Consumers are the new talent....

I wrote the following a short while ago.... With the release of a new iPhone I thought it might be worth repeating here today.....

Steve Jobs tied the iPhone to one telecommunications company. This is not what is normally done in the telecommunications industry. Jobs knew he had low talented users - he designed the iPhone specifically for them. Jobs also knew he had to give them an extraordinary iPhone user experience so he limited who could do what with the iPhone and relied on his cool design to win the day with his consumers.

But all bets are off for the next generation of iPhones. It is already clear that the next generation of iPhones will have to serve extraordinarily talented users and so Steve Jobs must complement his handset with free contracts with every telecommunications company. To make this deal even better the provision of a free service contract will most likely come with a range of additional telecommunication offering because all those companies will have devised passive income models that suit their iPhone users.

What did the Chattering Clusters make of the iPhone? It was intially greeted with great joy and thus generated a heap of positive chatter. But what long-term storylines will prevail? Some of the negatives about the service provider's role in the iPhone began to play loud and often after the initial release. So what will prove to be crucial to the iPhone's success? For the iPhone to become the next big thing, like its little sister the iPod, it has to win over the Chattering Clusters.

If the iPhone is a great user experience then the storylines within the Chattering Clusters will be generally positive and thus will ensure that more and more users buy it, use it, and most importantly chatter incessantly about it on Web 3.0. If this happens then iPhone Clans and Tribes will be created. These Clans and Tribes will validate the iPhone and then move on to suggest practical ways to adapt it, innovate it, and thus have it provide more value to you and to me.