.Dust

Do you remem­ber SPEC­TRE in those James Bond movies and novels?

SPEC­TRE stands for SPe­cial Exec­u­tive for Counter-​intelligence, Ter­ror­ism, Revenge and Extortion.

Have a look at the Wikipedia arti­cle about SPEC­TRE:

It should be noted that the goal of world dom­i­na­tion was only ever stated in You Only Live Twice..

and more

Orga­ni­za­tional dis­ci­pline is noto­ri­ously dra­con­ian with the penalty for dis­obe­di­ence or fail­ure being death. As quoted by Blofeld on sev­eral occa­sions: “This orga­ni­za­tion does not tol­er­ate fail­ure”. Fur­ther­more, to heighten the impact of the exe­cu­tions, Blofeld often chooses to focus atten­tion on an inno­cent mem­ber, mak­ing it appear his death is immi­nent, only to sud­denly strike down the actual tar­get when that per­son is off guard.

Well, some­how this reminds me of Apple.

We all know what they have done in the mobile phone mar­ket. Since the launch of the iPhone Apple almost killed any other hand­set in the high end seg­ment, espe­cially for those car­rier who use to sub­si­dize their hardware.

If you are a cus­tomer walk­ing in an oper­a­tor store and you find that you can get an iPhone with zero upfront and a two years con­tract and another high end phone, whichever it is, at the same pric­ing what do you think you will buy?

Apple is lever­ag­ing two crit­i­cal aspects of their strat­egy. On one side there is the mar­ket that is eager to have their prod­ucts. Peo­ple out there want an iPhone. That’s it.

On the other side they have con­trac­tual agree­ments with oper­a­tors world­wide and oper­a­tors com­mit­ted with Apple on vol­umes that they are obliged to purchase.

The com­bi­na­tions of these two fac­tors are killing high end mobile phone sales for the vast major­ity of operators.

At the very same time you, as an oper­a­tor, can­not bring in money from your value added ser­vices like music and ring­tone sell since they are going into Apple pock­ets through iTunes.

Yes­ter­day I was kid­ding with a col­league about the upcom­ing Mobile World Con­gress, and I said: “Wouldn’t it be funny if all oper­a­tors CEO would meet in a room and agree not to buy any more phones from Cupertino?”

It was a provo­ca­tion and a joke, obviously.

They all have the scars and that would never hap­pen in the real world.

Last week Apple announced the iPad and since then I have read hun­dreds of posts on the sub­ject, tons of videos and lot of cov­er­age on tv.

It seems that the iPhone story is going to be repeated.

So, is Apple the new SPECTRE?

Well, I would say yes. They def­i­nitely want to dom­i­nate the mobile world and if you don’t do as they want you will be killed (i.e. taken out of the oppor­tu­nity to sell their products)

Is there an option for other hard­ware manufacturers?

I def­i­nitely think there is one but there is some­thing they need to understand.

• First: Do not copy.

Every sin­gle man­u­fac­turer out there has tried to come out with some iPhone killer prod­uct in the past years. Every­body has failed. You can­not be like an iPhone. Full stop.
This will be less dif­fi­cult on a tablet since you do not have many options to work on those kind of devices. They all will be a big dis­play with a bezel.

• Sec­ond: Price

Try to place your prod­uct at least half the price of the iPad.

• Third: Inno­vate

Do not try to copy the Apple model. Stay away from every­thing that will be sold trough iTunes or if you want to pur­sue the same strat­egy work with oper­a­tors to inte­grate with their billing.

• Fourth: Be fast.

If you will leave six months to Apple on that seg­ment, you will be dead.

I will leave to a future post the descrip­tion of what I think can be an alter­na­tive to the iPad.

Related posts:

1. Apple iPhone Con­firmed For T-​Mobile In Germay
2. Apple Warns Hack­ing iPhone May Harm It
3. Apple iPhone And The Yet To Be Announced Google Phone
4. Mobile Appli­ca­tions Store. Apple, Google And The Rest Of The World
5. It’s A Tech­nol­ogy War (No More!)