aaron evans

In my analysis of Apple’s upcoming phone, I suggested that Apple will use iTunes to offer software syncing of address books and calendars. This led someone to ask the following question:

I am just wondering how Apple can implement the iCal and Address Book features to an Apple iMobile phone if those apps don’t exist on a Windows machine? Will the iMobile phone be useful only for us Mac users? Only QuickTime and iTunes exist on both platforms. To use an iMobile phone, one may need a Mac, which could be an incentive for people to purchase Macs and abandon the Windows platform either somewhat or altogether.

I gave this some thought and if you’ve read the subject of the post it should be pretty clear what my conclusion is.

Here are Apple’s options:

1. Make the Apple Phone Mac-only as they did with the original iPod.
2. License someone else’s Windows software to sync your favorite Window’s calendar/address book software with iTunes or directly with the iPod. This was a variant of the strategy taken by Apple when they first offered Windows support for the iPod via Musicmatch.
3. something else…

The first option is compelling because it gives Apple some startup time to sell their phones and service to a limited audience. It also lets consumers know that a benefit of owning a Mac is that Apple gives its customers first dibs on new products.

Option two is undesirable because Apple would have to pay for development of or licensing of such software and then offer sub par integration with other calendaring or address book systems. Apple does not want its Windows users using Outlook to update their contacts so that they can then open up iTunes to sync their contacts with their Apple phone. Apple wants to control the whole experience or at least get something in return from the entity providing the calendaring/contact services to iTunes.

Who else has calendar and address book software that could be used by Apple to Apple’s gain? Google. In this scenario, iTunes becomes the syncing agent between Google services and Apple hardware. It’s a beautiful strategy because it lets Apple form an alliance with a powerful friend for mutual benefit. Google gets a slew of new users who want to sync their phones while Apple can focus on iTunes and hardware.

The syncing options range far beyond calendars and address books and provides Apple with many compelling new features for its phones, iPods, or other portable devices. Why not gmail or Google Maps on an Apple phone? The integration of the two company’s services would provide an amazing platform for both Google and Apple to sell their products and services. Google can be seen as offering all of the mobile services to Apple’s phones that are currently provided (in a very mediocre way) by network operators. I want one.

The only lingering problem with this scenario is what to do with all of those .Mac subscribers who currently pay Apple for a very similar service. The answer to this problem is to simply kill .Mac and rebrand it under the umbrella of Google services. Apple has never given .Mac the attention it needs to be great and many of the services provided by .Mac are provided by Google. Apple should stop competing with Google for these web services and instead simply rebrand them and make them very easy for Mac users to access.

This partnership would really upset the current cell phone industry. I don’t think Verizon or any other network operator can compete with Google in their offering of mobile services. I don’t think anybody can create more compelling phone hardware than Apple. No operator or phone manufacturer has a presence on the desktop like Apple. That presence will prove to critical in making the Apple phone easy to use. This market is wide open.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 26th, 2006 at 11:17 am and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.