iPhone Doomed to Failure (2008) | Hacker News Reader

iPhone Doomed to Failure (2008)

networkworld.com

50 pointspeterjuras68 comments

Funny side story about this publication. I worked at a company that sold a network monitoring appliance that was ‘reviewed’ by them. We found the review… surprising, prompting us to inspect the demo appliance that they’d sent back to us.

They hadn’t even fired it up. The review was, as far as we could tell, entirely fabricated. We brought this to the editorial team’s attention. They responded by adding a few points to our scores.

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.

Here we're commenting on a specific article. The case it makes against the 2008 iPhone:

* The upcoming LG Voyager phone

* The fact that Windows Mobile 7 allows you to use touch gestures to rotate the view in any app, not just in Safari and when viewing images.

* Windows Media 7 supports an ambient light sensor to determine screen brightness and ringer volume.

That's it, that's the argument. Counterpoint: the iPhone is the most successful electronic product launch of all time.

Apple iPhone. Enjoy the limelight because it won't last long.

> 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)

It really took off with the 3GS

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.

Was Apple insisting on exclusivity with Cingular/AT&T, or was that just the only carrier that would cede control over the phone's software to Apple?

The latter. Apple didn't want exclusivity; they wanted control.

> the original iPhone was a flawed device

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.

Obviously this has aged badly overall, but I think this is quite interesting and insightful:

I was having lunch today with a good friend of mine, Ross Carlson, and we were lamenting how Apple creates innovative products, but then only implements that innovation to a very limited extent. Yes, the iPhone has a finger-based gesture interface. And the image rotates on the screen, but only for a limited set of applications like the Safari browser and displaying pictures. Many applications on the iPhone aren't "rotation aware" apps. Even WM6 supports rotation of the interface no matter what the application.

That’s true, handling rotation correctly on iOS was always a bit of a pain, even though it’s a key feature of the platform! It’s really quite similar to the original Mac OS, where despite having a rich toolkit of functions for the famous UI, you had to jump through a ton of hoops to actually implement a properly Mac-like app.

And yet both the iPhone and the original Mac have lots of really well-written apps that work hard to adhere to the UI guidelines. It’s like Apple (at their best) sets an example to developers of what a high-quality UI should be like, rather than providing them with great tools, and developers are happy to put in the extra work to make their apps good.

Makes you wonder if there should be professional repercussions for being so wrong. Does credibility or accuracy with assessments and predictions even matter?

Other notable examples are Jim Cramer, who seems to be more wrong than right on stock and company analysis but still gets paid handsomely by CNBC. Or Paul Krugman who said the Internet's Effect on the World Economy Would Be 'No Greater Than the Fax Machine's. Krugman managed to maintain a fine career in academia and in print.

Cramer is not a stock trader but an entertainer, and he did fine on that job. Same goes for Krugman. Krugman nowadays is an opinion columnist and not an economist. If you read his articles regularly you will realise that accuracy is not the main goal. Sounding important is the main goal. And he too is doing fine on that job.

Calling Cramer just an entertainer is absurd, he's more manipulator of a gullible audience than entertainer. It's pretty clear his role is to promote investing, and more specifically making certain (often bad, for the audience) investments.

Pretty sure if you bet against them consistently you come out ahead.

If you wanna try, SJIM and LJIM are the ticket symbols to buy.

Hmm, Money in SJIM about 5x that of LJIM.

https://www.crameretfs.com/sjim https://www.crameretfs.com/ljim

> who seems to be more wrong than righ

Just invert their output and you will have some good predictors.

Ah the ole inverse Cramer.

Ballmer lost is CEO job.

This article reminds me of a conversation I had in 1995. We were using Astound on Windows 3.1 - a PowerPoint like product. Once Windows 95 came out, we quickly upgraded to it, but Astound didn't run well on it.

So I called their tech support asking when the Windows 95 version is coming. They told me they didn't think Windows 95 will be popular. Instead they were working on a version for OS/2 Warp. I tried to tell them otherwise, but they were 110% sure.

It was patently obvious to me, after one day spent using it, that Windows 95 would be hugely successful. I had the same feeling after Steve Jobs' presentation of the iPhone.

