Jared M. Spool: > I have to admit, I have no idea what we're actually talking about here. If > you could elaborate why we're talking about this, that might help me.
>From my POV, strategy of timing and baseline testing. The reason I objected to the characterization of Apple talking to Verizon (and presumably others) as a 'bidding war' is that we don't know why exactly Apple talked to Verizon. (Just as we don't quite know why MSFT abandoned its pursuit of Yahoo. It may be yet another Ballmer fumble that we've become accustomed to or a tactical move to depress Yahoo's price for a later takeover. We don't know.) But I can appreciate why Apple may have wanted to start conservatively with the largest carrier in the U.S., and offer a GSM-only, US-centric, one-carrier, 2G, etc., device. That's the baseline. As a company that has never before played in the cell phone industry, it needed market and consumer behavior data. Now it has that. Multiple carriers -- at the start -- would have enormously complicated that baseline understanding. Just as, for example, having dorky Java or random Flash interfaces would have when Apple wanted to establish a coherent, multi-touch gestural interface that neither offered. "Bidding war" suggests that Apple had an iPhone that was both GSM (AT&T) *and* non-GSM (Verizon), and that the company would forego such highly appreciated UX features like visual voice mail or iTunes activation, which carriers didn't offer and thus had to be built. By way of relevance, baseline testing is often very difficult for designers to pull off. They often 'test' for way too many (interdependent) variables *simultaneously* to extract any useful meaning: there's no baseline. As in, did Apple's multi-touch gestural interface fail because Apple did an inadequate design job or because the presence of Java and Flash corrupted the baseline understanding? -- Kontra http://counternotions.com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
