Antenna-what?

It's called Antennagate. Why?

Why is this a scandal? Is this a tip-of-iceberg crime that is part of conspiracy? Dead bodies? People's life's saving wiped out? How does this scandal compare to Enron, BP, WorldCom, World Savings and Loan, Country Wide, Goldman, Madoff (and literally thousands of smaller scale Ponzi schemers)? We could add the corrupt politicos - let's not.

Or is this journalist excess? (Others can debate what is journalist in today's world.) The story is that there is no story.

Return rates are about .5 percent.

Was there cover-up? Apparently concerns were raised earlier. I'm sure people raised concerns. This happens in all product teams (or any other team effort.) If you want to amaze people with innovations, you take some risk. You cannot solve all the problems, eliminate all the risks and then start the project.

But back to journalists, or bloggers or ... Remember the press stories about Palm being the iPhone killer? This was an obvious PR ploy by Palm and many in the press fell for it. Now we have Ballmer boasting about his tablet. Publicly confessing that 'he' missed this. So what? What is the story? The new ruling on jailbreaking applies to all phones, but the press features the Apple angle. Again, the story is there is no story. A few months ago, the company in China that produces products for HP, Apple and others reported the high suicide rates. The headlines featured Apple - almost as though it was their factory. Now this is a real story.  The tragic side of China's economic miracle. Indeed 1000's die annually in coal mining accidents. This story is never told.

We have the on-going armeggedon stories of the 'platform wars' iPhone vs Android. It seems some people see replay of the PC wars. Do they think that Apple/Jobs have learned nothing in the last 30 years? But Apple have. They now have control of the chip roadmap. Dependence on Motorola nearly killed Apple. Today, Apple's leverage of ARM is a key advantage. Apple invented the concept of 'software evangelism' - recruiting ISVs to your platform to drive sales. It is working fabulously today. Sure there are many developers and applications in the Android ecosystem. But, when I see a SmartPhone app in the generic press, it's an iPhone app. I sincerely would love to hear about how the Android ISV ecosystem is maturing, i.e. producing high revenue applications. I would especially like to see a big success story about an App that came on the Android before the iPhone.