Operator gang gunning for iTunes

The Wholesale Application Community has been laying out its philosophy ahead of a promised business plan next month, and all-out war with Apple next February. The WAC is a coalition of network operators who've been looking at Apple's business model and wondering why they're not making any money out of it, with a view to …

[Seanie Ryan]

ignore the obvious

So the phone operators have done the same as the broadband providers.... in a race to the bottom to prove who can provide the cheapest service, they completely forgot about costs.

Kinda like what Dell did too.

Now that they are down there and realising that providing the "unlimited" plan costs more than they charge, so now they want to either grab a portion of someone elses revenue or try do it themselves.

So when they do open their own App store and then 2 years later realise that the cost of that is more than they realised, what then? Close it down and 2 fingers to customers.

They all want to be the RyanAir of their industry, but they havent the brains on how to do it.

Maybe BMW and Ford should go after Shell , BP etc because they dont get a portion of the Petrol sales.

I know . i know , its not a direct comparison but you get the picture...

[Anonymous Coward]

Completely agree

I wonder if there is a bookie who take bets on if it will be a mess - and how fast it will shut down. I could use the cash from the bet.... (OK - so I can't legally do this where I live.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Classic!

Quote: "folding both the JIL and the OMTP into the WAC to make life simpler..."

I was in stitches by this point - no doubt a foretaste of the chaos arising from this frankenstein consortium.

[jubtastic1]

LOL at the last twitch

Soon they'll realise they have the exact same business model as the gas, water and electric supply 'industries'.

[Anonymous Coward]

If they nail the experience, this could be great!

This might work, but it does need to be a whole experience and can't just be a collection of apps.

I've bought precisely one thing on my phone, a game. The terms said I could download it as many times as I needed in 24 hours from purchase, but when the first download failed and I restarted it, I was charged twice and had to spend time getting my money back. Two weeks later I was advised to upgrade my phone firmware and despite the app being on the memory card, it was lost and I just couldn't run it again. A complete waste of money.

This biggest problem with the non-Apple experience is the lack of a readily-available intermediate backup (i.e. iTunes) of things I've bought and paid for - this matters equally for upgrading phones and wanting continued use of software I've already bought.

If they nail that, I might be back. Till then, I simply won't buy software for my 'phone because I can't actually be sure of what I'm getting. In the meantime, I've managed to get the crappy Orange firmware off my phone and completely dispense with their thoroughly hopeless "stores".

[Joe Ragosta]

Logical conclusion

I wonder if they realize that iTunes is only a very tiny portion of the business conducted over the Internet. Ads constitute a much larger portion of Internet traffic than iTunes - so why aren't they whining about getting a portion of Ad revenue?

Or if they're worried about overloading their networks, why don't they get together to do something about all the spam and malware that are bringing the Internet to its knees?

Or maybe they should get a fraction of Amazon's revenue. Or NetFlix. Or perhaps they should tax YouTube videos - they use a LOT more bandwidth than iTunes.

Or maybe they simply think that it's only a matter of creating their own iTunes clone. But they're missing all the other stuff, so why not start by creating their own Google clone - or YouTube clone - or Amazon clone?

It really saddens me to see how bad people are at understanding the concept of adding value for customers by creating a great product. If they had said "we think we can offer a better user experience than iTunes and we're going to do so", that would be a reasonable (if misguided) approach. Simply saying "we want a portion of the revenue so we're going to take it" is not.

[Seanmon]

That's gonna have

a lifetime of approximately 3 seconds, i.e.. the length of time it takes Steve Jobs to declare that iPhone apps must only be bought through the Apple App Store.

[Monty Cantsin]

RE: That's gonna have

@Seanmon: Unless jailbroken, iPhone apps already must be bought through the Apple App Store. This proposed monstrosity if for non-Apple phones.

[Patrick 8]

Classic Advertising Slogan Time!

You,ve tried the best,

so come on now and try the rest!

Oh and bring oodles more of your money because it will cost you dearly for service treatment you'll recieve from using other than the best

Just lovely!

[jbelkin]

What's after this, world peace and mass hand holding

WEll, good for thisguy to create a $250k a year post for talking but I'll bet these guys can't even agree on what to have for lunch. Middle East peace sounds good also and maybe we should all hold hands and skip around. Other than getting his salary paid and a nice expense account to go to telco trade shows, this has about as much as a chance to succeed as Google does with Android (any franken-OS).

[johnnydfred]

Am I missing something?

So-- what is this $30 per month data service I pay for? Greedy bastards, the lot of them. And whiny to boot.

[vincent himpe]

@seanmon : pre-empted strike

Apple already announced ,ehh lets see , last week. that they will not allow intermediate layers to link against the os...

blub blub blub ...

[Phormic]

Oh dear.

"Hit a whole lot of people with a slightly less-good service then that's enough for most people."

What an inspirational and motivational call-to-arms that is. "Let's do something that barely good enough for the lowest common denominator!"

[Anonymous Coward]

They've got no hope whatsoever

Most mobile operators nowadays are nothing more than marketing companies. They've under invested in their networks. They outsource most of their technology. They are almost impossible to work with on a technical level. Sorting out API access to an operator can take months. They all offer different APIs, hense the need for SMS agregators etc. How on earth could these muppets organise anything like what they're trying to achieve.

They realise that they are dumb pipes and that there is really nothing to distinguish one from another. So these marketing companies are constantly trying to make themselves 'relevant' to their customer base and win some kind of loyalty to their brand.

Another interesting point is how the idea of having a common API and experience across multiple handsets, goes completely against Apple's stance of trying to provide a unique user experience in apps built for their platform. I believe having a nice simple widgets API is a good idea to let developers reach a large number of people but I can't really see how combining

Widget API + Multiple Handset Manufacturers API implementations + Operator Collaboration + Application Store = WIN

[Tom 13]

I have three letters for all of you who think the technical prowess

of I-Tunes won't be defeated by inferior quality: VHS