iPhone – iLaunch – iJune 29th

Apple iphone is getting shipped on 29th June. Yayyy !! Now after all the yayys and yoos lets get back to some hard talk. Apple is riding high on the success of ipod success. Suddenly its hogging limelight everywhere. But food for thought here is – Will Apple be able to capture the market with iphone, surely it has captured the imagination of people with it.

When ipod was launched. It was a virgin market, begging to get plundered. I am not aware of any great mp3 players from big electronics players that were marketed and packaged like ipod. So ipod cashed on its FMA. It was a cool product and Apple was also able to deliver ipod upgrades which were again lapped up by people. Besides there was iTunes. I don’t want to get started here on microchunking of the content. Blah! Blah !!

Back to cellphones. Today Motorola which invented cellphone reports quarterly losses. What’s going on here !!. Tomi Ahonen a veteran has asked some tough questions. Apple will end up delivering on its 10 million target, but only barely, and in so doing, it will take a huge hit to its profitability – this is a damned hard market to be in. The world’s largest engineering company, Siemens, quit handsets. Europe’s largest home electronics giant, Philips, quit handsets. The world’s largest telecom’s maker Ericsson found it can’t continue in the handset business by itself. The world’s largest home electronics giant Sony also found it can’t sustain its handset business by itself and joined with Ericsson.

And now Apple is rushing in. I don’t doubt their ability to do cool and innovative products, but this is a bloodbath industry and it moves at vastly higher speeds than Apple has ever seen in the Mac/PC or iPod business.

Its not going to be an easy JOB Mr. Steve. 

 

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