iPhone… I tried to resist…
really I did…but I cracked; so here is my two cents on the iPhone.
First – and this is definitely a rant, so I’ll keep it short and sweet – what the hell is the deal with needing to tie phones to network providers??? (And no I don’t buy the Jobs spin that the need to work in ‘partnership’ with the network provider means you need exclusivity.) Why not an unlocked version? Even if you have to sell it for $1000. At least give your customers the choice. I still have some small hope that in Europe they might not marry a toad but the US precedent is worrying.
Now with that off my chest…wow. And I see that I am far from alone in finding that this is much more important than a cool merger of a phone and music player. MadMaxMedia sums it up nicely:
This is the first genuinely marketable iteration of a smartphone/teleputer (George Gilder- interview at Inside Digital Media) for a mass audience. This IS the teleputer version 1.
The key – like all of Apple’s products – is the user interface: obvious, intuitive, easy. A beautiful marriage of software and hardware. (For those with a dealing room background, think how powerful (and ahead of its time at launch) and paradigm shifting the Bloomberg terminal turned out to be.) Mobile phone meets computer. Without casting aspersions on the fantastic work that Nick Negroponte and his team are doing with their $100 laptop project, in 5 years time doesn’t a hardy future iteration of the iPhone replace it in terms of relevance? (especially if/when it has a micro-projector incorporated…) I have often alluded to the idea that I think mobile phones – or their progeny – will be the most important enabling technology in the developing world, ultimately connecting billions of previously excluded people to a global network of knowledge and commerce. Devices like the iPhone – by showing what is possible – make me even more confident in this expectation. Of course there is no reason why ultimately this will not become the dominant enabling technology in developed countries as well.
If hundreds of millions (or even billions) of people are connected ubiquitously to a global network of markets and information via this kind of device, the implications for markets, especially dematerialized markets (ie financial derivatives on any underlying), are significant and profound. The notion of wholesale versus retail markets will either disappear or be transformed beyond recognition from today’s reality. An enormous amount of work still needs to be done (above and beyond the manufacture and distribution of billions of smartphones) on building and connecting the underlying transactional infrastructure in such a way to facilitate an economic paradigm based on micro-transactions and marginal transaction costs going to zero. The biggest risks to the emergence of such a world will probably not be technological but rather cultural as nations, companies and people who based their historic success on competing in a centralized world resist the changes brought upon by a dissemination economy.
