Cecilia Aronsson, a Swedish business reporter, is a fellow at the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford University. Through July, she’ll write columns for VentureBeat.com about her experiences in Silicon Valley. Here’s her first column.
The European business press is speculating that the next market Apple plans to target with its iPhone is Sweden, a hotbed of mobile innovation and the home of rival mobile phone maker Ericsson. But I was tagging along with 15 leaders of the Swedish telecom and computer industry yesterday as they visited several Bay Area technology companies, and from what I heard, it sounds as if Apple may not understand the Swedish market.
While US customers are used to choosing a carrier and accepting that not all phones will be available through that carrier, Swedish customers are used to having whatever phone they want with any carrier.
Apple’s strategy so far has been to hook up exclusively with one mobile operator per country (AT&T in the US). The iPhone only works with AT&T’s SIM card (the card that contains the user’s data).
In Scandinavia, though, things are different. Read more here.
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