Pajama Entrepreneur

Apple will sell the iPhone through more than one mobile phone carrier in Italy and a number of other European countries. In the US, it sells the iPhone exclusively through AT&T, but in Europe, where iPhone sales have been disappointing, Apple has decided on a different strategy.

There are rumors of a soon to be released 3G iPhone as early as June 2008. Recent price drops (in Germany, Deutsche Telekom slashed the price of the iPhone from 399 EUR to 99 EUR), supply drying up in the UK, lead people to believe that Apple will make an announcement concerning the 3G iPhone soon.

You’d think it was the end of the world. Today on CNBC, I listened to one of the most ridiculous exchanges about whether companies should get their IT departments to support iPhones and Mac laptops.  What triggered this discussion is a Businessweek article (The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit) on how employees are demanding Macs. Goodness, what is this world coming to?

The moderator of the CNBC discussion asked why should your boss get you a Mac — so you can be “unproductive” since you’ll bring in your iPod and download music while working. This question is a common one among corporate Wall Street types. There’s still this assumption, especially in the business news area, that Macs are for fun and are not for business (productive) use. Haven’t these people seen the catastrophe that is Windows Vista?

That millions of people, including serious businesses like ad agencies and film companies, have managed to “get by” using Macs has completely passed them by. The iPhone is a wonderful device. It has an elegant interface and is easy to use. The people who use it know they are more productive with it it. Same with any of the Apple laptops. Why not ask the user why he or she likes it so much instead of making assumptions about their productivity/non-productivity? Apple puts so much effort into designing good interfaces and beautiful devices that make people fall in love with them — ask the users why.

I switched to the Mac around 2002 and never looked back. It’s not just how beautiful their devices are, it’s also the ease of use, the operating system, etc. They’re not perfect, for example, they need to fix the wireless networking problems in the Mac Book. But I’ll take beauty (Macbook Air) and a good interface design over the horrid Windows Vista and those hideous clunky Dell laptops.

The city of New York told Apple it won’t accept new Macs for its schools until the Wi-Fi problem is fixed. Not sure what the problem is exactly but many users have reported a lag time in logging onto a Wi-Fi network, slow connections on Wi-Fi versus on a wired connection.

Read more here.

When I gave away my old Dell laptop yesterday, the last visible reminder of the Microsoft Windows operating departed from my life. The laptop had been gathering dust in my closet anyway since 2002 when I switched to the Mac. I still use Microsoft Office for occasional writing, spreadsheets and Powerpoint, but I’ve been mostly on Google’s online apps (docs, spreadsheets). I don’t plan to upgrade to Office for Mac’s latest version.

Better enjoy the last remnant of civility left on airlines (i.e. no mobile phones) because Ofcom, the UK regulator, has just said they’re fine with mobile calls on UK-registered aircraft.

Read more on Rose Cantine.

Geosign, a startup that raked in $160M in VC funding, blew up one year later after its business model — gaming the Google search engine — was effectively shut down via a change in Google’s algorithm. Read more here.

Viviane Reding, the European commissioner in charge of telecommunications will do everything she can to enforce functional (or structural) separation in the EU. According to this article in the NYT, the EU’s efforts to increase competition in the member states, by clamping down on the power of local telecom incumbents, has resulted in a dramatic rise in broadband penetration and in a few countries like France, lower prices and higher speeds. Here are a few excerpts from the article: 

“We have four countries that are world leaders — Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Finland,” said Viviane Reding, the European telecommunications commissioner. “We have eight countries which have higher penetration rates than the U.S. and Japan. We are not doing badly at all.”    . . .  In an interview Tuesday, Ms. Reding vowed to press ahead with an effort to give regulators powers to force the so-called incumbent telecommunications companies to run their businesses in a way that would make it easier for new competitors to enter the market. In countries like Germany and France, former state monopolies have fought fiercely against such a move . . . Ms. Reding emphasized her determination to encourage greater competition in the market and to give regulators the power to force “functional separation” — obliging the owners of telecommunications networks to free the networks from their operating divisions . . . Asked about the recent increase in broadband penetration in Germany, Ms. Reding said it had occurred only under pressure from Brussels to encourage competition. “The German regulator was rather passive,” she said. “After I pushed him, he started to push his market.”    

Read the NYT article here.  My observation: Although the Netherlands is lumped in together with Finland, Sweden and Denmark as having the highest broadband penetration in the EU, I am not impressed at all with the rollout of FTTH in Amsterdam. In Paris, you can get 50 Mbps symmetrical service for 30 EUR. In Amsterdam, the FTTH project called Citynet has not even begun to announce when the center of the city will get FTTH service. I understand Reding’s frustration with local regulators, some of whom are friendlier to the local telco incumbent than others.  Viviane Reding’s recent victory in favor of consumers was forcing the mobile operators to lower voice roaming charges. She’s now trying to get them to lower data roaming charges, which are still outrageously high.  One of my friends got a bill for 10,000 EUR after she took video on her mobile phone and uploaded it to her blog . . . while she was outside the Netherlands!