All these “iPhone is doomed” folks had good arguments, the original iPhone was a flawed device. On paper, the incumbent mega corporations should have been able to come up with an iPhone killer quickly, considering the resources available to them.
What they missed was the inertia and the lack of agility in these big companies. They kept insisting on their current plans until it was too late.
Only Google was capable of throwing away their work and starting fresh. Android was blackberry-like just until iPhone came.
Also, Samsung was smart enough to copy Apple.
The rest were too slow and died off - eventually. However the first few years it was hard to make a point why would you buy an iPhone, people had to see that amazing UI to believe it.
One thing they missed was the importance of two things. A full 32 bit pre-emptive multitasking workstation class operating system with a full TCP/IP networking stack under the hood. Combined with a desktop class object oriented GUI application framework, of course tailored to a small screen touch interface.
These are not visible features of the device. You can’t tell just by looking at it or even using it, except that they enable a fluidity and consistency in performance and functionality. It also provides a sold foundation of back end operating system services, made available as a solid platform to developers.
Google was incredibly lucky because their under development Blackberry clone happened to be based on a Linux kernel, using a custom Java engine. This gave them all the same core advantages to build from. A workstation class OS, pre emptive multi tasking, full TCP/IP, solid back end system services and a desktop class object oriented application stack.
On top of that, Apple maintained absolute focus and discipline in building the user experience. The many different interaction modes the author was so impressed by in WP7 were all possible on the iPhone, it had all those capabilities. Apple just composed the interactions into a much more coherent and approachable interface. Again, discipline and focus.
Eventually yes, Microsoft came up with a really decent phone OS, but that was around 2011. Way too late. iPhone and Android were already far too established with deep and wide ecosystems of peripherals, applications and services.
Agreed. IMO, a naysayer that did their research should have watched the original iPhone intro and would not miss the slide where Steve Jobs says "iPhone runs OS X", with a list of all the features they "got for free". You wouldn't have to know much about Apple to also realize the amount of software they'd already written that could be adapted to a mobile format and the advantage they would have over the competitors (Nokia, Blackberry and Microsoft with their existing Windows Mobile OS).
>Only Google was capable of throwing away their work and starting fresh. Android was blackberry-like just until iPhone came
Danger, Inc made Android, not Google. Google bought them. Android didn’t exist (publicly) until after the iPhone was released. It took until Android 2 (2010?) for it to feel anything like the iPhone (the HTC Dream had a physical keyboard and a trackball).
They didn’t really throw anything out. They added stuff like auto-rotation due to gyro and touch-first APIs with swipe gesture callbacks and what-not. Brian Swetland (from Danger) is a genius and wrote a mobile OS initially for the T-Mobile Sidekick form factor that could have all the touch-first stuff added on without breaking everything. Google’s most genius move of the era was buying the company employing Brian.
I think this article also was making an assumption that the iPhone was a once-off product rather than just the 1.0 of an ongoing program. The challenge for Microsoft and all the other incumbents wasn't to catch up to the original iPhone, but to overtake the trajectory of the iPhone product line.
It also missed the ramifications of the smartphone industry being in an exponential growth phase at the time: being able to upgrade existing phone hardware to Windows Phone 7 and work around the missing sensors needed for the new features was not a competitive advantage. It was Microsoft wasting developer effort for the sake of hardware that would rapidly (within a year or two) decline to a trivial fraction of their install base.
> All these “iPhone is doomed” folks had good arguments, the original iPhone was a flawed device
I also did remember the first iPhone being a flop in my country, the pricing was very high but the biggest nail in the coffin was the lack of MMS support (it might sounds strange now but this was basically required for any feature phone)
IIRC, Apple slashed the price after a couple of months due to slow sales.
Their initial price was wrong. The customer were used to pay next to nothing for the device as the device was considered an accessory for the GSM provider. Apple also didn’t have that many Apple Stores, to show people how amazing the device is.
I think most of the "iPhone is doomed" people fundamentally misunderstood what the iPhone was and what it did compared to existing phones. And of course, they judged Apples future on the first device, which they considered flaws in a bunch of ways that didn't matter (I recall how many people laughed about it missing MMS and multitasking, which turned out to not matter (it could multitask for the features people used), and something they added later.
