Does Japan Need the iPhone?
The world's most sophisticated users of wireless technology may be unimpressed by Apple's high-tech gadget — The Japanese fell for the iPod. So why should they not embrace the iPhone, too? It's tempting to think that Japan's love affair with Apple's …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple is circling Japan at the end of 2007: three days before this piece, it reportedly sat down with NTT DoCoMo and Softbank about launching the iPhone there (Apple Meets with DoCoMo, Softbank On Launching iPhone in Japan). The puzzle Business Week frames is real — Japanese consumers bought the iPod in volume, so brand affinity exists, yet analysts openly question whether the country's sophisticated wireless users will embrace the device.
The stakes sit against a backdrop of momentum elsewhere: insiders expect Apple to claim roughly five million iPhones sold by Macworld in January, with strong Christmas-season sales reported — but none of that yet includes Japan, the one major market where the formula is untested.
First-order effects
- DoCoMo and Softbank now face a direct choice on Apple's terms: carrying the iPhone means ceding some of the control over features and revenue splits that Japanese carriers traditionally hold over handset makers.
- Japanese consumers get a concrete alternative to domestically engineered feature phones, whose capabilities local users treat as baseline rather than premium.
Second-order effects
- If either carrier signs, the other faces competitive pressure to match, since exclusivity would hand one network a marquee device and its halo customers.
- Domestic handset makers and carriers must defend the feature set — mobile wallet, TV tuning, e-mail-centric usage — that defines what Japanese users consider a complete phone, forcing Apple to localize or accept a niche.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Japan becomes the stress test for whether a global smartphone platform can displace carrier-designed handsets, or whether the world's most advanced mobile market stays a walled garden of domestic devices.
- The outcome will shape how other markets weigh the same trade-off Apple embodies: a closed, tightly integrated device versus the operator-customized phones carriers have long favored.
The trend: Global smartphone platforms are beginning their collision with Japan's carrier-controlled, feature-phone-first wireless market, with Apple's carrier negotiations marking the opening move.