Apple Won’t Develop a VC240 Clone

By Tsahi Levent-Levi

Categories: Technology

March 9th, 2010

Here’s a thing I realized talking to a friend of mine the other day: Apple isn’t going to focus on visual communications in 2010 – not in their Macs and probably not on their iPads either.

My friend, who is aware of our own SCOPIA VC240 product – a 24″ PC monitor with built-in HD video conferencing capabilities, told me that Apple’s 27″ all-in-one Mac monitor should probably add such a capability as well. He didn’t understand why they didn’t do so already. To him, Apple going to visual communications made perfect sense, and a way to move the industry forward. To top it all, Sagee here had similar sentiments regarding the iPhone itself more than a year ago; wishing they would add video calling to the iPhone to get our industry rolling.

Well, Sagee’s requests didn’t happen. And my friend’s wishes for the 27″ Mac won’t happen any time soon either.

And why is that? Because Apple is a cloud computing focused company that knows how to do consumer electronics very well. Their strength today comes not only from the marriage they are capable of doing between software and hardware in their products, but also from the tight coupling they are putting in place between their devices and their leading cloud service, the iTunes store.

Apple today use partners in two areas, as far as I am aware of:

1. Hardware components, such as chips (from Intel, not for long though), flash memory (Samsung) and manufacturing (Foxconn).
2. Content on their iTunes store, where they are currently involved with the music industry, movies and book/news publishers.

The only place where they are in contact with service providers is AT&T for the iPhone in the US and numerous other mobile operators around the world.

For Apple to decide to enter the visual communications market in any serious fashion will mean a need to provide the service provisioning part as well as the means for dealing with the multiple issues that occur with hosting such services on their own. And that is far from easy – here are a few examples of how hard it can be to provide voice services over IP (which are much easier than doing video over IP):

• Google decided to go out and shop for a company to get these abilities 3 times already (Google Talk, Google Voice and the latest acquisition of Gizmo5). Each time they provided additional capabilities to their infrastructure to provide VoIP services.
• Telefonica’s latest acquisition of Jajah and BT’s acquisition of Ribbit prove that it was easier for them to just acquire these capabilities than to start developing them in-house from scratch,
• Verizon partnered with Skype to provide voice services, based on the Skype network, to mobile handsets. Again, they could have put some infrastructure in place to provide the services on their own. IMHO the operators are the only ones who can really compete with Skype, and having them align with Skype looks like confessing defeat.

For Apple to decide to add video capabilities to their 27″ Macs that are similar to our very own VC240, means providing the service on their own or aligning with service providers to give this service. My feeling is that they won’t go with service providers if they do go into this market. For that reason they will need to develop service provisioning capabilities for video communications – something that is hard to do. The only other option for them is to acquire the technology somewhere and there are only a few such companies up for grabs.