I wonder what Steve Jobs is thinking about the German court order forcing T-Mobile to sell unlocked i-Phones.
I bet he’s laughing himself silly.
Jobs appears to be a guy who likes to be disruptive, for whom a status quo is something to be given a good kicking.
That’s a proud Californian high-tech tradition. Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce, the founders of Fairchild and Intel, also saw themselves as revolutionaries.
Jobs, Moore and Noyce did more than anyone to overturn the entrenched computer industry structure known as ‘IBM and the BUNCH’ (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell).
So now, it seems, Jobs sees another industry status quo that needs overturning, the hegemony of the telecoms network operators.
They’re a bit like the board of the FA, these network operators: a bit thick, a bit slow, a couple of yards off the pace, and spending all their time trying to defend their patch rather than driving the industry forward.
That’s why the telecoms industry needs Jobs.
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