The revolutionary development of the iPhone's design and market are detailed in the article. Jobs' foresight, while not quite awe inspiring, is remarkable and his timing impeccable. The biggest revelation is the negotiating power the Apple brand posses. Essentially, Apple is making $320 on day one of a purchase. While AT&T's payback is quite a bit longer. The article speculates that Apple might have revolutionized the mobile phone design process and importance of electronics firms.
Personally I question the ability of these firms to deliver a device with the elegance in form and function. Even if they were able to deliver something 200% better than the iPhone it's not likely to be as successful because Apple delivers the entire personal digital platform. Assuming Apple can find a model that works for the recording industry and themselves, they could easily dominate entertainment delivery for a long while. With convergence of entertainment and computing devices in both home theater and PDP sectors, Apple might grow to dominate home entertainment and become a rival to Sony.
The question might quickly concern who can mount some competition. Where can a competitive alliance emerge? Most of silicon valley firms with financial ability lack technical know how for consumer devices. And no one has the platform to do this. The two most likely fronts for competition are open source and Microsoft. Only MSFT has the platform and experience with consumer devices, though that experience is very mixed between the Xbox 360 and the Zune. Many might recall Microsoft's tabletop touch sensitive prototype from the Surface group.
Given the well documented shortcomings of Vista, Zune, etc., it's easy to doubt MSFT''s ability to execute; and what kind of lousy draw is the MSFT platform these days. What is more interesting is to consider and speculate where decent competition might come from. The most promising challenger in the open source (Free and Open Source Software - FOSS) is Ubuntu but Linspire failed (why didn't they form a partnership with a company like Sony or Panasonic - now Asus has filled the space); personally I think LG could deliver a solid platform...
The reality though is that the window has closed. RedHat opently admits they are abandoning the desktop for now and rightly so. Apple has taken the opportunity for unix on the desktop with their Darwin BSD based OS X. I think at this point we'll need some serious missteps from Apple or a genuinely unique approach to this market. It's quite conceivable that a consumer platform could arise out of China using Red Flag and local manufacturing know how to produce a rival personal digital platform. HOwever, Apple has no doubt created their offerings with multi-lingual capabilities that encompass Mandarin and these devices are relatively cheap - iPhones are being sold in Europe for $199.
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