“Sachio Semmoto, founder of Japanese broadband Internet and wireless company eAccess Ltd, said on Wednesday that WiMax, a new super high-speed wireless technology, will lose the battle to be the fourth-generation mobile standard of choice,” Sachi Izumi reports for Reuters.
“Semmoto, a telecoms industry veteran of 35 years, [also chairman of eAccess] told the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in Tokyo that a rival technology, known as Long Term Evolution (LTE), will win the race for 4G wireless networks because many large operators in developed countries are throwing their weight behind it,” Izumi reports.
“Semmoto also said Apple Inc’s iPhone was a ‘total failure’ in the U.S. market, considering how few of the phones have sold compared with those from rivals, such as Nokia,” Izumi reports.
“He praised iPhone’s functions but blamed the choice of network. AT&T is the only carrier for the iPhone in the United States,” Izumi reports. ‘If I have a chance to talk to Steve, I’d like to tell him face to face: You made a wrong choice,’ he said.”
Full article here.
Obviously, iPhone is not a “total” or any other sort of “failure” in the U.S. market. Apple’s iPhone quickly catapulted to 28% share of the U.S. converged device market (second only to RIM’s 41%, well ahead of third placed Palm’s 9%, and ahead of all Windows Mobile device vendors combined, whose share was 21%) in Q4 2007 – even while being tied to a single official network carrier, AT&T – a choice that Steve Jobs must have felt he had to make at the outset, regardless of the opinion of some random Japanese wireless company executive.
By the way, Apple’s iPhone will not be exclusive to AT&T in the U.S. for all eternity.
This bozo must have some motivation for calling the wildly successful iPhone a “total failure” in the U.S., but, to tell you the truth, following the specific money trail(s) or figuring out where he felt some perceived Apple slight is simply not worth the effort.
Besides the imminent arrival of iPhone in Japan (fear is a strong motivator for generating stupid quotes from bit players), we do know that, back in February, Reuters reported that eAccess had announced a sales deal with Taiwan’s High Tech Computer (HTC), which is yet another iPhone lookalike-not-actalike outfit that preys upon the ignorant.
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