Apple Just Learned A Valuable Lesson – iPhone Customers Are Real People Not Apple Heads

Enough, Steve Jobs should have apologized like any other vendor has for making a bonehead business decision and dissing off customers. For some ungodly reason, folks seem to think that telecom vendors don’t apologize. You bet they do and they do so by issuing rebates and repairing handsets for nothing. What is getting everyone’s attention is that it is “Steve Jobs apologizing”. I guess he was never wrong. Mr. Jobs, welcome to telecom equipment provisioning.

Telecom consumer devices space is far more competitive than the desktop computer or laptop computer space. The average lifespan of a handset is less than 8 months. The cost to Apple is going to be astronomical unless they find a way of cutting revenue deals that let them share the revenue from content.

Apple wait until you have an overt device malfunction and then you will discover how fast the typical handset user will simply move on to another vendor. Unless you actually own all of the intellectual property that provides for your handset functionality then all you have is brand power. AT&T took advantage of Apple's band power and announced to the world that their iPhone network is powering the iPhone. Funny thing about marketing is the people in the business know the AT&T network that is powering the iPhone network is the same one they were using to power the non-iPhone network last year.

AT&T’s network is the same GSM and UMTS based network they have been using for the last 3 years. It is the same network powering the AT&T Trax phone. It is amazing how product packaging can make everyone behave irrationally.  More importantly this is a lesson to Apple; in the eyes of the carrier the end user customer belongs to the carrier and not Apple.