I saw the COO of Verizon talking about this on CNBC a few weeks ago. He says that to compete with the iPhone, Verizon has "18 multimedia phones" with picture and messaging packages.
But when you go to a Verizon store, and use the phones, they're all hideous attempts to create cool devices. Why do they even need EIGHTEEN devices? The menu systems are ugly and practically unusable, the buttons on the phones are poorly designed-- I bought my dad a Razr K1m, and the buttons are so small and flat that you have to grow your finger nail to press each individual number. The Verizon devices (that's LG, Motorola, etc) all suffer from a lack of creative design and ingenuity, because they are all pumped out quickly and with contracts, and because the manufacturers have little competition amongst themselves, because they generally operate in different niches, or on different networks.
This is why Apple's strategy is so revolutionary and is going to change the game. They've taken their crazy talent at creating easy and beautiful user interfaces and merged it with lots of leverage on AT&T's network in an attempt to remove all of what is bad about the cellular industry.
I think it's cool; the cell phone industry needs some shakeup now, just like PCs did in the late 90's.
On the one hand, its very annoying that the Iphone can't be used on the best network. On the other hand, I can understand why Apple wanted so much control over the launch as they want to sell the user a complete experience, not just a gadget.
Letting Verizon handle sales would have been a bad idea - they're not very good at selling phones - I haven't enjoyed having to go and buy them at the Verizon stores in the past.
Letting Verizon handle support would have been less problematic, they've been great with my blackberry support, always overnighting me a new one no questions asked the same day (happened 3 times). Of course having people have to buy them at the Apple store gets people looking at Macs etc,so the motivation for Apple is pretty clear.
The big question is whether running on a lesser network will lose them so many customers that demanding the super deal with AT&T was a mistake. Time will tell once the clones arrive.
But when you go to a Verizon store, and use the phones, they're all hideous attempts to create cool devices. Why do they even need EIGHTEEN devices? The menu systems are ugly and practically unusable, the buttons on the phones are poorly designed-- I bought my dad a Razr K1m, and the buttons are so small and flat that you have to grow your finger nail to press each individual number. The Verizon devices (that's LG, Motorola, etc) all suffer from a lack of creative design and ingenuity, because they are all pumped out quickly and with contracts, and because the manufacturers have little competition amongst themselves, because they generally operate in different niches, or on different networks.
This is why Apple's strategy is so revolutionary and is going to change the game. They've taken their crazy talent at creating easy and beautiful user interfaces and merged it with lots of leverage on AT&T's network in an attempt to remove all of what is bad about the cellular industry.
I think it's cool; the cell phone industry needs some shakeup now, just like PCs did in the late 90's.