iPhone Killers, Blackberries and Chicken Parts

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 5

There is an unfortunate tendency to confuse delivering a bunch of 'chicken parts' with producing an actual living, breathing chicken.

MG Siegler, over at TechCrunch, has written an excellent article that shines a light on the cycle from hype to disappointment that goes with being dubbed an 'iPhone Killer.'

BlackBerry Storm, Palm Pre, the G2, and now Droid have all been touted as contenders to the mobile computing crown, yet the iPhone continues to kick butt.

No less, Apple has levered its market leadership position with iPhone (and the iPod Touch) to create a halo effect on the rest of its business, generating bottom line results that are industry-defining (see analysis of Apple's Q4 results HERE).

Meanwhile, conventional wisdom, shaped by the history of Apple vs Microsoft during the PC Wars, tells us that Android is 'destined' to be bigger than the iPhone worldwide.

And to be clear, would-be iPhone slayers are indeed establishing strategic positions that have the potential to become compelling and differentiated within the mobile market. Examples include:

• Android: We are more open than Apple;


• RIM: We are more enterprise-ready;


• Palm Pre: We are more web-native;


• Android, RIM, Nokia, et al: We are a heterogeneous device platform.

But, alas, there is a fly in the ointment. Many of the above solutions are at a functional stage where they still fail to deliver a 'more than the sum of the parts' experience - at a time when Apple is clicking on all cylinders from a product innovation and new product pipeline perspective.

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Network neutrality: code words and conniving at yesterday's FCC hearing (Part 2 of 2)

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 1

Yesterday I summarized the public FCC hearing about bandwidth at the Harvard Law School, and referred readers to a more comprehensive background article. In this article I'll highlight some of the rhetoric at the meeting, which shows that network providers' traffic shaping is no more sophisticated or devious than the shaping of public perceptions by policy-makers and advocates.

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Network neutrality: how the FCC sees it (Part 1 of 2)

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 1

The mere announcement of an FCC hearing on "broadband network management practices" was a notch in the gun of network neutrality advocates. The achievement was reinforced by the line-up at Harvard University's law school today. The Comcasts and Verizons were outnumbered and outmaneuvered by the left wing of the network neutrality movement, which included such leading lights as Yochai Benkler, David P. Reed, and the honorary host of the event, Representative Edward Markey, who heads the House's Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.

Yet to a large extent, the panelists and speakers were like petitioners who are denied access to the king and can only bring their complaints to the gardeners who decorate the paths outside his gate. I believe that the FCC commissioners see distinct limits to what they can accomplish, and that their compromise will come out much closer to the current practices of the Comcasts and Verizons than to the more idealistic calls for an Internet that we should have had seven or eight years ago.

I feel a natural pull toward network neutrality, which I knew for many years in slightly different versions and different terms (common carriage, the layered protocol stack, the end-to-end principle, the stupid network) before the current buzzword emerged. But I soon realized that the subject was a thornbush from which it is hard to untangle a solution, and wrote a major analysis two years ago that I really think still stands as an accurate representation of the issues.

But where do industries, the public, and the government stand today? That's what I'll explain in this article. I'll drill down tomorrow in another article about some interesting details at the hearing.

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