The Hype
Well even if we have been living under a rock, we would have known about Apple's iPhone release last Friday at 6pm. In fact that was single handedly the only piece of news out there in the tech community. But some of the stats are in (via TechCrunch). As of Sunday, Apple and AT&T moved 700,000 iPhones. Apple sold out in 95 of its 164 stores. The larger phone which was calculated at a cost of $220 and sold for $599 and the cheaper phone at a cost of $200 selling at $499 gives Apple somewhere of a $200 million + weekend IN PROFIT (less marketing costs, we'll talk about this later).
It's an amazing phenomenon. People were in line as early as 5am on MONDAY, a whopping FOUR days before the iPhone went on sale. How much marketing was done? Very little. If memory serves me correctly, a Super Bowl ad. That's it. The rest was Jobs talking at various conferences and user generated hype. How sustainable is this? If the iPhone promises to change the way we do telecommunications...a lot.
But what really interests me is the artificial hype that was created about this phone. Sure its a beautiful phone and this past week, when I noticed someone with the phone it made me turn my head, but never before has a phone really made this much impact. A phone as status symbol. Only Apple could do it. The Sidekick went for the young hipsters, the Razrs went for the mainstream, but the iPhone did it right. I'm not sure why but it did.
There are many Apple evangelists out there that support anything that Jobs does. I don't know if its a function of that fact that he's going up against the evil empire in Redmond led by evil Bill Gates and that in a way he's still David versus Bill (Goliath). But there is no other brand that has much loyalty as the Apple heads. And I cannot figure out why. You'd think that there'd be diehard Yahoo guys against Google, but there aren't. Wii versus Playstation. Nope. The only one that comes close and this is very distant are MiniCooper owners who seem to have formed a click. And for that fact other rare car owners (see Larry David's Prius episode).
But these supporters came out and did what Steve wanted them to do without him asking them. They just read his mind. They blogged about it, they created mock commercials about it, they waited in line for days, they thought about it, they drooled about it. Over a phone. Over an IPHONE. The fastest selling gadget of all time - people are trading off weeks of food for a $600 phone! And I bet you if it weren't for all of the mumbo jumbo that you have to deal with when you go to a cell phone service contract they would have to sold more. Which leads to my final point of sustainability. Sales will be sustained....but now the ball is in AT&T's court (which so far have not been positive)....
Will this Change Everything?
The much anticipated iPhone is launching in less than a month (June 29th). The implications are amazing. Many are finally predicting a convergence between Internet and mobile, Media and Commerce, and location and information. User generated commercials have popped up online.
However, is the iPhone as big of a deal as we think? Of course Apple is going to hype up their latest product which they hope will be as big as the iPod. Apple, though, is limited by Cingular and with a price tag of $499-$599 by wallet sizes. (Unlocked phones I hear are going for over $1100). I think the biggest breakthrough though with the iPhone is the touch screen interactivity of it. With this, there will be no more need for clunky QWERTY keyboards and t9 guessing algorithms.
Smaller devices will come out that can take advantage of this, being not only a phone, but a web browser, a camera, MP3 player, and camcorder ... all at the same time! But how will it affect marketing? I think the implications are obvious. Text messaging while powerful and popular will become even more when rich media can be delivered on the spot in relevant locations. Users won't be limited and programs won't have difficulty reading varied responses when web like applications appear on your phone. Overall, the iPhone is a step toward a world where we really will have the world at our fingertips, anywhere, anytime, anyplace.
The Power of the Blog
Yes there are two posts today! I had to write about this (via IRWebReport) because it really supports how powerful the blog is, who is reading them, and what a popular blog can do to a big company. Engadget, a very popular blog about technology, wrote about how Apple's iPhone would be delayed as well as the new Mac OS X Leopard. The post was at 11:49am yesterday and accordingly Apple stock dropped nearly 3% from 107.89 to 104.63. Wow! Since then its been outed that the email in which Engadget derived its information was a fake and has been retracted. However, this is a good sign for tools like Monitor110 that look at the blogosphere for various tips that could give you an edge in trading and that information is moving faster than ever. Sometimes there won't be time for an editor to read something over and that's why the blog is a great tool for communication (as long as the information is accurate). But in the dense world of the blogosphere, the tools to find the information you need are going to be more and more important and hence tools like Google and Technorati are going to be playing a big part in determining what is information. Could these new tools be the new Bloomberg of Wall Street? Time will tell.. It just goes to show you the power of the blog, the investors that read them and the power one blog has over a very successful and powerful company.
Google Rules the World So in addition to their purchase of Doubleclick and their announcement of the Clear Channel Radio ads roll out, coupled with Google TV and their purchase of YouTube last year, Google seems to be the major force in the new world of targeted advertising. Google's database is going to stretch across all media which will truly be either a scary thing or an extremely good thing.
With Doubleclick, Google now has a presence in serving up banner ads and other display media. Coupled with their AdWords product, Google hopes to serve up relevant ads not just in text but also via banners. Overall Google is hoping that you have one crossover Google account. You can be hit with advertisements for your favorite foods and mainstream brands on TV, your favorite restaurants while on the road via Radio, and anything else they've missed via the Internet. One area where Google is lacking (although I'm sure they can find a small fledging company in this space that would LOVE to get bought by them) is mobile. Could Google be going the way of Apple and their iPhone product? Mobile is the hot new area of growth especially in the advertising front. Mobile gaming has grown in triple digits, nearly everyone has a cell phone (80%), web access is coming up on 50% and so on. While Google has their text messaging feature, it will be a matter of time before Google offers you free service, but only if you listen to an ad or if someone interjects during your conversation about different goods and services from some type of voice recognition pattern. Scary huh?
One last point. With this inevitable big brotherliness about Google, why does everyone still cower down on Microsoft? Why is Microsoft evil while Google is always the good guy? It's clearly not David and Goliath anymore but rather a battle of two near equals. I think it comes down to the fact that Google doesn't charge YOU the end consumer and for the people that they do charge, they have guaranteed results. Google is open source everything, opening up their API's, and integrating their revenue source into it. Microsoft meanwhile is more old economy by selling IP and closing off the rest of the world to their monopoly. Lesson here? Be open, be liked, and also take over the world while you're at it.
