Apple: Market King; Photographer: Koichi Kamoshida/Bloomberg I can remember few times in my life when I was more excited about a “magical” technology than I was in 2000. My good friend Sol Lipman and I were driving down a dusty road on a spur of the moment road trip; carried away from our apartments in the Valley on that particularly strong wind that only comes when a bubble bursts. While we took stock and thought about the future, we blared Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers from that magical piece of tech: the MP3 player…a AA battery powered, 64MB of onboard memory Nomad Jukebox.
What? You don’t love your NomadJukePhone 6s? Oh that’s right…despite portable digital music players being around since 1996, no one *really* cared until Apple AAPL -2.78% released the first iPod in 2001.
In comedy and technology, timing is everything. Enter a market too soon and no matter how great your product is, it will flop. Bide your time, refine your product, pick your moment, and even a “me-too” product can have world-altering success.
The beauty of Apple AAPL -2.78% is that it doesn’t just time markets: it creates them in the same fell swoop. When it came to MP3 players, any other company would’ve been considered 5 years late to the party but, when it comes to Apple AAPL -2.78% , the party doesn’t start until they get there. It happened with smartphones and smartwatches. It happened with tablets and contactless payments. Sorry Samsung, it even happened to your beloved stylus.
Now, Apple has picked its moment once again – this time placing a bet on a technology near and dear to my heart: carrier billing. Out of the universe of alternative payments Apple could’ve integrated alongside Visa and Mastercard in iTunes, it chose carrier billing.
Can you imagine […]
