At the time of the public debut of the first generation iPhone (January 2007), the statement "lots of companies were making smart phones with similar specs" is objectively false. Further, there were zero companies making comparable large touchscreen, large cpu phones outside of Apple at the time.

Arguably HP/Palm's WebOS devices were ahead on every mark - easier to use, more featureful, smarter, better physical design than any iPhone of similar manufacturing date.

The difference was management choosing to stick with a platform for long enough for network effects to kick in.

If Apple has any advantages compared to other big tech, it's an ability to look past next quarter's financials.

Palm offerings in 2007, such as the Treo 755p or the Centro, could not compete hardware-wise with the original iPhone. The claim that these Palm phones were "easier to use" is hilarious to me, and probably hilarious to many others.

I explicitly mentioned WebOS, meaning the devices released around 2009, which competed with 1st gen iPhone old stock, and directly against iPhone 3G - the second generation.

The first gen iPhone is not a smartphone by today's standards. No multitasking, no copy/paste, no centralized instant messaging, all things WebOS devices had on release.

Even the second generation of iPhones felt half baked by comparison.

Which just goes to illustrate my point, that they weren't technologically superior, just more committed.

The race was already over by the time webOS showed up. Even Microsoft, with a superior product and many billions spent pushing it, couldn't overcome the network effects of iOS and Android. No one else had a chance.

Disagree strongly. Your definition of failure seems to be "not achieving market monopoly" which doesn't make any sense to me.

Both Microsoft phones and WebOS have surviving communities today, and would have thriving communities if management had stuck with them.

Sadly, it takes more than two consecutive quarters to establish a platform.

My definition for success is - do they still exist

Comcast and AT&T still exist. Kraft still turns out war rations by the warehouse. Tasteless grocery store tomatoes are still the most widely available.

This metric has very little to do with quality.

Those are horrible examples. The product lines you are discussing do not exist in any meaningful sense of the term.

LuneOS - the direct continuation of WebOS development had a release in Feb 2024 and is still under active development: https://webos-ports.org/wiki/Main_Page

Pretty good for something that supposedly failed 12 years ago.

> Under Johnny Ive's management

You spelled Steve Jobs wrong.