Register has a very interesting post about apple proving it pays to be late and ignore mobile networks.
So Apple now finds itself where everyone else in the mobile handset business wanted to be 15 years ago. Large companies full of clever people devoted years of planning and expenditure to fail to get here. If the iPhone continues to flourish (see below for the many obstacles en route) - then both rival manufacturers and the networks have to tear up some long established strategies.
So how did someone with no track record in a notoriously difficult business find itself walking away with the laurels? What can explain this paradox?
For Apple, coming late to the phone business has actually been a huge advantage. The success of the iPhone is down not just to great engineering, but profiting from several years of desperate and outright stupid behaviour by the mobile phone networks, who set the terms for the manufacturers. The received wisdom of the industry - that you had to know the wiles of the mobile networks to succeed - turned out to be completely mistaken. And to explain this we find another paradox, which looks like this.
It is indeed very impressive for apple to come in so late and disrupt the whole mobile industry with its iphone. It is not because they are late that they are able to do this.
For years the mobile manufactureres and networks were ripping off consumers and controlling their net works with draconian grip and choked off innovation. If the PC world was open and stadardized then the mobile world is closed and fragmented. An industry that is based on controlling and exploiting customers is not sustainable. It leaves the door open for companies like apple and google to come and eat your lunch. Amazingly apple has done this in two monster industries; music and mobile.
So the lesson to companies that have their business models based on controlling distribution (hello media companies?) is this; change or prepared to get change forced on you.