Monday, June 18, 2007

iPhone success..!!

Apple introduces its iPhone this month. Big Questions is-- will it be a success?

I was reading about pattern of Failure of Convergence Devices.

An iPod is a divergence device; an iPhone is a convergence device. MP3 players(before iPod) were are with flash-memory units capable of holding only 20 or 30 songs. The first iPod, on the other hand, had a hard drive and could hold thousands of songs. Now there were two types of MP3 players, a classic example of divergence at work.

in the past--

* The computer/phone. AT&T, Motorola and others introduced combination products. Few were ever purchased.
* The computer/TV. Apple, Gateway, Toshiba, Philips and others tried to market combination products with little success.
* Interactive TV. Microsoft spent $425 million to buy WebTV and then poured more than half a billion dollars into the venture. That didn't work, so it moved on to Ultimate TV, which didn't work either.
* Cellevision. Everybody is talking about the third screen, watching TV on your cellphone, but relatively few people do. (The real action in TV is the booming market for divergence products such as big-screen plasma and LCD sets.)
* Media-center PCs. Everybody was going to run everything in their homes from personal computers. It never happened.

A convergence failure is never seen as a "conceptual" failure; it's always seen as an "execution" failure. "The concept was sound; they just didn't do it right."

for Steve Job, more than one thing has to be right this time (mobile operator, internet connection speed/cost,..). for sure, it will make in-road in BlackBerry market but in wider consumer mobile market its impact is remain to be seen. Iam Apple Fan, I can only predict it will be very very successfully (subjective analysis)

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