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Carriers are the biggest threat to innovation (article)

Thanks for the link to the article. Very interesting. The major carriers seem to want to keep us confused and in their own environment. I generally like my carrier, Verizon; but find their website confusing. With the bundling of everything, God forbid I should try and compare rates to other Verizon plans, let alone to other carriers. I can see why many folks just give up and accept what they have, price increases and all.
 
carriers will be dumb pipes when smartphone prices come down

$650 for a new smartphone is WAY TOO MUCH when a laptop costs $500 for a decent one
 
I read that over the weekend and I totally agree.

But it's kinda like a catch 22, if you get one of them on board, like Apple did for the original iPhone with AT&T, you do get new stuff, like visual voicemail, etc. But it's the same in every market. The carriers have market power, and they're going to use and abuse that power every way possible.

And nobody wants to work with carriers that don't have much market power. For example, I'm sure Google or whoever would be able to convince Sprint to work with them to roll out crazy new features without having to give Sprint too much money to do it, cause they're the smallest. But nobody would ever want to do that cause Sprint is just too small and no one would actually use those new features for whole thing to be worth the effort.
 
Until we the consumers stop using subsidies to get our phones, we will all still be under the control of phone carriers. Once the majority of consumers pay full prices for their phones and not be stuck in long contracts it will give the power back to us and phone manufactures to do what we want to do with our phones rather than be limited to what the phone carriers want us to do.

With subsidies the phone carriers technically own our phones until we pay them off. Too many people here in the States are willing to give up their consumer power in order to get a cheaper phone. It ends up hurting us in the long run as mentioned in the article. It was a good read thanks.
 
I've worked inside some carriers within north america. It's insane the way they work and how inefficient they can be, especially with the manufacturers and the supply chain.

The subsidies thing really hurts us all. Keeps the non-subisidized price of devices inflated and will drive most consumers to view and expect devices to be free/$99/$199/etc.
 
Yes it's similar in Canada here as well. I had no idea that a carrier, by it's actions can break a phone release ie: Palm!

I broke down and subsidized for my new phone but only because I got a really good plan. That and car and house insurance came due :(
 
Proof again that it's all about distribution

Though this is bending the term distribution so don't kill me for that
 
The iPhone arrival caused change in the USA, but it's a mixed bag. For example, the carrier "walled gardens" that Jobs railed against didn't apply to smartphones. On those, we could always load outside apps, ringtones, music, etc. The Apple walled garden is locked tighter.

For the Good:

Cheaper apps.
Carriers gave up trying to block GPS.
Delay in moving to Verizon allowed rise of Android.
Perhaps more and faster competition between makers.

No Change:

Carrier walled garden traded for Apple version.
Apple still gave into AT&T's broadband app restrictions.

For the Worse:

Cells crowded and slower.
Data plans now required.
Unlimited data a thing of the past.
Higher subsidies means higher ETFs.

- What else?
 
This article is interesting, I never really looked at the phone market from this angle before. It does make sense though- the carriers have been in this cycle for years. When a feature is new, you let it ride, when it catches on and becomes popular you jack the prices sky high, when the bubble bursts you create a option-less or tiered system to continue to rake in the dough. ATT texting is a great example of this. And let's not even talk about the insane journey of the data plan these past few years.
 
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