Lessons from Apple

I was building a blog post on all the fun lessons you can learn from Apple's iPhone adventure this weekend. It would have been good but Seth Godin's post is superior to anything I would have written.

Go here and read it. 

What he said.

Comments

[Steve Laceyq]

Seth doesn't appear to accept comments, so I thought I'd comment here..

The Wii is still scarce after 18 months. I finally found one today, whereas the iPhone's scarcity will probably only last a week.

Is the iPhone's scarcity a manufactured problem or a manufacturing problem? Is Nintendo's?

I find the balance between real scarcity and manufactured scarcity a fine line to tread, but even after 18 months, Nintendo still seem to be getting away with it...

[Neil Wainwright]

Well, in my case I had a late night last Thursday so I got up, checked out our company's position in the Apple App Store (yes, we were there on day one) and wandered down to my local Rogers store at 9:20am. It opened at 10am and I was 4th in line and they had a total of six phones...so I got one. Rogers activation systems promptly crashed for about seven hours so I didn't get activated on Rogers until about 5pm. However, being a local store they just took my number, put my name on the box and called me in when the activation systems were working. I scratched my head all day wondering how bad their infrastructure must be to have stayed down for so long. Crashing I can understand...but staying down?

I took the phone home and iTunes did its thing to complete the activation...in a few seconds. I know the iTunes servers were choked earlier in the day, but with Rogers being down so long most of us Canadians never got to experience anything but the problems in the Rogers systems. The Rogers staff were very nice, friendly, helpful and understanding. A huge two-thumbs up to my local store's staff!

An interesting side note...my voice plan remained the same as my BlackBerry BUT the $60 BlackBerry plan was replaced with the $30 iPhone data plan. In other words...it's cheaper than my BB and my payback period is now 8 months given my device cost of $249 Cdn.

...Neil