Gulveen Aulakh, writing for the Economic Times:
Obi Mobiles, backed by former Apple CEO John Sculley, is relaunching itself as Obi Worldphone with new smartphones after it failed miserably to attract consumers in the Indian market where it first started out in July last year.
Sculley admitted to have adopted a wrong strategy of sourcing phones from China and selling them in India to make a mark, a model which had no differentiation or upper hand in the face of bitter competition from local and international players in one of the most heavily commoditised handset markets in the world.
“We started originally whether we could make gains from phones bought from Chinese factories and just go through retail distribution,” Sculley, chairman of Obi Worldphone said sharing that the strategy was not sustainable and the market got very competitive. “It became clear that it wasn’t going to work, so we pulled back. We had to have design differentiation,” he added.
He’ll forever be known as the man who fired Steve Jobs. And now he’s putting his money and name behind some low end Android phones.
Last time I was in India, they offered me a drink called Obi.
Pretty much sugar water. 🙂
The wording is wrong, it is not exactly a competitor!
Boom!
“We figured a strong supply chain would be enough. After all, it worked for Compaq.”
It is certainly possible to create a competitive phone for these markets. It remains impossible to make any money from it. They are feeding lawyers, officials and consultants while putting more and more pressure on the workers… Almost nobody wins here, even if they win.
We should also stop calling developing markets “commoditized” or “price-conscious” or whatever metaphor suggesting they are cheap. WE are cheap, they have no money.
Forever cementing his name as one of the poorest technology decision makers in history.
Not entirely. ARM practically wouldn’t exist as it does today without him.
People seem to forget that the Newton, ARM, etc all happened under Sculley. He even coined the term PDA. He might have made one of the most foolish decisions in tech history when he was still new at Apple, but he did also make some pretty significant ones later on in the future.
Thats not to say the guy didn’t destroy Apple and its culture, because he did. But some important things emerged from that place.
I’d say Ballmer still holds the crown, in my eye, as worst decision maker in technology.
Obi’s phones look decent enough, but the differentiator is weak (“Designed in San Francisco”) and for low-end phones, not competitive enough for the target markets (Middle East, southeast Asia, Africa) — $129 for low-end SJ1.5 (Steve Jobs 1.5?) and and $249 for SF1.