Over at livemint.com, Priyanka Mehra and Shauvik Ghosh have a story on how and why the iPhone failed to take off in India, and boy, a truer article I’ve never read! Apple either doesn’t understand the Indian market at all or just doesn’t care about it. They’ve never really paid any attention to their flailing Mac business out here or tried to make the iPod as much of a household name as it is in the USA. Now that it’s a mobile phone we’re talking about, they’re finding it difficult to gain a foothold in the country with the fastest growing cellphone industry in the world. And it serves them right.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Apple’s products—everything from the hardware design to the tiniest level of software minutia to the integration between their various products is incredibly well thought out and implemented. However, when it comes to aggressively pricing and marketing their products, the only country they seem to give a damn about is the United States.
How else can one explain the lack of the Apple Online Store, the iTunes Store (one that actually sells music and movies like it’s supposed to), or even a single Apple Retail Store? How can one explain the huge disparity in the prices of all Apple products out here when compared to their USA counterparts? How can one explain the complete lack of any advertisement directly from Apple in any form in the second most populous country in the world?
Apple doesn’t care about the Indian market and it has now come to bite them in the, er, posterior end. At least this one time, I’m glad to see Apple not being a success and people not taking a liking to an Apple product. And the fact that it makes my iPhone unique is only a small part of that. What makes me glad, primarily, is the hope that they will perhaps start taking India a little more seriously now.
What Apple needs to do now is get off the proverbial high horse and face the music. They need to realise that when their CEO climbs up onstage at one of the most high profile technology events of the year and declares that the iPhone will be priced at $199 or less all over the world, their world map had better include India as well.
Furthermore, it’s high time Apple came to terms with the fact that you aren’t really in the cellphone business until you’ve managed to infiltrate the school and college campuses of India. And for that to happen, they need to add the capability to forward text messages pronto. We also need video recording, Bluetooth (that actually works), and copy-paste, but these can be dealt with later. But if you want your product to be in the hands of the millions of teenage prepaid SIM card users out here, it better be able to pass on that not-quite-so-funny joke they just received to everyone on their contact list.
Of course, it is entirely possible that Apple still plans to keep things the way they are currently and is happy with their slice of the Indian market pie, no matter how small it may be. If that is the case, well, it’s just more bad news for us Indians. But something tells me that’s not the case anymore. I do not think that a man like Steve Jobs and a company like Apple would be foolish enough to willingly allow Nokia easy access to the pockets of the millions of smartphone users out here. Sooner or later, Apple will get serious about India. It’s just a matter of time.
Watch this space for updates.