Steve Jobs single-handedly restructured the mobile industry | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs single-handedly restructured the mobile industry

cdixon.org

82 pointstessro56 comments

> In the US, before the iPhone, the carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile) had an ironclad grip on the rest of the value chain – particularly, handset makers and app makers.

This is like one of those myths where if you say it enough time, people start to believe it. There were tons of smartphones available before the iPhone that let you install any software that you wanted. My first smartphone was the Sony Ericsson P800 and it was released in 2002! I had to change carriers to use to, too.

The original iPhone was a great device with a wonderful interface, but it wasn't the invention of the smartphone. It did, however, sell the mainstream consumer market on smartphones. (The business market was long sold on the Blackberry).

The author isn't completely wrong -- the explosive growth of smartphones (and not just iPhones) has completely changed the equation. Before, everyone was trying to get on the carriers dumb phones but even if they succeeded it would mostly be a waste of time -- the phones were just too dumb and nobody cared about the crappy experience they provided.

There is way too much credit to Apple and Steve Jobs here.

You might be able to install any software you want, but the on-phone app stores and what they carry have been controlled by the carriers. That's the primary distribution channel, and the one largely responsible for providing app makers with the financial incentive to make apps.

Before the iPhone, smartphones didn't have on-phone app stores. You downloaded/purchased your applications off the web just like you do on your desktop. There was a good market for software for smartphones with lots of developers and distributors. The article would have us believe that none of that existed before Steve Jobs but that's just not true.

Dumb phones had carrier stores (and their firmware heavily customized). However, nobody I know has ever bought app for their regular 'dumb' mobile phone. Even the apps that were for free (like music players) were so horrible that they usually went unused.

Really? Granted, I never paid much attention to smart phones before the iPhone, but I find it hard to believe that none of them had on-phone app stores.

At any rate, games on dumb phones were definitely making money (I remember reading plenty of articles about how mobile phone gaming was getting huge pre-iPhone), and if you wanted to sell your dumb phone game, you had to go through the carriers.

> but I find it hard to believe that none of them had on-phone app stores.

They didn't. Carriers didn't really do too much to smartphones -- there was some customization (theme, background picture, etc) but that was it. Software is (and was) sold just as it is on the desktop.

> if you wanted to sell your dumb phone game, you had to go through the carriers.

There were tons of high quality games available for smartphones (including from big firms like EA) years before the iPhone was released. There was no on-phone store and you didn't have to go through the carrier.

The iPhone popularized the smartphone, changing the equation from the dumb phone to the smartphone. But if Apple didn't do it, someone else would have -- Android was in development (and already purchased by Google) years before the iPhone was released, for example.

It's doubtful Android would have had the same impact as the iPhone if the iPhone hadn't existed. I can no longer find the source, but Android's interface pre-iPhone was just as uninspired as all the other smartphones around at the time. It would've taken considerably longer for other companies to hit on a genuinely good touch screen interface if they hadn't had Apple's example to follow.

Even I knew about the potential of multi-touch interfaces 18 months before the iPhone was released due to this TED talk. I'm guessing people who actually work with touch displays are well aware of the decades of published research on this topic.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jeff_han_demos_his_breakth...

Note that when Steve Jobs demos the pinch zoom nearly two years later he claims it as an Apple invention, while this guy as nearly his first comment is to name people who have worked on this technology for decades but says that the big difference now is that it's ready for production use.

Yeah, I've seen that too, and it was breathtaking. But it's a long ways from that to a full-fledged touchscreen interface for an entire operating system. Pinch zoom isn't even the half of it.