It’s how a talented artist, craftsman or sportsman makes things look effortless, when it took them years of grit, determination and hard work to reach that point.
I helped cover Apple for a large investment bank. The day of the iPhone announcement in January 2007, I saw a press release from Motorola come across the wire, in which the company announced yet another phone with a keyboard. I felt pity for the unfortunate souls who had designed it, worked on its launch, and wrote the copy for the press release, and who now had to see their efforts fly into the iPhone Hurricane.
Apple might have genuinely murdered the entire market if they hadn’t insisted on their ridiculous exclusivity plan with AT&T. Whichever Apple exec greenlit that must surely have been an industrial saboteur because it saved 5+ other companies from ruin.
I always thought this was a genius move. Remember, at the time, Apple had no product in the space. The market was highly fragmented, and cell phones were becoming commodity devices. Here's Apple wading into a sea of competitors, with a product that was priced outside of the normal range and needing to differentiate itself. With the AT&T deal, Apple accomplished several things:
1. It put the marketing might of one of the largest corporations behind its brand-new, niche product. The deal created an incentive for this corporation to market the product on Apple's behalf.
2. It created a forced scarcity. Only /some/ people (those on AT&T) could get the iPhone, which immediately created a brand distinction necessary for a luxury product. On day 1, there were haves and have-nots.
3. It provided an out for Apple not ramping up production too fast (whether they could or not). If the iPhone failed, they wouldn't have product everywhere. If Apple couldn't make iPhones fast enough, they would only be affecting a subset of the market.
4. It limited Apple's engineering requirements. They only had to support AT&T's network on day 1, and not the network technologies of the other carriers. Limiting exclusivity to AT&T meant that they could focus on the product while delaying the technical challenges of supporting multiple cellular networks.
Back then the network operators had full control over the devices on their network. They even dictated what features these phones will have. They wanted to sell services like ringtones, so the device manufacturers were almost like their subcontractors.
Apple simply didn’t have an option to do it by itself. Back then Apple wasn’t that powerful, they had a firm grip on music player and music store market but nothing else.
So the story goes, Steve Jobs meets with the CEO of AT&T(called something else back then) in a hotel room and show him the device. Apparently the guy was sold the moment he scrolled the setting and see the rubber effect and accepted to let Apple do the phone in Apple way in exchange of exclusivity.
I worked at Windows Phone leading up to the WP7 launch all the way through the last version. The carriers had two things that every device maker, including Apple (initially) needed
1) distribution - Americans went to the carrier store and not Best Buy for their new phone
2) financing infrastructure- they could finance, subsidize and generally hide the up front price of these devices. The market expected a $0-200 phone with contract.
So, you needed AT&T and their contract prices already assumed they were subsidizing the phone so it was no point selling unlocked, full price.
Samsung was paying mobile store reps (at AT&T, TMO etc) $50-100 PER PHONE to push Samsung ($9B marketing budget).
Apple went with the operator that would allow them control over the device. This was at a time where Nokia sold specific versions of their smartphones with WiFi disabled in the US. And the situation was similar elsewhere. So in many of the countries they entered, they often started with a smaller operator. They bet that the bigger operators would change their mind after seeing iPhones success (and how many subscribers they had lost), and they turned out to be right. In hindsight, they managed to upend the whole telecom industry (or at least accelerate that process), which is now more or less reduced to "dumb data pipes" that you use when you're outside of WiFi coverage.
It was clear to me when I got the original iPhone that it changed everything going forward. It had flaws, but it was easy to see past them as technology improved.
Same. The moment you held it and unlock it you can tell that this is the future. It was flawed in some ways but it got so many things so right that it felt like from a different era.
What they missed was the inertia and the lack of agility in these big companies. They kept insisting on their current plans until it was too late.
Only Google was capable of throwing away their work and starting fresh. Android was blackberry-like just until iPhone came.
Also, Samsung was smart enough to copy Apple.
The rest were too slow and died off - eventually. However the first few years it was hard to make a point why would you buy an iPhone, people had to see that amazing UI to believe it.