares will be very few in the begining and the ones that are available will be expensive (live everything from apple). I can not imagine buying a phone, on which i can not run Opera Mini or many other Java MIDP softwares i used for productivity and connectivity. Nokia was my choice and will still be my choice until i can install commonly available softwares on iPhone. Waiting for Nokia N95! Paracha
so I can run my DirectX games on any computer.
You can play directX games on any computer - just install XP. It's quite simple. Even a mac can be turned into a useful gaming PC these days.
So ... Microsoft Word isn't an attempt at vendor lockin through a proprietary format because anybody can buy/create a different word processor?
Other companies can't start music stores easily because they don't have a DRM scheme that's acceptable to music companies and can also play on devices. If Apple were to license their DRM scheme then another company could make a music store that could sell DRM to music iPod (and the music corps require DRM), or they could make a music player that plays iTMS music.
If you're fine with companies milking proprietary formats, fine, but cut the "I still don't get what advantage proprietary formats give to companies" BS. It just makes you look dumb.