Now that the Jesus Phone has descended onto earth, the question is how much will iPhone impact the wireless industry. Clearly, Steve Jobs did not enter the market to be a mere asterix in it, but is the conventional wisdom that the iPhone will do to the wireless industry what the iPod did to the music business turn out to be true?
It’s clearly too early to tell, for every hit (iPod), Apple seems to lay a miss (Apple TV). Will the iPhone we successful? Probably. But while Apple entered a very infantile market (digital music players) and earn 80% market share in the US, it’s not going to be as easy in the cell phone market where some predict Apple might get 5% in a few years. If the network is everything, this is especially true in the wireless space where the middleman between the product and the consumer is especially powerful.
All in all, the single biggest nuance between the iPod and the iPhone is that in the former’s case, Apple largely took on a media industry (record labels) shell-shocked by Napster and bleeding sales whereas in the latter it’s taking on massive telecommunication companies operating in an oligopoly along with other hardware makers with a clear leadership in the cell phone market (Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, etc).
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