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Verizon iPhone sorely missed on four year anniversary of iPhone intro

Verizon iPhone sorely missed on four year anniversary of iPhone intro

Those impressed with the market strides of either the iPhone 4 or the entire 3.5-year iPhone run should be more impressed when they stop to consider that Apple’s phone has accomplished what it’s accomplished with one arm tied behind its back and some of the fingers on its other hand taped together for good measure.

What Apple and the mobile world have learned this year is that while a groundbreaking smartphone can indeed shift some of the focus from the carrier to the device, doing so is at best a partial victory. At the end of the day, there are those T-Mobile customers who love their customer service too much, those Sprint customers who love their pricing plans too much, and those Verizon customers who, well, just really hate AT&T. As such, even the most successful smartphone in the history of smartphones has failed to pry those Verizon contracts out of millions of users’ (not yet) cold dead hands. Hmm. Imagine what ground the iPhone 4 could be covering if it weren’t missing most of its weaponry.

With the four year anniversary of the iPhone’s January 2007 introduction upon us (raise you hand if you were one of the five thousand or so in the room that day at Macworld Expo), imagine if the announcement had gone ever so slightly different. Instead of Steve Jobs inviting just one confused, uninterested cellphone carrier CEO on stage that day, he invited four carrier CEO’s who didn’t want to be there. Or just left them all at home and proclaimed that the iPhone was so much more important than any one carrier that Apple was going to launch the iPhone on all four of them nearly simultaneously.

Yes, Apple would have made less money per iPhone, as that exclusive deal with AT&T was pretty sweet on a per-unit basis. But having seen over the past four years just how many in the U.S. alone have ultimately refused to leave the confines of Verizon, Sprint, or T-Mobile (the same phenomenon has played out overseas, just with different names), it’s easy to fathom that iPhone sales over the past four years would have been at least double what they have been. So even in a seeming worst case scenario in which Apple were getting half as much profit per sale thanks to lack of an exclusivity deal, Apple would still have made as much profit but with twice the market. And twice the accompanying app sales. Twice as many PC users lured in to become potential future Mac users. And perhaps most notably, there would be no Android market.

Google jumped on the Android idea because it saw an obvious window of opportunity: thee out of the four U.S. carriers don’t offer the iPhone, those three carriers are desperate for an answer to the iPhone, so why not give them a competing smartphone operating system for free? Of course all three carriers jumped on it. But if they had all already had the iPhone in their arsenal, none of them would have jumped on Android. None of them would have needed to. Google might have gone ahead and released Android with no potential mainstream market anyway (they did that with Chrome OS), but the flop of the Nexus One shows that Android’s success has been strictly a carrier-based one. Without three desperate carriers in need of an iPhone competitor, Android would be about as popular as Chrome (and most of you reading this have never heard of the latter).

Even if Apple had just gone with Verizon and AT&T for the iPhone, leaving second-tier carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile to fend for themselves, there’d still be an Android market but Apple would be dominating the two largest carriers out of the four. The remarkable part is that even with the Verizon iPhone 4 arriving four years late, Apple still has a chance to accomplish on the Verizon platform what it should have begun accomplishing back in 2007. We’ll find out soon enough how many or few of those Verizon Droid users are never coming back to the Apple pack. But then again, most of them bought a Droid because they wanted an iPhone, which means it’s never over.

[Thanks: http://www.beatweek.com]

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