It's not just pinch zoom, though that and the keyboard that guesses where your finger is trying to type show how much of the interface is really just obvious to someone in the field once you have the basic technology (or alternatively that Apple is shamelessly ripping this guy off, either interpretation is suitable to my point). And it's not hard to go a long ways when you're not pretending to be a lone creative genius. His final paragraph:

So, multi-touch interaction research is a very active field right now in HCI. I'm not the only one doing it, there are a lot of other people getting into it. This kind of technology is going to let even more people get into it, and I'm really looking forward to interacting with all you guys over the next few days and seeing how it can apply to your respective fields. Thank you. (Applause)

You are incorrect. Carrier-provided app stores existed.

Here's a forum post from 2005 asking about the Sprint Store native app on the Treo 650, released a year earlier. As an owner of the phone, I had seen it and used it myself.

http://www.sprintusers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63071

That's right, I do remember the Sprint store -- but then I wasn't on sprint and it was still completely optional. I'm not sure it was ever much of a success.

Thanks for your response. Yes, but starting two posts by writing that there were absolutely no on-phone app stores, was misleading.

Yes I remember handango.com was the popular appstore for my HP ipaq smartphone. Anyone could develop Windows Mobile or Java apps and sell it there.

I doubt I'm smart enough to work for Apple, but I doubt I'd ever want to. Why?

Everything the company does is something done "single-handedly" by Steve Jobs. Steve may be the driving force of the company and have great insight into what people want/need/etc. But he has a great team to actually implement what he wants, and Apple as a company are the ones who restructured an industry.

Maybe someone can answer this better than I, but does Steve Jobs name go on every Apple patent?

Here is an article which lists at least some of the Steve Jobs patents:

http://technologizer.com/2009/05/28/the-patents-of-steve-job...

Not at all. There are lots of Apple patents without his name.

A good friend of mine retired (an Apple Fellow at the end of his career in graphics) with a good bunch of patents with his name on them (along with many others in various groupings). I don't think Jobs was on most of them.

> Everything the company does is something done "single-handedly" by Steve Jobs.

Would you like to see a rolling list of the names of all Apple engineers every time you turned your iPhone on or off?

No, but I'd love for it to have a "Credits" app.

I hear ya, but it's part of his job - he is the figurehead for the company. If you've watched any of the major stevenotes especially the iPhone, you will notice he graciously thanks all of the teams and team leaders that worked on the product. The press also likes to give him the spotlight whether he wants it or not.

This isn't Steve Jobs' doing. I don't know how far back it goes, but whenever Jobs does these presentations, he lets the people in charge of various projects present them. So Scott Forstall presents new platform features. The guy who redesigned iMovie presented that. Same for the iWork suite on the iPad. Jonathan Ives also gets plenty of credit for being Apple's resident industrial design genius. They're even more prominent in the videos Apple puts out, and Jobs isn't even in those.

Now all the people who work under these guys aren't getting the spotlight, but this is the norm pretty much everywhere.

I know that Jef Raskin is frequently cited as the real father of the Macintosh, and Jobs probably failed to give him his due. That was a much younger Steve Jobs, though.

Well to be fair, I never blamed it on Steve himself. And while it's normal for the lower level guys to not get recognition, usually it's while the company is being recognized ("Microsoft releases...", "Nokia develops new..."), whereas with Apple it's usually attributed to Jobs himself.

I think that's because whenever Apple releases a major new product, it's Jobs who personally announces it in a high-profile presentation. And because Jobs is well known as the CEO of Apple, the press prefers to simply state that Jobs announced or introduced the product. Partly because it's more factually accurate, and partly because Jobs is less abstract an entity than Apple while just as familiar, which is always preferred in writing for large audiences.

Other companies, in contrast, don't have well known CEOs and/or their CEOs don't bother to personally do the announcing. It seems like most tech products get announced with a press release. Maybe there's a press kit if they want to get fancy.

Jobs (forcibly?) took over the Mac project from Raskin, and Raskin took a leave of absence from Apple in 1981.

I'm guessing Raskin wasn't on Steve's mind at the launch.

Right, ok.

Maybe you can point to ANY other industry in the world, any other company, where all the people who worked on a project get praised, or even mentioned. Maybe some newspaper article, where anyone besides the CEO, or if you are lucky the top management team are described.