I am always stunned how things that are obvious to most people completely escape others.

The marketing campaign for W95 was literally everywhere when it was released. People camped out at stores to buy it. The same happened with the iPhone. When you consider how garbage the cellphone was pre-iPhone then it rescued the market. Jobs knew Apple zealots would buy it as the iPod market showed it possible.

Then you may be similarly surprised that you're a victim of hindsite bias, and not a super-insightful technorati.

I still remember vividly all my friends with Qteks running windows mobile going on about how Apple had no chance doing phones. All the power users I knew were like taking out their styluses - I kid you not - and was like look at what I can do.

First time I saw pinch to zoom i was sold, maybe I would have thought differently if I have had a "smartphone" back then.

Simplicity is what the original iPhone was about. People saw it as an iPod with a phone at first before data plan became the thing. Remember that data plans were unlimited originally due to limited uptake.

Reads as the same level of naïveté as the intertwined trends of "Tesla will go bankrupt" and "Tesla killer EV unveils soon" articles in the past years.

Incredible but true. In fact, many comments on this thread could apply to that context as well. For example:

> On paper, the incumbent mega corporations [legacy ICE manufacturers] should have been able to come up with an iPhone killer [a Tesla 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.

As we know, the theoretical ability of the incumbents to fiercely respond has been imagined every year since 2012, and yet the legacies are still struggling.

Very interesting article to read after 15 years and it seems to have aged like milk so to speak :) I think the main thing is that the author approaches the problem very logically (just comparing features) yet the users don't follow their logic. While I agree that windows mobile 8 was brilliant*, smartphone domain suffers horribly from network effect. Windows phone came too late into the game and couldn't move quick enough. Only a few of the cool things were available even at its peak. Then it unfortunately died out.

I missed out on windows mobile 7 which is the one this article mentions but I used windows mobile 6 and windows phone 8. Windows phone 8 was heavily inspired by windows mobile 7 aesthetics so I think they are comparable in ux.

Unlike enterprise products, consumer market values products with minimal features, and the simplest things tend to win in the long run in any industry. Having more features in the consumer market on it's own mostly never is a winning strategy. A lot of the products that I really liked which were featureful lost to simpler products. Talking to my non tech savvy friends I got to know that they vastly preferred products with minimal features. They just don't want to see more options and have better things to do with their time.

> I missed out on windows mobile 7 which is the one this article mentions but I used windows mobile 6 and windows phone 8. Windows phone 8 was heavily inspired by windows mobile 7 aesthetics so I think they are comparable in ux.

UX wise, 8 was a lot like 7. 8 added a few UX features, but the big differences were tecnical: NT kernel vs wince, which allowed for dual and quad core phones, which made background execution better, although it was highly restricted by policy; a new application framework for better or worse (a staple of the windows phone era), etc.

I'll leave out the rant about what Microsoft did wrong with the platform. I will note though, that the fact is iPhone only dominates the market in a handful of countries; Android dominates worldwide, but clearly Apple is fine with the status quo, because they haven't tried to approach the low cost market at all.

>because they haven't tried to approach the low cost market at all.

There's a reasonable argument to be made (and that has recently been getting some discussion, could swear there was a big HN thread on it but can't find the right search terms) that actually in a sneaky way this isn't quite true. Yes, for brand new devices Apple has maintained a high MSRP. But the current iOS also supports phones going back 6 years now, and iOS 15 is still getting security updates (last one less than a month ago [0]), pushing support all the way back to the iPhone 6S from 2015. And the rate of phone improvements has been steadily flattening, same as in standard computers before it. As a result, the "low cost market" arguably is getting addressed to some degree by robust support for high end but now older iPhones. An entry iPhone 11 can be had for around $250 or less, SE 2nd gen even lower. That's still a solid device, is still 2 gens newer than the last fully supported iPhone, and 4 gens newer than currently security supported. And Apple can still make some revenue on these via app sales and services.

