The iPhone in Spain: On again, off again

What’s going on with the iPhone on the Iberian peninsula?

Although it’s the corporate home of Telefonica, S.A., (TEF) one of the world’s largest telecommunications conglomerates (it owns, among other carriers, Britain’s O2), Spain hadn’t received official word of a signed deal with Apple (AAPL) until early this morning, when a press release and an iPhone pre-registration link appeared on the home page of Movistar, the local Telefonica subsidiary.

Then, a few hours later, the pre-registration page went away and the press link disappeared. According to one report, nearly 25,000 Spaniards had signed up for the iPhone before the site closed and reverted to a generic Movistar home page.

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The iPhone has reached mythical status in some parts of Europe. It certainly sheds light on what we mean when we refer to a “free market”. Free to be manipulated by corporate commissars. What worries me even more than the iPhone taking more than a year to not reach parts of western Europe is the fact that nobody else has used this time to introduce a competing product. As far as I can see, it is still the only portable internet browser that does the job properly.

How does it take a year for a product to become available in markets that can afford it, in a globalised world? Not to become available, I mean? Switzerland has the highest per capita income of just about anywhere, and you still can’t buy an iPhone here.

I begin to understand why Rupert Murdoch calls Apple “slow and limited” in the corporate sense. For ten years you couldn’t buy an Apple unless you lived next to one of three Apple stores, and now it has taken them a year to lose the interest of the richest part of the western European market. Apple make wonderful products (as Murdoch also remarked) but they are very far from being an inspiring business model.

Posted By cynik, zurich, switzerland : June 2, 2008 1:18 pm

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Silicon Valley veterans like to joke that Steve Jobs must be surrounded by a reality distortion field; if you get too close to him, you start to believe what he's saying. Thanks to the success of the iPod, the launch of the iPhone and the renewed interest in the Mac, Apple has made believers out of millions of customers - and made a lot of investors rich. But Philip Elmer-DeWitt believes that an ounce of skepticism never hurts when writing about the company. He should know. He's been covering Apple - and watching Steve Jobs operate - since 1982, first for Time Magazine, then for Business 2.0, and now for Fortune.