In fact, just show me any writing anywhere, doesn't even have to be a newspaper, where everyone else is mentioned?

Why, because it is ridiculous and stupid to ask that.

Steve Jobs was the one pushing the iPhone, he was the one that didn't back down when getting the usual shit from the carriers, like everybody did before him. Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony, they all bowed down before the carriers, changed stuff on their phones, had annoying splash screens and apps. That was Steve Jobs, not engineer 118b.

Wasn't this already happening with the Blackberry? If you needed a Blackberry for business, then you picked the carrier who let you use one.

Are there carriers in the US that didn't offer blackberries? All the carriers in Canada did, and have for years before the iPhone announcement.

Before the iPhone, smartphones i used were not locked down. They were open like the desktop. You could download and install anything you want on them. But very often some app will drain your battery or crash your phone. Apple had to lock down their phone to improve user experience. Pre-iPhone you install apps at your own risk. That was my experience with Windows Mobile.

I'm sorry, the iPhone is a neat phone, but it is far from revolutionary.

Hello...palm pilots? I had a palm m100, then m105, then m500, then zire 71 in the early 2000s and there were thousands and thousands of apps for them. Installing them meant connecting it to my PC and transfering them (love that twee del DEE......TWEE del do sound it would make).

Putting a cell phone into a PDA was an obvious move. Apple didn't invent it, they were just the first to gain mainstream popularity.

Apple did a lot to start to bring the US up to speed with the rest of the world in terms of mobile technology, yes, and it certainly deserves praise for the success that the iPhone has been, but what Apple provided was a usable platform. "Smartphones" before then had been slow, ugly, generally not that sexy, and it's hard to excite people about your mobile software when they aren't even excited about their hardware. The iPhone did do a lot to help bring mobile software to the average consumer, but the notion that it did it in a vacuum is silly. There were lots of technologies that paved the way for the iPhone to be a success before it. Apple did not singlehandedly invent the concept of the smartphone, nor was it the first to introduce usable mobile computing platforms to consumers. RIM was doing that long before Apple ever had a thought of entering the mobile game.

The author simultaneously praises Apple for the single-handed creation/salvation of an entire industry, and then turns around and says "Android's only great because it's stood on the shoulders of giants". Boy, that's a convenient bit of selective application of history.

> Yes, Apple has rejected some apps for seemingly arbtrary or selfish reasons and imposed aggressive controls on developers. But the iPhone also paved the way for Android and a new wave of handset development. The people griping about Apple’s "closed system" are generally people who are new to the industry and didn’t realize how bad it was before.

Now this is just silly. The people that gripe about Apple's "closed system" are people who know how bad it was, and are frustrated that Apple is repeating many of the "closed system" problems that made mobile software so terrible in the first place. The iPhone is a marvelous device, but it's completely disingenuous to praise the iPhone for bringing accessibility to a "closed market" and then in the same breath to hand-wave its own closed nature away. It's better than the previous iterations; that doesn't make its iteration "best". The people who are frustrated with the closed nature of the platform are people who have tasted how good an accessible platform can be, and who are frustrated at the roadblocks that Apple has placed in their way.

I love the iPhone - it's a marvelous piece of hardware, and I absolutely acknowledge that it thoroughly changed the landscape of mobile consumer computing in the US, but I own an Android phone because Apple's policies make me hesitate to buy into a platform that is locked down and guarded by one man's whims, or to financially support a company that is so xenophobic and who actively and aggressively stifles competition. I own an Android phone not because I forget how bad older-school mobile software was (to write, distribute, obtain, run, the whole pipeline), but because I remember clearly how bad the old system was, and to have a phone in my hand that I can do just nearly anything I want with is a very welcome relief and advancement from the mobile platforms of yore.

Apple did not singlehandedly invent the concept of the smartphone, nor was it the first to introduce usable mobile computing platforms to consumers.

