Response to Sascha Segan’s article “A World Without Apple?”

Sascha Segan is PC Magazine‘s Lead Analyst for mobile phones and PDAs. And he recently wrote an article titled A World Without Apple? where he paints a very flattering picture of various technology related situations in South Korea. I tweeted that I disagreed and he suggested I continue the discussion. Once I was finished with my comment on his blog, it turned out to be too long to post as a comment so here it is. I’m directly responding to his article so you might want to give his article a read first. Also, please do not dismiss me as an Apple fanboy. Far from it, I complain about Apple as much as I praise them. I’m for competition and innovation.

re: Triumph of the keyboard

My disagreement here stems from my view that the statement “touch keyboards are fundamentally flawed” is incomplete at best. Are there negative aspects of a virtual keyboard? Yes. Are these negative aspects insurmountable with some user learning? And more importantly are these negative aspects greater than the sum of positive consequences of having a virtual keyboard? No. Given that the physical size limitation of a mobile device forcing various compromises, I contend the sum is significantly positive. Some of the features Segan refers to when he says “we love the rest of the iPhone’s features” are a direct result of having a keyboard that’s dynamic (characters, arrangement, and orientation) and can go away entirely solely based on context. Typing in Korean (or any other language for that matter) on the iPhone is awesome and easy to switch to.

What Segan sees as a triumph, I see as a lack of innovation thanks to a lack of competition.

re: More diversity, less DRM

I’m not a big fan of the “iPod monoculture” here in the US but I agree with the other commenters that more Apple does not equal more DRM. And inversely, less Apple did not seem to have lead to less DRM. I’m not too knowledgeable on this issue, but I think the comments from Koreans on the ground trying to use mp3s on their phones say a lot.

re: More TV?

This observation as well as Segan’s observation that more people are listening to music on their mobile devices might be true. But the cause he attributes to this behavior is wrong. This has more to do with public transportation (among other things). Many, many more people in Korea take public transportation than do people in the US. This leads to a lot of time waiting for and standing/sitting in a bus/train. That leads to a lot of activity on mobile devices, this consumption leads to more services (e.g. TV on phones). Public transportation isn’t the only reason, but it’s got a heck of a lot more to do with it than not having Apple there to muck up the works as he’s suggesting.

re: Missing Links

People using a stylus are doing so because they are stuck on WinMo (eck). Also, I don’t I agree that Koreans are naturally patriotic about their gadgets. It’s what’s sold to them thanks to the various conglomerates’ power over so many aspects of South Korean life.

The biggest missing part of this article is highlighted by his last sentence. “I’m not sure if we can learn anything from Korea’s relative avoidance of all things Apple, but it’s still interesting to see a country where they really do think differently.” Apple is missing from Korea not because people there are willingly avoiding it. They are forced into this decision not out of some open-mindedness or some special ability of the Korean people to avoid the Apple Fanboy Syndrome. It’s got more to do with the dominance of MS IE in Korea. The very sad, detailed story is available on Mozilla in Asia. IE is basically required for daily life, thus no choice but to use a Windows machine, thus not a strong presence of Apple.

I didn’t even get into all the shenanigans of SKT and KT in not bringing the iPhone to Korea or how expensive smartphones and service is in there. I’m afraid to say, from what I read (I don’t live in Korea), SKT and KT are even worse than AT&T if you can believe that. Channy Yun does a great job of dismissing all of the excuses in his post, There Are No Obstacles to Introducing the iPhone in Korea (in Korean).

There are positive aspects of Korean society to be sure. For example, although in retrospect it turned out to be a god awful idea, I love the initiative the government showed in providing Koreans with SEED when no good alternative was available to them. And I think there’s some truth to the belief that people there love to explore new technology. But as of 2009, in regards to computing device innovation and freedom (including mobile devices of course), I’m afraid it’s a slightly less than ideal situation in Korea.