Viva La (Telecoms) Revolución!
I’ve said it before - the iPhone was a revolution. The device itself was revolutionary but even more importantly was Apple’s ability to bend the telecoms to it’s will. It made them do things they’ve never done before and most impressive of the bunch was the revenue sharing model.
Prior to the iPhone the telco’s pretty much had the run of the show. They were the only game in town and if you wanted to have a successful handset you had to do what they said. Witness the 5 different versions of Motorola’s flagship RAZR2 - every telco demanded a different feature set forcing Motorola to customize it heavily for each one. The losers in the deal (in addition to Motorola…)? Consumers - features were stripped out to customize each one to the particular fears of the individual telco, obviously.
It was only a matter of time before the other big handset makers started wondering why Apple gets the sweet deal and they get the shaft. The dominoes are beginning to tip over… Nokia just stated that it wants to get a cut from subscriber’s mobile plans, just like Apple does. Nyah nyah nyah.
“As far as mobile phones are concerned we are sticking with our old business model - that is, we get paid for our devices. But for providing new services we are seriously considering a shared turnover model,†said Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo
Wait, what? Did he just say, “We want the telco’s to both subsidize our handsets and give us a cut of the sub fees.”?? Heh, that’s pretty badass.
It’ll be an interesting tug of war as the telco’s fight to keep features off phones - since they want to keep you locked into their system and monetize the hell out of you. From their perspective, letting you do things like make your own ringtones and buy music not from them looks just like throwing money out the window from their perspective. Of course that desire stands in the way of … the march of progress? Is that march inexorable? Hopefully!
It seems to me like all the incumbents from the telco’s to the music industry to the movie industry are all trying to desperately refill pandora’s box, sadly (for them) it’s too late and they’re just making themselves irrelevant by fighting the inevitable. For the telco’s, at least, Apple has changed the game and it will be increasingly difficult to prevent the other handset makers from gaining more freedoms (or at least more money) out of the situation. I’m hoping more freedoms - handsets have languished in mediocrity for too long now.
