Link: Cocky carriers dismiss Apple as ‘niche’ | The Register.
Rio Caraeff, general manager for Universal music mobile, claimed there are 44m iPods in circulation worldwide compared to 180m phone customers in the US alone, meaning phone companies have a large addressable installation base for OTA services. A point seized on by Nagel, who called Apple "niche."
Interesting by Gavin Clarke at The Register. I’ll eat my hat if mobile operators are able to organise anything better than ‘a pissup in a brewery’ as the phrase goes. Normal friends of mine (that is, non technical geeks) download tracks from their mobile operators. One or two. A friend I know has downloaded 8 in the last three months.
She still buys CDs like no tomorrow though. There’s no loyalty and there’s no desire for her mobile to function as the centre of her musical entertainment universe. She just wanted to try it out.
Ergo you’ve now got some marketing manager at some mobile operator thinking that Apple is ‘niche’ and that they’ve got a super route to market. There’s a key, critical difference between buying a few songs on your handset and investing into your ipod with your entire music collection — ripping your CDs into iTunes and using the iTunes store for new music purchases.
If by some werid quirk of fate, everyone starts buying all their music from their airtime supplier, then I will modify my perspective. I have far too much experience with crappy badly conceived network operator services to even get in the same ballpark with the concept at the moment.