The iPhone Threat to Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, Real, BREW, Symbian

What marketshare do you think iphone needs to make such an impact?

And why do you think it will gain that huge marketshare?

Its the first "nice looking internet in your pocket". But is that enough to take over the mobile world? Couldnt other companies create type-on-screen devices with round edges?

First Mover = guaranteed success?

I don't really think that not gaining access to the iPhone would be particularly devastating to Adobe or Microsoft. MS in particular has sufficiently large pockets to weather inconvenient storms. The computer based market will remain vastly larger than the phone based market. I don't have real numbers off hand, but lets assume 5% of web views are via cellphones, thus if we reach your 5% number for iPhone penetration then perhaps 0.25% of web views would be on an iPhone. I just can't see numbers that small being decisive.

We're generating svg graph files with AT&T's open source graphviz product. Graphviz is really impressive.

I've written lots of reporting systems. I always keep things abstracted enough that supporting new visualization methods is painless. I'll be adding support for the iPhone as a simple plugin.

The iPhone is more than "just another mobile phone". It is a paradigm shift in the wireless industry by a very influential company.

It is widely gaining acceptance so as a developer, supporting it is a very important consideration. Simply "watering down" your app is not always possible when you are trying to do things besides serve simple HTML with no hardware interaction.

I think that, like the .com bubble, the importance of the iPhone will be overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long term.

If it's really a must-have application, writing it in Flash/Java leaves you open to a competitor starting off with ~1 million affluent users just by rewriting it in JS.