Josh Ferguson

Why I'm Disappointed By The iPhone

I hadn't thought of all of that but yes I think you're right. Exclusivity agreements do make a big difference. If anyone had the technical prowess, licensing, and developer power to come to market within the next 1-2 years they might just be left behind by these types of agreements. I think Apple has put itself into a good position to try and move into the 1% market share by the middle of 2008 like he wanted. It will be tough but we'll see if they can do it, I think they have a big hit on their hands but the technically best product doesn't always win out. I think Apple's marketing machine is pretty hot right now though, and I don't see them losing steam anytime soon.

Why I'm Disappointed By The iPhone

I think what you're saying here is that it's not open to other carriers. I think that's an issue for some reasons but I think It will be resolved by late 2008 early 2009. I don't know what deal they have with Cingular but I hope it goes away fast. The nice thing about it from a marketing perspective is the rapid exposure and national sales channels a partner like Cingular can provide.

As far as opened in other ways though I think that's wrong. I develop web applications and also Mac applications on OS X. I can tell you the developer community is buzzing about the fact that this runs OS X as a platform. That means all of the experience that will be available from developing on TIger (10.4) and the upcoming Leopard (10.5), which Jobs said the phone will be running, will already be available. The fact that I can start coding something once they release the developer kit using my previous knowledge, and build it for the iPhone when it's available is not just a plus, it's a deal maker. This will attract a huge number of developers who can whip up good applications in a matter of a month or two. I'd look for the number of apps for this to explode through the rest of this year.

As far as Symbian, MS's Mobile OS, and all of those other crippled useless platforms, they will begin to lose even more traction with the development community. The stagnation in the market that these companies have caused is something they will have to figure out how to deal with as they begin to build competing products to slow down Apple's growth in market share, which admittedly will initially be small and not much of a worry for them for the first few years.

Apple TV: A Device We Don't Need?

"And besides, there’s not that much interest in TV shows and video on the Web, anyway."

You're kidding right? You'd have to be living under a rock to think that is even remotely true. Video is revolutionizing the web. Every major content creator offers some form of video broadcasting, podcasting, or videocasting. Youtube is the #6 visited site on the internet and you can already get desktop clients to manage your videos from many different sites (look at Democracy Player). Apple has been selling TV shows and movies hand over fist in their iTunes media store. Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft are all scrambling to get into the video arena for a reason. On-demand for-pay video over IP networks is going to crush bundled television services, the same way iTunes and other online music services have been running rampant selling music for the past few years.

"Giving people the option of watching "Lost" on their PCs after paying $1.99 to download it from the iTunes Music Store isn't much given that the free broadcast is so available on TV, cable, satellite and on-demand on the Net."

Someone gives you these services for free? Most people are shelling out $60-$70 a month for these services, a substantial amount when you could spend that on buying shows you cared about and have a netflix account for movies.

It's pretty easy to figure out why this product is important. This is to television and movies on iTunes what the iPod was to music on iTunes. It unchains you from your computer to live your life and multiplies the utility you can derive from your purchases on iTunes. No normal person wants to fight with format issues, networking issues, etc. to try and get their content to some PC with a TV-out card or whatever. They just want it to work, and I think that's what this will do.