Pajama Entrepreneur

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.

A study reveals that close to one third of iPhones sold by Apple in the US have been unlocked to work on other carriers’ networks. That’s one million iPhones! Apple will lose $500 million in 2008 in revenues because it gets no revenue share from these phones. One wonders how much money Apple would make by selling the iPhone unlocked to begin with. How many people did not want to buy the iPhone because of it is locked?

Macworld begins on Monday, 14 January 2008. That means for the past few weeks, people have been speculating and spreading rumors: a new 13″ ultra-light Mac Book, an iPhone-like tablet and WiMAX in Mac Books. Since the demise of Think Secret, everyone’s favorite Mac rumor site, the rumor mill has never been the same. If you are dying to find out what Apple may be up to, you’ll have to go to www.macrumors.com.

Stats: iPhone has 0.09 percent of Web usage — yes, that’s a lot: In this post Valleywag points out that iPhone users tend to use the Web more than non-iPhone users. Excerpt:

Windows CE, which encompasses every Windows Mobile device shipped, holds a 0.06 percent share; Danger Research’s Sidekick product family holds a tiny 0.02 percent share; and the Symbian S60 smartphone platform, favored by Nokia, has 0.01 percent.

My take is that it has everything to do with the user interface and how easy it is to visit sites, check maps, look for information online. A lot of phones are clunky (terrible design) with the typical phone dialing pads or have ugly, impossibly small screens. Who would want to browse a website on that?

In the past few weeks, I have attended two conferences, Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco and Nokia’s Mobile Mashup in Palo Alto, on the supposedly new world of mobile Internet, a paradise where everyone can use these incredible applications on their mobile phones AND access the Internet in all its glory. Unfortunately we’re stuck with a basic reality: expensive data plans and the attendant roaming charges when you go abroad. Until I can get a cheap, flat-rate, all-you-can-eat worldwide monthly data service plan, I am not going to use these applications. Of course, I already use Google maps, search and visit a variety of websites on my mobile phone using Wi-Fi when I can find it. But Wi-Fi is not yet everywhere and it’s still sometimes a hassle to use: login screens that make you type in long characters (on a cell phone this is very unpleasant), having to pay every time you log on to a different network. Until we have cheap flat rate plans and no roaming charges, I’m afraid it’s a waste of time to develop these apps and attend these events.

UPDATE: SFR, the French operator, launched their version of “unlimited” mobile 3G Internet access. Click here to see the press release and here to see the article with video clip on Journal du Net. Several problems with this:

• There are 3 different tariffs (39, 49 and 69 EUR) with various services, like mobile TV associated with them. I find it confusing.
• You have to sign up for 12 to 24 months. What if you just want access when you are in France occasionally?
• Works only with certain phones.

If this is the mobile operator’s way to encourage mobile Internet use, good luck.

Walt Mossberg says that the amount of control that US cellular operators have over handsets and applications is terrible for innovation:

So it’s intolerable that the same country that produced all this has trapped its citizens in a backward, stifling system when it comes to the next great technology platform, the cellphone. A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that is the direct opposite of the PC model. It severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer . . . That’s why I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the “Soviet ministries.” Like the old bureaucracies of communism, they sit athwart the market, breaking the link between the producers of goods and services and the people who use them. To some extent, they try to replace the market system, and, like the real Soviet ministries, they are a lousy substitute.

Read the rest of his post about “freeing the phone”.

Orange, Apple’s exclusive partner in France, is required to sell the iPhone unlocked, if requested by a customer. The reason: French law prohibits the tying of a device to a cellular service. Operators can sell phones for a lower price if they subsidize it, but if the customer just wants the phone, they have to sell it to him or her, even at a higher price. Read my post on Muniwireless.