News for Wednesday, 26 September 2007

Last night, the European Apple Stores were closed for a while. The same transpired with the online stores in the American continents.
Although some hoped for a product freshening, there weren't any. Apple merely made some maintenance and modifications to its sites while arranging that the impact on their clients would be minimized as much as possible. One visible change is that the US store now sports a blue interface.

Many Mac users are happy to see and enjoy a Paris Apple Expo mostly dedicated to the Mac and hardware in general. Visitors are spending more time with application developers and testing software and hardware for home and/or business purpose.
On the other side, the iPod Touch, being demoed on Apple booth, attracts many customers; but the missing product is the iPhone. People never talked some much about a product not available, and according to our sources, relationship between Apple and Orange are as cold as ice, even though, Orange launched a massive and intensive training session for all its business task force to be ready right on time for the introduction of the iPhone by mid-November in France.

Taking advantage of the Paris Apple Expo, Microsoft unveiled packages and pricing of the upcoming Office 2008 to be released in January at the Macworld Expo.

Microsoft will offer 3 versions (Vista effect?) of its renowned office suite:
- Home and Student Edition, including World, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage but lacking Exchange support: US$149.95
- Standard Edition, including World, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage associated with Exchange support and support for Automator workflows: US$399.95 or US$239.95 for the upgrade.
- Special Media Edition, a Standard Edition plus Expression Media for Mac (an image managing application): US$499.99.
Price in Euro as well as the price difference due to localization are unknown. In addition, it is unclear if a special introduction price/discount will be avialable for current Office 2004 Mac edition owners

After NBC leaving the iTunes Store, Vivendi, via its Chief Executive Jean-Bernard Levy, condemned the contract terms between its music division, Universal Music Group (UMG) and Apple Inc., even naming it "indecent":

"The split between Apple and (music) producers is indecent ... Our contracts give too good a share to Apple,"

In other words Vivendi thinks that 0.70 euro out of 0.99 euro price per track is not enough (more than 75%!), while Apple is responsible for promoting and distributing the digital music store, and of course maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure.
Vivendi is probably openly pressuring Apple to renegotiate iTunes contract terms. Of course, Apple will most likely try to keep Vivendi catalog on its iTunes Store, knowing that the same catalog is currently available as a DRM-free offer from almost all iTunes competitors. Behind the scene, Vivendi expects to regain control over prices for its catalog, aiming to increase the cost of popular singles or hits, while decreasing the price of old albums.

Yesterday, Phil Schiller reported that SIM unlocking might lead to irreversible damage on the iPhone, making it clear that Apple will most likely release firmware update which will prevent hacked iPhone to work if installed. The iPhone Dev Team replied by ensuring iPhone owners that the current SIM unlocking applications are not a thread for the iPhone. They even announced they will release a new application able to bring the iPhone back to its initial status by the end of the week . In other words the iPhone Dev Team tries to make it clear that if following firmware update an iPhone turns dead this is only due to Apple.
The business model designed by Apple for the iPhone might push Cupertino in an instable position, with on one side people willing to purchase the iPhone but without being bundled to the carrier, and on the other side the selected exclusive carrier, sharing part of the revenue with Apple, but also willing to get as much return from this partnership. While Apple financially benefits from both sides, it will also get pressure and have to deal with complains from both sides.