A MARKET OF ONE

Critics took less than a week to take aim at the new ROKR device from Motorola and Apple, which combines a wireless handset with an iPod. In this case, though, it's a bit premature to fire on either the vendor or Cingular for wanting to target a significant segment of the public that likely carries both iPods and wireless devices. Sure, the ROKR has storage well below existing Apple devices and a design that's merely utilitarian. And its name makes assumptions. But beyond the technical specs and artistic merits lies an important trend: Carriers are getting used to the idea of focusing services and the products to access those services on niche markets. It's a far cry from the time when consumers could choose any color phone as long as it was black. Just how far this movement goes is up to carriers. In the IPTV market, for instance, vendors often brag about their ability to identify individual set-tops. The theory being that service providers eventually could sell advertising that targets, say, just the TV in the parents' room, not the whole house. Such granularity is interesting to debate (privacy issues are chief among the concerns here) and certainly technically feasible, but will carriers have incentive to target a niche within a niche within a niche? Not likely. However, as the industry moves forward into the last half of this decade, both service providers and vendors must recognize that the mass market isn't much of a mass anymore.