I fail to see why people keep pointing this out, because I don't know anyone who's been saying or even thinking it. Everyone knows smartphones existed before the iPhone. We know because Blackberries were, and sort of still are, all the rage. And it's constantly observed that Apple is generally not the first to invent a category, but they are often the ones who refine it into mainstream acceptance.

"Android's only great because it's stood on the shoulders of giants". Boy, that's a convenient bit of selective application of history.

As far as I'm aware, UI-wise, this is definitely the case. The Android's UI was just as uninspired as other smartphone UIs before the iPhone came out.

  Apple did not singlehandedly invent the concept of the smartphone

Neither did the Wright brothers invent the concept of a plane, but they will be forever remembered as its inventors because they build the first plane that flew. So will be Apple, for building the first smartphone that really took off in the market. The concept was not new, and there were dozens of attempts before, but none that flew.

The iPhone was not the first smartphone that really took off, Blackberry was. They were dominating before Apple arrived.

I would guess that most of the confusion around this point is that Apple's rate of adoption was high given that it came so late into the game, satisfying a part of the market that wasn't before. Apple also has the most marketing, and adoption in the consumer market specifically.

There are tons of businesses that deploy blackberries to a substantial portion of their staff, this is not true with iPhone and is unlikely to change.

One can probably find the numbers if they look, I've only got anecdotal experience for now.

Generalizations suck, I don't think the main reason for the iPhone success was because they had a "closed system".

"The people griping about Apple’s “closed system” are generally people who are new to the industry and didn’t realize how bad it was before."

Not only can you not read, but completely missed the point.

Apples system is closed compared to Android, but it is open compared to what came before, for most phones. The carriers would lock down handsets so they couldn't use bluetooth, couldn't download ringtones except from the carrier, couldn't plug into your computer. They would not start selling a phone unless it conformed to what they wanted it to do.

I'll be voted down for this on HN, but unforunately Android is reversing a lot of this progress. Buy the average Android handset and it has all sorts of stupid carrier modifications that no end-user would ever have requested. It's like the crap-ware that PCs have installed with them straight from the factory, except that you have to do a lot more work to get rid of it.

The iPhone is free of this because Apple's success let them give AT&T the finger when it came to carrier modifications. As the iPhone loses ground to Android in the market, expect the pressure on Apple to mount. Would Apple ever have an AT&T splash screen on the iPhone? They sure wouldn't want to, but if that's the only way to keep the iPhone on the market, it'll happen. Who knows how much further it'll go...

Steve Jobs single-handedly restructured the mobile industry as thousands of Apple employees watched in awe wondering what have they been doing all this time.

Right, Steve Jobs may have come up with an idea, but to make it work thousands of other employees had to design circuit boards, write code, and do the hard part.

Even as a fan of Mac products I think Steve Jobs gets too much credit. The idea is the easy part, making it work is the part that should be respected. Even with respect to the ideas themselves I wonder how much of the iPhone, the app store, and other innovations were envisioned by Steve Jobs personally, and how much of it was thought up by other smart engineers and technicians working for Apple?

For example the iconic Apple power adapter is credited to Steve Jobs, yet there are 12 names on the patent. (http://www.google.com/patents?id=C-IOAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...) So I have to wonder which engineers came up with which aspects.

If you think the idea is the easy part, I question anything else that you might say.

Also, ideas are evolutionary. Go watch Steve Jobs' D8 interview. See how the iPhone didn't start as a phone, and then tell me Jobs doesn't deserve as much credit as he does.

Remember that this isn't about the iPhone as a device, but the device as an industry mindset changer. An idea goes beyond just the idea, and Jobs dared to envision and execute a strategy that put the phone before the carrier. If what Jobs did isn't that great, then why didn't anyone else do it?

"If you think the idea is the easy part, I question anything else that you might say."

Cue HN permathread on "Ideas are worthless" ...

