2010:
“k we made this app in two weeks have a million users and revenue you in?”
“bout to finish writing the check one sec”

Funny memory – I remember 2 years back enjoying a morning coffee on a beautiful morning at Mobile World Congress (Barcelona) with a new iPhone in one hand and trade show dailies in the other. The latter was filled with industry conceits like “we own the customer relationship” and “we play a key role in the value chain and for delivering innovation”. I had just done some search and mapping on my iPhone (Google) and laughed out loud – “you had nothing to F**%ing do with it!”. What of all that mobile industry innovation? Well, every mobile operator trade show booth seemed to prominently display Facebook. I quit my telecoms/mobile-industry job soon after and bet on a new wave of mobile innovation outside the mobile operator fold.

Apple “bracketed out” the mobile operators by and large. Apple created a compelling device and a structured environment for develops to innovate. And boy have they. Innovation isn't a function of sheer genius or product mgmt process. Innovation is about mass experimentation. Most stuff many suck, but some stuff is game-changing. Similar ingredients helped give us the Internet.

Morgan Stanley's Mobile Internet Report offers great perspectives on this – a must read (and free on their website).

International deals with carriers where even more onerous.

On my first trip to Japan in 2001, I got very well informed on their mobile ecosystem and revenue shares with the carrier. I realized then that there was no opportunity for any developer to make a company succeed in the US without going bankrupt. 2007 Apple opened it up for all of us.

Apple has changed the game for all of us and made the space a real opportunity where the carrier does not matter that much anymore.

New guys in the game, be really, really grateful you didn't have to deal with this crap!

http://www.anonymity.it.tc

There is still no promise we will be buying unlocked/open handsets and taking to the carrier of choice (based on plan cost, coverage etc). It's a pipedream IMO and the carriers will still find a way to offer exclusive devices.

I wrote about this extensively here http://ouriel.typepad.com/myblog/2010/06/though…

Now rather than a 'design by committee' approach, Apple democratized the process of ideation. They gave some amazing tools in the form of iPhone OS and SDK to a lot of common folks in the world, and look what the common folk and entrepreneurs have come up with.

Now the consumers have the power to decide upon and bring their app idea to life. The sames is now being replicated on the Android, and BlackBerry platform.

I believe the crowdsourcing of innovation has been the single greatest contribution of the iPhone

compare that with the iPhone's app discovery and install experience. yes, the catalog is controlled by apple and yes, they reject apps and sometimes for reasons that aren't easily understood. but for most users, they made the process so easy, that people actually bothered to install apps at all.

i would bet that in the first year of the itunes app store, more apps were installed on smartphones than all apps on all smartphone platforms until that point.

Jobs changed the focus from the intermediate customer (the carrier) to the real customer (the consumer). I've been working in wireless apps since 1999 and I can't tell you how much we had to deviate from good consumer experiences to satisfy channel requirements related to business model, customer care concerns and network utilization. This still exists to some extent, but not nearly as much as before iPhone came out. Google, Palm, RIM, etc. owe Steve and Apple a great deal.

App developers can design apps based on what's best for the consumer versus what is best for the carrier.

Back when the first iPhone was announced, I wrote about how this was a phone that could only come from Apple:

http://blog.agrawals.org/2007/01/09/a-phone-tha…

A big part of Apple's success has been their own retail channel. They have people who are trained and can explain the product — which is always important when you're selling something like the iPhone. (Witness Google's lack of success with a self-service model in the Nexus One store.)

Who will upend the internet access industry and give us 10 times faster broadband?

“….their former contacts at the carriers are shell shocked: no one is knocking on their doors anymore…”

Hilarious. Capitalism works, I guess.

And Android is set to upend the iPhone grip.