This column first appeared in Business and Finance magazine 27 July 2007.

What is it that Steve Jobs understands that most people in business don’t?

He is, by all accounts, tough to be around – and he isn’t known for his modesty. Imagine him next to Bill Gates, and he makes Gates seem humble by comparison.

Actually you don’t have to imagine. The Wall Street Journal recently put the two men – the ying and yang of tech universe – on a stage together where they were interviewed together by two of the Journal’s reporters.

Within minutes, Jobs was getting under Gates’ skin, making him visibly uncomfortable. The geek, taunted by the cooler, wittier class clown.

In fact, within a few minutes, it was hard not to feel somewhat sorry for Gates, and you really should never feel sorry for someone with a net worth higher than Ireland’s GDP.

But Jobs doesn’t seem particularly smarter than Gates and certainly seems less agreeable.

What Jobs seems to be very good at is putting himself in the shoes of his customer – even more remarkable for someone who doesn’t seem all that empathetic.

Hence the iPhone’s nearly flawless launch last month, achieving the seeming impossible of actually delivering on its hype – at least if the reactions of reviewers and the first consumers is anything to go by.

Apple under Jobs has bent whole industries to his will. Until recently, Jobs was able to wrangle the whole of the music business to trading on his terms – forcing them to offer flat-rate pricing of music tracks that could only be sold and played in environments totally controlled by Apple, the iPod and iTunes.

Now he’s negotiating with the world’s mobile network operators, which collectively have made some of the worst product development and marketing decisions of any industry you can think of.

Remember WAP? It never really went away, you know. Wap (wireless access protocol) was clunky by name, clunky by nature. For ridiculous prices that few would pay, you could get access to a walled garden smaller than you’d find in a cramped new-build estate in Lusk.

Mobile operators just refused to believe that they couldn’t convince people to spend money on it, though. So operators like Vodafone spent millions developing Vodafone Live!, a souped-up, prettier version of Wap, hiring David Beckham to help flog it.

Things in the mobile space that have turned out to be runaway successes – SMS text messaging and Blackberries – have been in spite of, rather than because of, the decisions of mobile operators’ executives.

Now comes Apple’s iPhone, conservatively predicted to sell 10m units by the end of 2008 and not available this side of the Atlantic until autumn at the earliest (possibly longer in Ireland). Could the iPhone do to the mobile network business what the iPod did to the music industry – offer it a way to the future but on the terms of a brash upstart?

There is some shred of hope for optimism. The iPhone’s launch in the States had one flaw – exclusive mobile network partner AT&T. AT&T has a lot more control over pricing of the services that make it work than the music types ever had. Even then, however, Apple is getting a slice of the revenue from the wireless packages being sold on top of the $499 or $599 asking price of the iPhone itself.

But the early reviews say that the limitations of AT&T may be the only real potential barrier to a user experience that makes people love the iPhone even more than the iPod.

Apple is in the middle of negotiating with mobile operator O2 at time of writing to sign it up as a partner in several European markets.

When a deal is eventually announced, the terms will be closely watched. How much control does Apple successfully get in designing the whole consumer experience?

One intriguing note from the early reports is that Apple doesn’t want the iPhone to work with 3G networks – the higher speed digital networks that mobile phone companies spent some €300bn on in licenses, network kit and other costs in the first part of this decade.

Why this would be isn’t entirely clear – but it certainly doesn’t suggest Jobs thinks much of 3G (or the business case that led to all that investment).

The smart money says that Apple will get its way, because even the bosses of the mobile operators understand that Steve Jobs probably knows more about what their customers actually want than they do.

Richard Delevan is business editor of the Sunday Tribune. rdelevan@tribune.ie