Continued:

Why would Jobs go to such great lengths at fumbling his rivals’ plans to come out with an enthusiastic product of their own? That’s because anything that affects the iPod sales hits Apple where it hurts the most (the cumulative sale of all iPods is estimated to be $4.8 billion).

Of course, the music industry and the music playing cell phone will take off no matter what Jobs tries, but the possibilities for Apple are quite a few. If ROKR really takes off with the iTunes mobile edition, Apple can have some serious bargaining rights in terms of digital rights and content provision for other users, which shouldn’t be too difficult especially since iTunes online store has quite a few songs including the entire song by song albums of Madonna, the only online collection of such kind in the world. ROKR’s success will also help Apple push FairPlay (digital rights management software) to other phone manufacturers, which would be interesting to watch as well.

The possibility that I like better, however, is that Apple could come out with its own "iPhone" (what else could they possible name it?) and beat Motorola and Nokia at their own game. Their partnership with Motorola for the ROKR could be for the simple reason that they want to understand what they are getting into before actually getting into it full time. As a personal request, if iPhone does happen, I wish they somehow include the click wheel on it so I can easily scroll through the address book.

If you get right down to it, Apple need not even manufacture the phone itself, there are always third party manufacturers like BenQ that will take care of the manufacturing while Apple can go on with thinking up cleverer ideas to leave us catching our breaths every time a product launch occurs.

All that leaves us with a very important conclusion, ROKR is here for sure. Whether or not we see an iPhone soon (next 6-12 months) depends on the adoption of ROKR by users, so that Apple at least feels comfortable launching its own brand.

It may sound far fetched right now, but this appears to be a fairly good idea and business strategy to first test the market, then create a product and launch it when you feel the market is ready for it. Nice going, Steve!