Vodafone is – surprise! – not too happy about the exclusive deals Apple has been making with cellphone carriers. In Germany’s case, that would be T-Mobile, the cellular subsidiary of ex-monopoly and -state-owned enterprise Deutsche Telekom. They now claim to have achieved an injunction at the Landgericht Hamburg. Good for them.
Good for me?
If I were a potential customer, yes. Vodafone argues that the device should be available in an unlocked fashion, thus making it work with any carrier. (Yes, you can achieve this with hacks, but that’s not the same.) This has previously been achieved in France, albeit for legal reasons, and at a premium price. It goes without saying that more carrier choice would benefit a customer, even if it does come at a premium price.
That said, I’m not a potential customer (at this point). So, is it good for me as a shareholder? Probably not. I’m convinced that Apple hates to partner up with other companies just as much as Microsoft does, so the fact that they do in the iPhone’s case means that they found overwhelmingly good reasons to do so. Whether it’s about the ability to implement features exactly the way they wanted to (particularly Visual Voicemail, which requires some technical changes on the carrier’s end), the added revenue through sharing deals, or something else entirely: Apple must have thought this through thoroughly, and must have found that going this quirky, unusually and potentially damaging (particularly PR-wise) path has benefits that outweigh the downsides. Thus, being a business, their choice was likely the economically smarter one, which means that shareholders indirectly benefit from it, even if only in theory.
Let us also not ignore the hypocrisy of Vodafone. You think for one second that, if they had scored the deal (it’s not as if they hadn’t been in the race), they would have still advocated “customer choice”? Or that, had T-Mobile not revealed a moderately successful first day of sales, Vodafone would have still cared? Vodafone has found that it’s worth having a slice of the cake that is German iPhone sales and that they can disingenuously wrap this into “customer-friendly” PR. Good for them. Good for customers, even, if they win.
Though, with the abysmal state of Vodafone’s EDGE network in Germany, you’d find yourself roaming T-Mobile regardless.
Others' Thoughts
Comment on November 19th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
I can’t blame Vodafone for not wanting to invest in an aging, outdated technology. The last Dutch EDGE network was shut down over a year ago, IIRC. I’m surprised it actually survived elsewhere.
Comment on November 19th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
No doubt EDGE is outdated, but 3G’s present-day merits are far overstated.
Its chipsets are still too power-hungry. Vendors compromise in various ways: by making bulky devices to account for a much higher-capacity battery, or by lowering other specs, such as CPU and RAM (take this video comparison, for instance). 3G also doesn’t help much with latency.
It’s not like Apple has some antipathy towards 3G. They made a conscious choice against using it right now, while also announcing right from the start that 3G will happen (as well WiMAX, further down the road).
Comment on November 20th, 2007 at 7:46 am
From your linked forum post:
Actually, my father was a former employee from the pre-divestiture days. He’s got a spreadsheet diagram showing the various stock’s evolution, including splits, mergers, etc (current as of 1999 or so - not sure if he continues to update it). It only fit on a sheet of Legal paper (while still being readable). And yes, it made your head hurt.
I don’t normally care about cellphones - my company gives me one as part of needing me on-call, and as long as it does what I need its not a bad thing. Probably an anti-tech rebelliousness from dealing with computers all day (I’m certainly not going to have a CrackBerry pushed into my hands if I can help it).
However, the idea of having phones hook into Wi-Fi for its access instead makes for an interesting twist. You could potentially have as many providers as there are ‘endpoint’ Internet ISPs. That’s probably not going to end well, but I suppose it will depend on how well a standard is worked out before widespread implementation (yea, right!).
–TSK
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