Yesterday Steve Jobs challenged “content owners” to walk away from DRM, and signalled Apple’s desire to live and participate in a DRM-free world. Great.
A day earlier, Apple announced that they’d settled their long-running suit with the Beatles. So we’re going to see Beatle songs available for download soon. Also great.
So Steve, why not go for broke and tell us today how you’re going to give us a SIM-free contract-free iPhone, with support for third-party applications?
My thanks to Kerry for correcting my headline, pointing me to the Wikipedia link and making some other really valuable suggestions for improving this piece.
…with support for third-party applications.
Shouldn’t the title be One more thing? ;-)
I dont think we need support for third party applicatons.
I mean in the sense… it will be controlled through iTunes software downloads.
Right now you can buy games, written especially by EA for the iPod.
Its a classic case of Supplier control… Hes taking control of the complete value chain.. he wants to control the choke.
EA will sell as many games titles as he decides not what EA decides.
In the future, he may open it up, im sure he will, just not immediately.
The AT&T/Cingular is more obvious- he wanted to go with the biggest GSM player in the US. Simple as that. This way the other standards (which frankly we dont need) will slowly wither away.
In UK, im sure we’ll have a few more carriers, but only those that are interested in innovating their back-end with the iPhone. (e.g. Visial VoiceMail).
Given a choice between a world dominated by a company like Microsoft which is an un-creative, un-innovative monopoly (ran by Gates) vs. a creative, innovative, potential monopolost (run by Jobs)… I know which world i would prefer!