Losing the customer


If you don't give them what they want, someone else soon will.
At the Wired site, Frank Rose writes a great in-depth article on the ROKR and why it is flopping.

None of this is difficult. The technology to make a cell phone do double duty as an MP3 player is readily available. Motorola and other companies have been selling phones that play music in Europe and Asia for a couple of years now - handsets with lots of memory and serious audio capabilities. And with the iPod, Apple showed how to turn an ordinary MP3 player into a great one. Put it all together and you get - the ROKR? How does a great idea get this botched?

The ROKR was conceived in January 2004, shortly after Ed Zander became head of Motorola. As a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and, before that, president of Sun Microsystems, Zander had known Jobs for years. So when Jobs called to congratulate him on his new position, it was only natural to discuss how they might work together.

Each had his reasons. Zander had been hired to jazz up the staid midwestern company, and an association with iPod would provide a much-needed infusion of cool - maybe even more than the upcoming RAZR. For Jobs, a partnership with Motorola was a way of neutralizing a threat to the iPod, which already dominated the US music-player market. Consumers around the world are expected to buy 75 million MP3 players this year, but they'll purchase nearly 10 times that many mobile phones. If music players become standard in handsets, the iPod could be in trouble. Partnering on a music phone gives Apple a way to enter that market yet protect the iPod. So although the two companies were superficially aligned, in fact their ambitions were diametrically opposed: Motorola dreamed of bringing the iPod to the cell phone-buying masses, while Apple sought to protect the iPod from them.

Thus conflicted, they set to work. Motorola already had a hardware prototype - the so-called MTV phone, which had launched two years before in association with the music channel in Europe, Asia, and South America. Engineers at Motorola's handset division in the Chicago suburbs started working with Apple's applications team in Silicon Valley to adapt the iTunes software. They had to deal with situations iTunes hadn't been designed for, like how to handle a text message and what to do when a call comes in while music is playing. They logged a lot of airline miles.

Bottom line, despite all the deals that had to be cut, if a business doesn't listen to their customer it won't have any sales. This is going to be one of the great missed opportunities unless someone starts listening real fast.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Thu - October 27, 2005 at 04:35 AM  Tag


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