As an object lesson, the wildly successful Apple Store had its genesis not in any strong desire on the part of Apple to get into retail, it came of necessity due to existing players in the retail channel treating them poorly.
A tightly controlled user experience is part and parcel of just why Apple products work so well and in turn sell so well. Bellyaching about one’s top selling products in a public way is potentially counterproductive.
This is especially so when dealing with a company with the market cap of Apple, and when dealing with a company that has made a mantra out of improving their user experience, middlemen be damned. Look to the music industry, largely disintermediated now, their high margin CD business rendered practically irrelevant.
Look no further than Adobe dragging its feet on Flash compatibility with the touchscreen interface, only to be unceremoniously dumped for HTML 5. I can tell you, being an iPad user with no add on app for Flash, that content relying upon it is getting very infrequent. Adobe killed their own cash cow.
It can happen again, and I can't think of too many cell carriers that engender any sort of affection or attachment whatsoever, unlike Apple.
Do you see what I mean yet?
Again, the phone companies should be so lucky. Every single phone company that has the iPhone, has lost market value since they got the iPhone on their networks, due to the massive amounts they have to pay Apple(Apple reportedly collects as much as massive $600 per iPhone user in royalties from the carriers, on top of the hardware profits from the phones).
“As an object lesson, the wildly successful Apple Store had its genesis not in any strong desire on the part of Apple to get into retail, it came of necessity due to existing players in the retail channel treating them poorly”
I love my service(and the great rates) from T-Mobile. Significantly, they don't carry the iPhone.
“A tightly controlled user experience is part and parcel of just why Apple products work so well and in turn sell so well”
The widespread Mac botnet and the notorious antennaegate scandal with the iPhone 4 beg to differ.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Mac-Botnet-Infects-More-Than-600000-Apple-Computers-699749/
http://mashable.com/2012/02/18/antennagate-iphone-settlement/
“Do you see what I mean yet?”
Nope.