Jefflog

There’s been lots of chatter on “teh Internets” regarding Apple’s iPhone announcement. It makes me believe that Apple is starting to slip up and they know it.

For a long time, Apple Computer (now, simply Apple, Inc.) has been the master of surprise. Steve Jobs will be on stage, and out of the blue, *boom*, the iPod Mini, or the Intel iMac. This is usually accompanied by the announcement that you can buy it “starting today” or “next month, preorders accepted”. They were so ahead of the game that they didn’t need to pre-announce anything.

But during the last developer’s meeting, Steve Jobs did something uncharacteristic: he demoed a set-top box which he called “iTV”, and announced that it wouldn’t be available for four or five months. That’s not their style, so why was it announced so early? There may be a couple of reasons:

1. Make your audience wait for your product instead of going with the competition. Microsoft does this all the time: customers say Microsoft Word doesn’t have this particular feature and WordPerfect does, so they think about migrating to WordPerfect, only to have Microsoft say “No wait, we’re going to have that feature in the next version, don’t you worry!” So people stick with the old, because switching is a chore.
2. There wasn’t anything else Apple had available. You gotta make the keynote wow the audience.
3. To distract people from other shortcomings, such as declining sales or stock option grant improprieties.

For the iTV, I suspect reasons #2 & #3. For the iPhone, I suspect all three.

We heard information about iTunes sales during the keynote (two billion songs sold so far), but nothing about iPod sales or Mac sales. I suspect iPod sales are not going as well as analysts are expecting, and Mac sales are down. So Jobs takes the focus off those products and announces a product that’s six months away from being released.

That’s not the Apple Computer I used to know.