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Journalism of Courage
Will Apple’s iPhone change communication experience for ever? Indians won’t be able to test the proposition for a year unless they want to take their chances with the grey market. But America, where Apple launched its phone last weekend, will provide plenty of clues. To start arriving at an answer admit that Steve Jobs is a mortal and recognise two interesting factors. First, America isn’t the global leader in cell phone connectivity technology; Europe is. Which is why iPhone, whose sole service provider is AT&T, offers somewhat patchy internet performancebecause the supporting network, Edge, is not as good as the 3G network already up and running in Europe. Early reports say even the voice quality isn’t always brilliant. This of course implies that the iPhone may do better in more sophisticated networks.
What this means is that most likely iPhone will be a winner without being a paradigm shifter. And that will be a good result. The technology business is such that one company hitting the jackpot every time is risky from the point of view of innovation. Apple is a great technology company but it has had failures in the past. Its iPod was a technological and cultural tipping point. If the iPhone does less than that, if some other technology vendor produces the paradigm-shifting cell phone, it is a better general outcome. Of course, there is an exception to this rule of technological diversity: most of the world has been using Microsoft’s Windows for years now. This should change. But Apple’s share of the PC market is less than 5 per cent. That is where the world awaits a revolution.
