iPhone was never a mass market product. So you can not attribute the failure to distribution model or marketing communication. Infact you do not need any of these to sell the product. We were eagerly waiting for the iphone to be launched in India with a price tag of around 15-20K. Not more than that. Infact I have done indepth googling to know actual production cost and how much Apple would keep as margin. So much for a product!. So I do not feel that Airtel or Vodafone didn't do marketing well. Even if they did big bang launch, all that they could have sold more would not be more than another 1000 pieces. Such was the anger amongst the youth and younger working generation (20-35 years working group which I represent). Ofcourse there was this $199 price thing. Infact most of the prospective iphone buyers would be postpaid customers. Why nobody in this article mentioned that fact. Airtel could have easily grabbed most of the post paid market by launching iphone at Rs. 18000 and 2 year contract. Believe me. that was the price at which i was mentally prepared to buy. I wonder why do you need an Ad campaign for iphone. I remember the first Reliance mobile phones were only available at Webworld outlets which were very few in many towns. Still we went to those select shops and ordered the phones and waited for one to two weeks to get our hands on. So this is not failure of limited retail outlets. Indian consumer can walk 100 kms and still stand in queue to buy something if he perceives "Value". iphone miserably missed that point.