Apple I-Phone: Will it fly for Apple?

With the release of Apple I-phone, there is a lot of buzz in the stock. It touched it's 52 week high recently. So how much does the I-Phone add to the bottom line. I believe that Apple will have to tweak it's positioning to make the phone a huge success for the firm's bottomline.

1> Price it for the customer segment they are targeting now.
2> Add new features to follow-on products to differentiate different segments (3G, Bigger Storage, Asian Features, business features)
3> Move out of the being just one provider (cingular) product.

I also believe that company has already worked out these issues and the rollout will be as per what I will elaborate in the post on perspectives blog. This is based on my prior experience with the company. We (4 student project team) analyzed the Apple i-tunes/ i-Pod strategy in 2003. Our final recommendation was coming out with a player with smaller storage, better battery life and half the price point to compete against the mp3 competitive landscape (Dell and Sony were coming out with their own I-Pod killers at that time). In Dec 2003, Apple release Mini with almost the same specs that we had recommended. I think battery life was the only thing different.

I believe like I-Pod, Apple has the product and pricing roadmap planned. They will tweak it based on the customer response. Unlike Apple computers Inc. of 1980s, Apple Inc. (I think they should have dropped computers in 2003 with mini) is much more customer responsive firm now. In fact, I will not be surprised if the final product in June is different from the product that was introduced in Macworld 2007.