I know the world is pretty excited about the Apple i-phone. But I'm going to be a wee bit skeptical about one thing here.
Past Apple successes largely relate to areas where Apple could fully control the customer experience. Even with music, they set up their own delivery system with i-Tunes.
This time, Apple will need to rely on working with Telco's, who are notorious for being irritating to customers.
Here's what I mean: I hve a nice Razr Camera Phone. It should be able to download pix to my laptop via a cable. But my telco shut down that capability, because it wants me to use their cumbersome e-mail system. The first time I did it, it cost about $90.00. [That's not a typo] That was something like $.50 for the picture, plus a $52.50 per megabyte charge for the bandwidth. [That's not a typo either].
But I could sign up for a $20.00 a month package that would give me unlimited downloads. So of course I did. Now I'm paying $240.00 per year for a function that was built into the hardware. But wait... there's more!!!!
The installation of this service package on their end disrupted the integrated voice-mail between my land line and my cell phone. A mere five phone calls, several hours of holding, and more than a week later, I got my voice-mail back. No apology, of course. I'm actually simplifying this story considerably, believe it or not.
And this is the network that Apple's new baby will be entering. Hence my skepticism. I hope I'm wrong, and this event will mark the beginning of a new, customer-friendly era in telecommunications. Any thoughts, dear reader? Will Apple be able to make this work?
