waffle

Time Magazine names iPhone the Invention of the Year and backs it up with five reasons. The third reads like this:

3. It will make other phones better

Jobs didn’t write the code inside the iPhone. These days he doesn’t dirty his fingers with 1′s and 0′s, if he ever really did. But he did negotiate the deal with AT&T to carry the iPhone. That’s important: one reason so many cell phones are lame is that cell-phone-service providers hobble developers with lame rules about what they can and can’t do. AT&T gave Apple unprecedented freedom to build the iPhone to its own specifications. Now other phone makers are jealous. They’re demanding the same freedoms. That means better, more innovative phones for all.

This is spectacularly wrong-headed. The phone companies have control over their products and are perfectly capable of marketing them directly to the people who will be using them. Phone companies chose to answer the call (pun intended) when networks started waving money in front of them, and as a result have been fellating the carriers for quite some time. The trend is worldwide, but in healthy markets (hint – look east or west of the US) it is not completely defining the experience of owning a phone.

The first mistake Apple did with the iPhone was picking a network to work with. Apple needs to have no network’s permission to make a GSM phone. It needs to pay licensing fees and its products need to conform to standards and certifications (like FCC approval), but it is not necessarily the whipping boy of a carrier. For Apple to have done an extraordinary, remarkable decision, it would have to had bypassed the carrier during the US launch. Steve Jobs once made the observation that Apple hasn’t historically been good at “going through orifices to get to its customers” (referring to marketing Macs to the enterprise); more people than I have made the connection and concluded that perhaps it’s learning.

If phone companies are now “demanding freedom”, it is their way of appearing to have been tricked; their way to backpedal, to feign genuine interest in anything else than money and outputting press releases with the word “synergy” in them. Maybe it’s also angst of having written themselves into contracts that would halve their stock price to get out of.

The iPhone undoubtedly means more innovative phones – like the (non-bullshit) point 5 says, the most interesting thing about the iPhone is what will have happened in five years. But get your cause and effect straight.