counternotions

If you’re the owner of a general store in a small town of 83 people at some corner of a goldenrod state, you’d know the name of every man, woman and child there, where they live and when, where and what they shop. As far as marketing is concerned in that sleepy Nebraskan town, you’re God.

Now imagine a company that sells 50 million home mortgages all over the world. That naturally comes with very valuable financial background information on buyers that can be leveraged for additional products and services, where permitted.

And imagine further that this company not only has mortgage-related financial data, but can actually track furniture, clothing, electronics, food, financial, entertainment and pretty much any other kind of product or service purchased by all 50 million home owners in real time. Also consider that no other company has remotely the same access to such information. Finally, imagine that the company gets a 30% cut on all purchased items by all 50 million home owners. In anybody’s marketing world, this company would indeed be considered transcendent.

Welcome to Apple’s World

One of the jewels in the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 SDK:

Of course, those fixated on the rear-view mirror are reliably unimpressed: “Apple has made no more than $20-45m in revenue from the app store.”

This, however, is the same App Store that offers third party developers such features as:

Flexible payments.

In app purchase gives you the flexibility to support a variety of business models. You can offer your customers additional services and content within your paid app.

For example, you can create a subscription magazine app where you ask for payment on a monthly, yearly or periodic basis of your choice. Sell extra levels to extend the experience of your game. Build a general-purpose city travel guide app and let your customers pick the city guides they want to purchase. This new capability opens up many new business opportunities.

You create the app, we’ll bring the cash register.

The new Store Kit framework provides the functionality to process payments via the iTunes Store. You submit items to the store and set their price. When a customer chooses to purchase an item, your app creates a payment request and sends it to the iTunes Store for processing. After the iTunes Store verifies and approves the payment, your app is notified so that it can provide features or additional content.

Familiar business terms.

In app purchase uses the same business terms used for apps sold on the App Store. You receive 70% of the purchase price of each item you sell within your app, paid to you on a monthly basis—no credit card fees apply.

At the rate of projected growth, Apple will amass about 50 million iPhone and iPod touch users within a year. Unlike any other mobile device vendor in the world, the vast majority of offerings in Apple’s App Store will work identically on all its devices. For Apple’s ecosystem partners, that’s one OS, one market, one store and one transaction model aligned with one company, around just a couple of nearly identical devices.

It’s not your father’s business model

While other vendors are just now realizing that when they were busy haphazardly cramming specs and features into low-margin hardware, Apple has been laying the foundations of a moat strategy around its mobile platform.

Combined with the Push Notification service, Apple’s In App Purchase gives the company a level of visibility into customer behavior, purchase patterns, social networks and dynamics of mobile marketplace that’s unprecedented in the technology business.

Imagine 50 million users with credit card purchase history: apps they buy; how long and how often they use them; what they purchase within the apps; what personal connections they make; what email/text and app notifications they get, and how often and where; what traffic patterns emerge at what times; what applications are crying to be developed; what’s a good time to introduce products and services; what price levels are sustainable; what happens when prices are increased or lowered; and myriad other analytical insights that any CEO with half a brain would happily sign a “$20-45m” check for with his own blood. And that includes Google CEO Eric Schmidt and, when he wakes up from his consumer-markets induced coma, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

It’s a metadata universe

Apple has had a taste of large-scale customer data mining with the iTunes Store for audio and video products. But that’s a more limited, less lucrative domain of pre-packaged, static content. The App Store offers applications, which are far more open-ended in their commercial scope. Most apps can upgrade, connect to other apps and services, offer in-app purchases and leverage the ecosystem. With the App Store, in addition to its 30% cut from every transaction, Apple gains something else equally valuable: insight.

Insight breeds systems design intelligence, which is the core of Apple’s competency. Needless to say, not all transactional data will be available to or retainable by Apple due to privacy and regulatory reasons. But even a peek at aggregated metadata (without personal identification) would give Apple an enormous and unique advantage.

With the possible exception of Google, no other vendor is currently playing for the same stakes in the mobile arena: not Nokia, not RIM, not Microsoft, not any of the Asian manufacturers and not Sun’s daydream, Vector Java App Store. Google is keenly aware of the power of data analytics, but Android will, by its open-source nature, remain fragmented over many different vendors, business models and competing corporate goals.

It’s not publicly known if Apple has put in place the necessary infrastructure to gather, retain and analyze such massive metadata and has the brainpower to mine for insights, but as the mobile market separates along device peddlers vs. platform vendors, it’s once again Apple’s war to lose.

There’s a strange blindness that obscures U.S. blog and news coverage of iPhone. If the measure was mindshare, iPhone would be the world’s most important handset. But based on market share, iPhone is a tiny fish in a pond of larger, wiser fish. Nokia is biggest of them all. Marketshare matters — and it will matter more as Nokia launches its Ovi Store rival to Apple’s App Store…Nokia shipped more than five times as many handsets in a single quarter than Apple expected to ship for all of 2009. Perhaps iPhone is more water bug than tiny fish in that big pond.

Nokia is the poster child of those whose incurable fetishism is market share. It recently announced shipments of 92.3 million handsets in a single quarter, for a 38% global share. Apple, on the other hand, has sold only a total of 17 million iPhones (and 13 million iPod touches) in nearly two years for less than 2% global market share.

What if Apple operated like Nokia?

There are many differences between Nokia and Apple, of course, but none more telling than these two pictures:

Those are just a tiny fraction of more than 220 different models of Nokia phones in circulation. Apple, on the other hand, sells a single cellphone model:

That’s it. One model (with more or less memory, black or white) for all demographics and markets, here and abroad.

What never shipped

Steve Jobs has famously said that he is proud not only of the products Apple has shipped, but also the products Apple has decided not to ship. Indeed, had Apple listened to its competitors, analysts and pundits, it would have shipped a plethora of devices two years ago, including:

It’s the SKU, stupid!

With so many products, Apple would have had to research, design, manufacture, quality check, ship, stock, market, track, analyze and upgrade at a level of expenditure an order of magnitude higher than what it currently has for a single product.

SKU promiscuity is a sucker’s bet, as is the opportunity cost of behaving like Nokia. By spreading itself far too thin over 220 SKUs, Nokia inevitably fell short of a vision and ability to innovate, getting blindsided by the birth of the truly usable handheld computer, also known as the iPhone.

Indeed, Nokia’s greatest asset — its market share — has all of a sudden become an albatross around its innovation neck. The vast majority of its devices in the market are dumb phones running an aging OS, incapable of competing with web-surfing, multi-touch, multi-media and multi-purpose devices of the burgeoning ’smartphone’ genre. Reliant on volume and distribution for over a decade, Nokia has finally become the Microsoft of cellphone industry: ubiquitous, lethargic and beholden to its user base and SKU outlays.

In contrast, Apple uniquely leverages what’s essentially a single OS across desktop, server, mobile and set-top devices. Each innovation and improvement can not only quickly propagate across platforms through shared frameworks, but can also closely integrate them further to create the ‘halo effect’ that sells more Apple products. If Nokia’s strategy is ’segment and conquer’ Apple’s is ‘integrate and cross-sell.’

And one more thing…

Nokia reported a 91% drop in Q1 earnings per share.