I had a wonderful chat with a friend of mine yesterday about apples history and their business changes throughout the years and their upcoming strategy.
Besides building beautiful new products one interesting idea was, apple might become a carrier.
I personally don’t believe they will go into that direction, but I can imagine them to make a similar move as amazon did with the kindle.
Amazon did the magic to set worldwide roaming contracts for their kindle, so that one can download books via gsm and surf the amazon website worldwide for free.
Imagine Apple to set such contract with carriers as well. It makes perfect sense: The worst thing about using mobile devices is the whole roaming stuff – now, if Apple sets worldwide contracts for their mobile devices to
– Use itunes and download books, apps, music and movies
– Use Apple’s mobileme.com for email, calender etc.
– Use every app
and they then buy skype and make them their app to make phonecalls,
they will build the biggest walled garden out there and separate the internet into two – besides making everything so much easier.
The whole package would be paid by your mobileme.com account – which is $99 per year, if I remember correctly.
Because they control every app, they’d control the whole (closed) web of their users.