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Jo Rabin

9 months ago

in Open-ness in the mobile value chain on The Equity Kicker
Building walled gardens is surely in Apple's blood, and they know a thing or two about it.

<cite>So why is Apple a potential loser?</cite>

Well, are they? If they are looking for a profitable and sizeable niche rather than a mass market, then they are not losing are they?

From a developer perspective, as often observed, there is increasingly the choice of deploying Web apps rather than native apps, and you don't need to go to the Apple App store or indeed any other store.

No you can't do everything that way - fwiw the last MobileMonday London looked at this issue and the resulting blog posts summarise some of the interesting discussion.

1 year ago

in The difference between media and comms on The Equity Kicker
Having had experience both of working for an operator and for a content provider (who for most of its life was a kind of operator as well) I think the contrast you make between the competencies needed to be a successful media company and those needed to be a successful telco are very much to the point.

However, and of course, operators don't want to be "dumb bit pipes". They want to climb the value chain. They may suffer from "revenue envy". They may like the lifestyles they have today and want to hang on to them. It could be that being just a bit pipe is, given your observation about prices dropping to zero, a bit of an unrewarding thing.

I think there are opportunities not to be dumb bit pipes that don't involve transforming into media companies but that do require them to think differently about their businesses. The problem may be that most of these are not uniquely differentiable propositions in the way that media or content is, or can be, and hence don't represent a move away from commoditized propositions.

On the other hand, I think that the BBC iPlayer discussion reminds us that Content Provider business models are disconnected from the cost implications of their actions. The cost of infrastructure operation and upgrade clearly needs to be borne somewhere, and there is almost certainly a need for discussion as to whether operator concerns about the sustainability of the model for the "core" is a real economic concern, or whether it is a community "crying wolf" in pain at the erosion of its license to print money.

It would be interesting to know more of the facts.

Jo

[Incidentally, I made some similar kinds of remarks about operator competencies a little while ago at http://www.dev.mobi/blog/if-not-now-when.]
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