The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Today, in an age where mobile
Internet access is hitting its stride, the iPhone is easily the best
device on the planet and Apple is selling them by the truckloads. Yet
Apple is trying to limit the number of applications being developed for
its platform with implied threats of copyright suits for developers
that sell applications that need to "jail break" its device to work.
Now rival iPhone application stores are springing up like weeds in
an unkempt garden. They sell all sorts of useful applications that for
reasons of its own Apple doesn't want to sell. Applications, such as
one that turns the iPhone into a camcorder or a broadband modem are
persona non gratis on the App Store but not on these rival sites.
So
what happens if Apple is able to get the law to shut its rival iPhone
store sites down? There's less useful applications for the iPhone. You
can only get the ones Apple wants you to have and for which it gets a
cut of the pie.
Is that good business sense? It might be if Apple was the only smartphone company in the world and iPhone was the only platform.
As
I write this, a newcomer to the smartphone platform stage called
Android has made its appearance. Developed by Google and subsequently
released under an open source license, the Android platform currently
has only a fraction of iPhone's market share, yet developers are
churning applications by the thousands for it.
The fact of the
matter is Apple has choices at this stage in its history. With the
iPhone, it has an opportunity it hasn't had since the Mac.
Apple
can open up its platform to the wider third party developer community
and use them to help propel the iPhone into the indisputable dominant
player position in the smartphone space. Or it can continue on with its
walled garden and watch as the iPhone emulates the Mac and stays a
significant but niche product.
David Bass
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