Apple and AT&T: this can’t end well
After the iPhone 3GS was announced and the blogs went either insane with lust or became more embittered that Apple didn’t deliver <insert feature here>, one story emerged from the keynote aftermath: the state of the relationship between Apple and AT&T.
AT&T was notably absent on more than one carrier-focused presentation slide at WWDC, and there were a couple of times when AT&T was specifically called out by Phil Schiller/Scott Forstall for not being ready to support MMS at launch and not having a policy on data tethering. The crowd, rapt carnivores at this sort of Apple keynote, did its share by booing and laughing as circumstances dictated. From there, the blogs and op-ed MSM writers took bait and ran with it. Currently, you can find venomous anti-AT&T rants just about everywhere you look. Even John Gruber, noted Apple technologist and author of Daring Fireball, didn’t mince words as he took the temperature following the keynote:
Contempt for AT&T is topic number one here at WWDC.
The tension between Apple and AT&T exists mainly because they are at cross-purposes. AT&T wants to protect its network — which we know can be fragile on the data side, as evidenced by the ongoing 3G problems — charge users for the privilege of using the iPhone’s data-heavy functionality, and simultaneously add subscribers to its userbase while it has iPhone exclusivity. On the other side, Apple has the hottest mobile platform on earth right now, and the iPhone is nothing less than Apple’s bid to capture the pole position in what is very much the new, emergent computing frontier: mobile computing. The race for this real estate is every bit as valuable, if not more valuable, than the race back in the 1980’s to crown the personal computing juggernaut.
Problem is, platform dominance means marketshare, and marketshare means units. With the Palm Pre and Android expanding and flourishing on multiple American carriers (read: channels), Apple will eventually be outflanked by these competitors unless it can expand its American carrier footprint. The $99 iPhone 3G tactic is nice duct-tape patchwork to make a marketshare grab and stave off user attrition to the competition, but the brass knows the real deal: exclusivity, which once helped the fledgling iPhone penetrate a new market, has now become the boat anchor preventing what could be meteoric marketshare growth if Apple had its carrier-strategy druthers.
If I had to guess, I would say that there’s another shoe that’s going to drop, but it won’t be soon. But I would put a mild wager on Apple announcing a deal with another carrier (say, Verizon) within the next 12 months. And I’d wager quite heavily on Jobs making the announcement himself, because when Jobs feels he’s been pinched, he’s very keen on pinching back.
