Re:Amazon’s New Customer
by deepGem on Monday June 19, 2017 @03:12PM
(#14589543)
I am struggling to find that article in Vogue or some magazine that gave some inside details of how the iPhone came out. By my recollection, their strategy was definitely not to reduce the phone to an app. The strategy from what I remember was to add a desktop class browser to the phone and remove the limitations of a physical keyboard. Of course these had to be built on a new OS and all that. Oh there was one more - visual voicemail.
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I think the point is fundamentally they were making something that could do way more than make phone calls, where so many other devices on the market were just a phone (or pager) with some extra functionality strapped on.
They started from a clean slate.
Funny that you didn't even mention RIM's Blackberry which was the dominant device for email on-the-go among busy execs, including, if I'm not mistaken Obama at that time.
Jobs was only looking for 10% of the global mobile phone market in the 2007 keynote announcing the iPhone. The iPhone was so well received it demolished Nokia and RIM's dominance in the space of a few years.
Actually BB is why I added the "(or pager)" to my comment.
BB was a two way pager (and later email) that they literally crammed audio in to (the first phone version REQUIRED a headset as it didn't have a speaker/mic).
They made the mistake everyone did. They made an X and so they tried to cram new things Y and Z into it because they were an X company. And it limited their vision of what they could do.