Apple Must Buy iHop


With the iPhone we will be looking for fast data transfer, which will become a customer service aspect of the food and coffee business. Right now there's a hole in the market because MacDonald's and Starbucks and even some airports are requiring subscription to a special provider network. It's time for the ultimate Apple strategic move. They have to buy iHop and provide open internet access.

It won't be too long until the need to stop at a coffee shop in order to move data quickly will be like when we used to stop to make a telephone call. But for the time being, we have to stop somewhere for a dependable signal, most of the time. It's cheap to provide free internet service, and the natural place for Apple users to stop is, of course, iHop. It just has a certain ring to it. Or was that my cell phone?

I like my cell phone because it has such good coverage. The only reason I would switch to ATT is if I buy an iPhone. My wife already bought one.

I'm out of my depth here but I have been told that some of the fast networks in this country won't work in Europe. That's okay when phones are basically unimportant, like the old black dial phones that were standard issue before ATT was broken up. But when phones suddenly become crystal balls, opening out to the world at the pass of your hand, you don't want it on a local network.

It's funny how things turn into their opposite. Maybe ATT learned real good about not trying to sell what is invisible. The network was the value, but the customer didn't see that. All the customer saw was the access point, the telephone itself. With the breakup of ATT suddenly the telephone was an art object. That was what ATT had missed. They had a product that was still a Model T in a world of Bang and Olufsen product design .

Now the mobile telephone has become a giveaway product. You can buy one but the cost is generally rebated, because the business model is to use the phone as a loss leader to sell service contracts. Again, the system is not visible, so nobody notices it unless it doesn't work. But the telephone is visible, and there has been a lot of development of the mobile phone.

What I like about Steve Jobs is that he is a seer. He looks at the entire model and sees that the telephone has become unimportant, just like he once saw that the floppy drive was unimportant. He built a hand held computer that can handle telephone calls like it can handle any other data packets. I remember my anxiety about how I would copy data without a disk to copy to, before I realized the USB port was all I needed.

I was anxious because I am not a geek.

My wife is a geek. She used to work on the old mainframes. The only thing she won't fool with, unless she absolutely has to, is a Windows machine. She is an Apple fan, and she's made me one. My attitude was, "What the hell?" Research shows that the happy couples are the ones in which a man quickly and enthusiastically agrees with his wife's opinions. Or maybe that was a study on which women are happiest. Anyway, the point is to choose your battles carefully.

And let me interject here that by geek I don't mean a circus performer who bites the heads of chickens and bats. I mean geek as used to denote somebody who is an enthusiast or expert in a technical field. In female form these women are identified by Dilbert as making the best wives available. (How am I doing?)

Her iPhone is waiting at the post office when she gets back from New York City, which is the only reason she didn't buy the one she got her hands on at the Apple Cube in Times Square. She explained to me that some of the networks are faster than ATT, but that those networks often have compatibility issues. Okay, I admit that I (often) try to appear smarter than I am by quoting my wife. (Hey, everybody does it.) But from what I understand, from her enthusing about her new iPhone, she doesn't care much about it as a telephone. She doesn't even like to talk on the telephone. It's amazing to what lengths she will go to avoid it, in fact. But she loves computers.

From what I gather, she will mostly use her new computer, named iPhone, when she can hook into a wireless network that allows her to operate at high speeds. She can get and send email, and probably connect in to her computer at the office. And as I listen to her, I realize that when we are traveling, she is going to be looking for a place to stop where she has reliable high speed internet. And I have realized, over time, that she likes iHop, especially the corn cakes.

Agent Cooper, in, "Twin Peaks," observed that when two seemingly unrelated things happen together, you have to pay close attention. Sometimes they are connected by invisible threads, and sometimes by not so invisible threads. Why is did the International House of Pancakes choose the name, iHop? Maybe they were getting a copyright on the name before Apple realized that there is one more essential element in Steve Jobs' strategy to conquer all of geekdom. He needs a string of pancake houses, all across America, and maybe the world, with free wireless internet.

What would he call these pancakes houses? There's two top contenders out there is he wants to partner with an existing chain, and that's iHop, once it controls its only rival, Applebee's. First of all, they're international, like ATT. It fits the business model.

Plus, iHop is perfectly positioned in the marketplace. They even bring you a whole carafe of coffee so that you don't have to embarrass yourself by asking for a refill three or four times while you work on your Face Book or shop the personals on Craigslist. The waitresses are in my experience friendly, so one assumes there is some management program in place that thinks of that sort of thing. The only thing they have to watch out for is that the restaurant business requires constant innovation to not become shabby. With this new strategy, they'll have to build extra parking lots.

But existing seating should be adequate.

Posted: Mon - July 16, 2007 at 11:13 AM