Things That Just Fit

I definitely don’t agree with Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who believes that iPhone will be the dominant mobile platform. Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget was right to argue that Apple’s mobile phone business would go the same way as the Mac did in the 1980s and 1990s. I made the same case three months ago in the second of the three-linked Betanews stories below:

I’m a big fan of iPhone as a platform concept, but it’s going nowhere as a closed system. Android is cued as the operating system that everybody else will license to compete with iPhone, just like PC manufacturers did with Windows in the 1980s and 1990s.

The problem with analysts like Munster: They don’t think globally. Their perspective is ethnocentric United States—or at best North America. Globally, mobile priorities in many emerging markets are more basic than 110,000 mobile applications. The iPhone may have revolutionized the market for smartphones, but it’s a boutique brand. Android will rule the day.

But what is Munster going to say? The disclosure information released by SAI makes clear that Piper Jaffray will “buy and sell the securities of these companies on a principal basis,” with Apple first on the alphabetical list. Can you say, “Conflict of interest?”

Do you have a financial or questionable ethics story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

“Evidently, AT&T thought it best not to mention the iconic super-smartphone too much lest its executives be driven offstage by a mob of iPhone users complaining of dropped calls, lousy service, delayed text and voice messages and testudine download speeds.

John Paczkowski on AT&T’s Consumer Electronics Show event earlier today.

Do you have an AT&T or iPhone story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

Microsoft Has Lost Its Way Part 2

Microsoft has abandoned the fundamental principles that made it the most successful software company of the last decade and ensured its software would be the most widely used everywhere. But in just three years, since 2006, startups and Apple have set a new course for technology and how societies use it.

Compass

For Microsoft, this change is scarier than movie “Quarantine.” Without a course correction, Microsoft in the 2010s will be very much like IBM was in the 1990s. That’s no place Microsoft should want to be.

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Steve Jobs’ Return is Vaporware

Steve Jobs last appearance before medical leave

Today’s Wall Street Journal story about Steve Jobs’ return is classic media manipulation. The story’s timing—days before Apple convenes its Worldwide Developer Conference—and seemingly single source, “a person familiar with the matter,” stinks of corporate leak.

I challenge WSJ reporters Yukari Iwatani Kane and Joann Lublin to dispute my assertion that their main source was from inside Apple and most likely someone in corporate communications or from the board of directors. Yukari and Joann can’t do so, for they must protect that source and future Apple leaks.

Selective leaks are common in corporate America. They just don’t get written about much. Seeing as how it’s Dress Down Friday, I’m going to dress down Apple and the Journal. Disclosure: I am a digital WSJ journal subscriber since 1996; yes, I pay for the stuff. :)

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Don’t Touch!

Don't touch iPhone!

I love this photo, taken about an hour before Apple stared selling iPhone on Friday. Employees pulled paper covers from inside the windows and set a 60-minute countdown clock. Here, an employee reaches to turn off an iPhone. I shot the picture through the store’s Plexiglas.

I attended the iPhone launch at the Montgomery Mall Apple Store in Bethesda, Md. I covered the event for eWEEK.

Do you have an Apple story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

Chris, Steve and Eddie show off their old mobiles outside the Apple Store at Montgomery Mall in Bethesda, Md. The men arrived about 10 a.m. this morning, which put just 20 people in front of them. I interviewed them for an eWEEK podcast. I really love these guys. They were typical of the very atypical crowd waiting for iPhone. If there were geeks in line, I didn’t find them. But there were plenty of regular people, which says something about iPhone’s broad appeal and the cell phone market in general. Mobiles are gadgets for the masses, not geeks. Do you have an Apple story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.

Chris, Steve and Eddie show off their old mobiles outside the Apple Store at Montgomery Mall in Bethesda, Md. The men arrived about 10 a.m. this morning, which put just 20 people in front of them. I interviewed them for an eWEEK podcast.

I really love these guys. They were typical of the very atypical crowd waiting for iPhone. If there were geeks in line, I didn’t find them. But there were plenty of regular people, which says something about iPhone’s broad appeal and the cell phone market in general. Mobiles are gadgets for the masses, not geeks.

Do you have an Apple story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.