Phoning in your business model

Of course, the big noise today was Google's unveiling of their latest iPhone killer. Or at least iPhone maimer. We definitely know that it's not aimed at the hacker/tinkerer demographic. Why? Because any geek-savvy marketer would have known better than to name it "Nexus," thereby dredging up memories of the baton-handing Star Trek film wherein Captain Kirk and Captain Picard meet in a spectacularly contrived plot. (And, btw, it took Kirk three full movies before he had to sacrifice the Enterprise; Picard's crew crashed it first movie out. Which, I ask you, is the better captain? Huh? HUH???!!!)

Anyhoo, before I work up a head of steam on that particular gripe, I should share the tiny epiphany to come out of today's smartphone ballyhoo. Namely how I noticed that phones really aren't about the phone company anymore. The cognitive dissonance is more extreme for the d'une certaine age likes of me, who grew up in Ma Bell's Monopoly, where Ma didn't have to worry about competition--only Ernestine. (Heck, I remember some of my rural relatives on party lines, come to that!) The physical telephone was an extension of the company (i.e. the brand itself) in that era: Hefty, but dependable as the next sunrise.

So it seems to me somewhat odd that the hottest phones are not designed by phone companies (Nokia possibly excepted, depending on your definition of "hot"). It's not AT&T service that's coveted; it's the sleek iPhone. Presumably much the same thing will happen with the Nexus One and T-Mobile, Verizon, and whoever else's hide Apple managed to chap. (Blackberry and Palm came into the phone business sideways, so such blanket statements, IMO, don't apply to them.)

Thus I have to think that AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, et. al. have squandered the opportunity handed to them by the Wild West deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s (y'know, when we were calling them "car phones" and when an inquiry into pricing differences could mean opening your phone bill to find you'd been "slammed"?). This capitalist's dream, this near-mandate to innovate, to differentiate, was right there. Yet all they seemed to do--from my limited and somewhat apathetic perspective--was lay down more cable and build more towers. Congratulations: You've made yourself a commodity. Particularly given how you've trained us to expect equal opportunity suckage in terms of nickle-and-dime billing, cut corners, fine print, labyrinthine touch-tone menus--in short, the truth of Ernestine's "We don't care, we don't have to...we're the phone company!"

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Coincientally enough, when I paused writing this to remind myself of which carrier(s) would be handling Nexus One traffic, I ran into this take on the unveiling.