Ah, not to talk down Mr. Jobs but over in Europe regulation has meant that cellphones were carrier-independent devices years before the appearance of the iPhone. That's partly how Nokia's brand got to be so strong.

I think Jobs' achievement with the iPhone was to look at existing technology like tablets and say 'look, these really are awesome, but they're limited to simple tasks. Cellphones are awesome because they're so portable and popular, but a bunch of buttons is an overly complex interface for the sort of tasks most people want to do with their phones. We can and we will shrink tablets down to pocket size and market them as phones instead of computers.'

>Ah, not to talk down Mr. Jobs but over in Europe regulation has meant that cellphones were carrier-independent devices years before the appearance of the iPhone. That's partly how Nokia's brand got to be so strong.

And this is the way that it should be - but it doesn't happen without sensible consumer protection laws.

> do the hard part

Relatively speaking: any moron can design a circuit board. What I mean is that, given a set of inputs and desired outputs, there are probably tens of thousands of engineers around the world who could design the iPod's circuit board. Given a set of design principles and a vision, there are probably hundreds or even thousands of designers around the world who could have come up with something similar to the iPhone. But how many people can

- see that vision and

- gather together the right minds and organize them in such a way that they implement it?

Most events have compound causes, but Steve Jobs was probably the biggest member of the cause for the iPhone event.

Nobody said he didn't deserve a lot of credit. It's the 'single-handedly' they are objecting to.

In that case, I'd say it qualifies as arguing over semantics since "CEO does X" is an oft-used stand-in for "CEO leads company to do X."

Semantics perhaps, but the phrasing was particularly off-putting in this article. I know it was the first thing I noticed. I don't think I'd want to work for Chris Dixon.

I am impressed by your making that determination from a single article. That kind of decisiveness can be useful. Or maybe you have other data.

His posts appear regularly here, and I was being polite.

And, perhaps most importantly, do the hard-assed negotiation and reality distortion with the telcos.

Another example of good leadership vs bad leadership is to see what's happening at Microsoft. No dearth of smart people and engineers over there either.

why Bill Gates hand over the reins to Ballmer, I never understood.

I don't think it is "ideas",it is knowledge and experience, Steve has a lot of that.

You are making a fallacy, it is not ideas like I just dream and there it is:ideas, it is ideas like newton calculus ideas as a result of all their life working on them.

Steve is trained in figure it out what people need (marketing), materializing it and testing in the real world. Not as easy at it sounds because of unconscious incompetence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

I have seen companies with superb scientist and technical people struggle and fail because of bad managers, like a yacht with 700hp engines and broken rudder.

"Even as a fan of Mac products I think Steve Jobs gets too much credit."

I couldn't agree more.

Jobs epitomizes everything that so many of us detest about big companies, so I have to wonder why anyone here actually likes or even respects him.

He doesn't invent squat, or developed any hardware, written any software... so why is it that it's ok for Jobs to claim sole credit for everything Apple produces?

At the same time, Microsoft not only bends over backward to take care of 3rd party software developers (most of the time), Microsoft also explicitly gives credit to the developers that wrote the software.

When Jobs released the mac, he had the mac programmed to announce that Jobs was its creator... never mind all of the people at Xerox PARC who actually invented all of the technology inside, including the UI.

And when Gates announced Windows 95, he brought out the development team and gave them credit.

So who's the better person? Obviously not Jobs.

I don't think anyone wants to discount the work of the engineers but using the Microsoft Courier as a counter example we can see how engineers alone cannot force a product out the door. I remember reading an article a year or two ago about the iPhone development process and at some stage early in the game Jobs had to make the choice between what we know the iPhone to be today or what was a lot closer to an iPod Classic that could make phone calls. Obviously he made the right choice.

It hasn't occurred to you that many articles are shaped by PR departments?

Sorry ojbyrne, accidental downmod. Meant to upmod this damned phone interface is horrible for HN.

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