If I were to walk into a room of 100 people in 2006 and tell everyone about a fantastic new hand-held device that can be a cell phone and be an always-on connected device, allowing you to surf the internet, read and write email like you do on the desktop and run a bunch of applications from weather to stock tracking, that crowd, no doubt would have been very interested.
But not everyone would have been sold.
Some might have said they didn’t need the internet wherever they go. Some would have said they didn’t use email that much. Some might have even said they didn’t like cell phones. Others might have balked at the terms, whether it be cost or contract.
The point is, even that crowd of 100 would have only garnered a few dozen customers. As we know, this theoretical device is the iPhone, and even with a few dozen percent of the potential market, Apple did very well.
So what about the rest of the market? What happened to them?
Well, some waited. Some were under contract and had to wait before they took the plunge. Eventually, those who weren’t religiously wedded to their carrier, or could arrange a quickie Mexican divorce or Papal annulment, bought an iPhone.
Some couldn’t leave BlackBerry Messenger, and upgraded to the new generation of iPhone-inspired BlackBerries. Another group hated Apple. They waited for a competitor and bought the first thing that promised to be an iPhone, without being an iPhone, even before a real competitor emerged.
Others held out. They had a feature phone and saw no reason to change. Many, however, have since moved on, as feature phones have been pushed out of the market by the carriers, and smartphones were available for the same free-on-contract price.
Now what do we have left over? At this point, all people who were inclined to get an iPhone have bought an iPhone. It’s been two generations of two-year contracts since it was introduced, and years to migrate contacts away from BlackBerry and into email. Even those who weren’t inclined to get an iPhone now have “the next best thing.”
So what customer is left? Really, it’s people who are not into smartphones. They either don’t feel they need one, or are sub-luddites who don’t want to go to something more complicated than their trusted candy bar phone.
They were in the room when the iPhone was introduced, part of that 100. A huge part of that 100. Maybe half of that room. Five minutes into the presentation and they were checking their watches and thinking about what they were going to have for dinner. They didn’t go crazy for a computer in their pocket. It was something for the techies to buy. Not for them.
Now, though, four years later, they have to get a smartphone. The technology has moved on, and they have begrudgingly accepted it. Their candy bar phone has been run over by a car, chewed on by the dog, used as a meat tenderizer, shot out of a clown cannon and dropped in the toilet too many times. They need to get something new.
Not only that, but all their friends have an iPhone or iDroid or whatever the hell they call them, and they need it to keep up. They feel like a fool when someone says they’ll email them, and they can’t get it until they go home. They can’t look up a bit of trivia on the internet to settle a bar bet. They can’t make a calendar appointment in less than ten minutes of hammering the alphanumeric keypad like a gorilla.
Now it’s smartphone time. So they go into a store, mentally picturing themselves surrendering to the evil corporate machine that has forced them to this point, and they ask the gratingly eager salesperson for something that isn’t too complicated. Easy to understand. The salesperson asks if they want email. Yes, the customer confirms it needs email — and internet. It’s gotta have internet. What about apps? The customer isn’t familiar with what apps are, precisely, but he’s become aware that everyone talks about apps. Yes, it must have apps.
The salesperson then recalls that talk he had with his manager about pushing the non-iPhone products because they get a better percentage and they’re piling up back in the store room. He advises his customer accordingly.
It’s easy to use, right? The customer asks to double check. The salesperson says it’s really easy. See? You just press this button here and you go to another page and this button here to go back. What could be easier?
But hold on, the customer says, I don’t want to pay a lot of money. Even if the phone is practically free, they’re not going to pay an arm and a leg for the contract. The salesperson proposed an unlimited plan. The customer wants to know if they can save money on something less. Sure, the salesperson confirms, they have plans for limited minutes, a small data cap and no text messaging.
Fine, says the customer, I’ll get a plan to match my usual minutes. I don’t send much email or surf the internet all day, so I’ll go minimum on that, and I never send text messages. All in all, it’s not too bad. In fact, that customer feels like they may have beaten the system, getting a smartphone with a contract that was only 75% as expensive as they thought it would be.
They take the phone home and spend one or two nights of frustration picking up the phone, trying to set up email or going to a web site, failing miserably, and putting the phone away again. They repeat this pattern several times. They want to complain, but the salesperson said it was easy to use. Any admission of a problem is tantamount to admitting they’re a fool. Plus they don’t want to go back to that store. That was a nasty place, swimming with salespeople who looked at you like a walking bucket of chum.
So they stuff the phone in their pocket and go with it. They’re able to make and receive calls, like the old phone did, so it’s not a total failure. Still, they have a broken relationship with the phone, fighting it to do simple things. With the battle scars to show for it, they have gradually trained themselves to do three or four basic tasks on a phone that can do thousands of things.
Then, when they checked the first phone bill, it’s noted that if they use too much gigabytes on the internet, they get charged almost double. How much gigabytes does the internet use? They don’t know. But they certainly don’t want to risk it, so they barely ever use email or internet. Plus, now they have to pay whenever someone sends them a text message, and live in fear of getting one. Does that use gigabytes? They’re not even sure.
As for those apps, they have to pay extra for them! They paid for the phone and the contract, why do they need to pay extra for apps? The contract was already too expensive, and they’re not going to sink more money into this turkey. After all, they can barely get the stuff built into the phone to work. Why pay more for more apps that will be just as hard to use? There’s no way they’re handing over more money to their provider. No way.
So, there you have today’s reluctant smartphone customer: paranoid about getting overcharged, unable to understand the phone they just bought, and unhappy that they got taken at the phone store by a shifty salesperson. They don’t want to spend extra money, and they don’t want to use their device unless they have to — and they resent even owning the phone in the first place.
Android, meet your customer base.