Silicon Insider: An Army of Mavericks
The Florida GOP, iPhone hacking, Societe Generale and institutional loyalty.
Feb. 1, 2008 — -- What do Apple Computer, Societe Generale and the Florida Republican primary have in common? The growing power of the independents and the mavericks to determine the fate of large organizations.
Let's review this troika of events from the last week:
Apple Computer surprised analysts and industry watchers when, as in the previous two quarters, it posted both the number of iPhone unit sales and the number of iPhones registered and activated by the AT&T network. What made the numbers stunning was the discrepancy between the two: 1.7 million units.
Even if you subtract the iPhones sold in Europe and available on other carriers, about 350,000 phones, you are still left with 1.35 million missing iPhones. That's astonishing enough, but what is even more interesting is that the number of missing phones has been accelerating quarter by quarter.
It's not as if these iPhones are really disappearing; everybody has a pretty good idea what's happening to them. They are, in fact, being hacked. The proper term is unlocked, though it is fun to use the more loaded term given that Steve Jobs got his start in tech as a phone hacker … karma being a bitch.
Customers in growing numbers have been buying iPhones and then reconfiguring them to run other, and apparently more desirable, phone services.
This is quite remarkable for a number of reasons, not least of which is that Apple famously has some of the most loyal customers in consumer electronics. They have stuck with Apple through good times and bad — and mostly good times lately — and it is quite unexpected that they would suddenly begin to sabotage the company's carefully prepared business model and threaten its relationship with a strategic partner.
But even more interesting is the fact that despite Apple's every effort to stop this black market — limiting purchases to two iPhones, requiring credit cards, to changing the way the most recent iPhones download software from SIM cards — not only has none of it worked, but the rate of unlocking accelerated so fast in the last quarter that Tom Krazit of C-Net has concluded that "the unlockers are winning."