If this is a conscious strategy it seems like a very good answer to the conundrum of what they do as updates become less utterly compelling and more and more people stretch out lifetimes. They can focus on producing mid to high end top tier devices, which brings better economies of scale, logistics, etc, but then by supporting them well those same devices will still be competitive with new low end devices a few years later.

----

0: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213673

> a new application framework for better or worse (a staple of the windows phone era)

Not just of the windows phone era, but also of the windows 8+ Era as well. Microsoft has been through so many new application frameworks at this point. It definitely hurt them a lot on Windows Phone though as application compatibility was the biggest miss. They failed to convince developers to come to their platform.

IIRC correctly they even had monetary incentives for developers to come to the platform and some of the applications that were developed died due to the framework changes (and a lack of developer will to invest further into a comparably small user base).

This is pretty well seen on Windows desktop today as well. Many of the most popular windows applications are now embedded browser engines like Electron. Even if developers were willing to eschew cross-platform compatibility which windows UI toolkit should they bet on? Which will be easiest to hire for in 5-10 years?

WP7 limitations were almost entirely by policy: no native code, no background execution, lack of any shared filesystem for apps. (also WinCE SMP did exist)

I would argue that the first iPhone is in a different device category than its successors. It had only a 2G modem (very slow even in 2007) and (at launch) no third-party app support. It was essentially a dumb phone with a gimmicky interface that could be also used for surfing the web while on WiFi. The iPhone 3G was the first true smartphone from Apple. I therefore find it not surprising that many journalists where not impressed by the first iPhone.

Those shortcomings didn’t matter because the interface, screen, safari, iTunes and Google maps were so good. If I recall correctly, every iPhone plan was unlimited data or at least much more data than people normally got meaning you could browse the full featured web (ok without flash). Most phones before it with web browsers were convenient in a pinch for looking up an address or something, but didn’t feel like pocket computers.

Maps was yet another gimmick on the first iPhone since it did not have GPS. Other high-end phones at the time had turn-by-turn navigation and offline maps. It is funny to rewatch the original iPhone presentation. It had so few useful features, that Jobs spent a considerable amount of time explaining the voice mail app.

It didn't have GPS but it did work well in cities using skyhook.

Calling it a dumb phone with a gimmicky interface doesn't add up to me. Yes, it had a 2G modem, but it was still running OS X under the hood just like all the following models and had a suite of apps that worked way better than existing smartphones.

People consistently fail to properly assess the system architecture aspects of things. Iphone is not a standalone device but part of a complex system including hardware, software, organizational processes working on the app store etc. The device can be copied and improved upon with ease. The entire architecture of how these thousands of elements supporting the device fit together is much harder to copy. Consider Russia. They are, to an extent, capable of copying US technological devices from cruise missiles to aircraft. But they have, since 02.22, consistently failed to demonstrate their ability to make all the parts work together like the US has been able to. This despite US being their biggest strategic adversary and the considerable material and intellectual resources available.

We had one executive at the place I worked from 2010 to 2017 who was always on the next Windows phone bandwagon. He'd put pressure on us to make the site support whatever incarnation of Windows phone was out that year. We always resisted. What a waste of time that would have been.

Obviously, this opinion has aged like milk. In the author's defense, Apple had, at the time, a remarkable history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Remember it had only been a decade since Microsoft bailed out Apple with $150M. Apple is only a juggernaut in hindsight.

By 2008, Apple had built some really nice computers that had brought them back from the edge of death, and the iPod was obviously a big hit, but neither of those would necessarily lead one to believe that they could make such a big splash in the cell phone industry. Most people who believed that the iPhone would be huge at the time were Apple true-believers.

The massive success of the iPhone was not a foregone conclusion from day one. But it was obvious that Apple was entering the market as a serious contender with a product that had industry-wide ramifications and the highest possible visibility and awareness among its target market.

There was no plausible way to believe that the iPhone would quickly flop and have zero long-term impact on the broader phone market. (Even if the iPhone had never even shipped, the announcement itself changed people's expectations for smartphones.) The only plausible "iPhone failure" scenarios had to postulate that Apple's competition would be able to quickly identify the key innovations in the iPhone (as opposed to features that turn out to just be a flashy gimmick) and incorporate them into their own product lines while using their incumbent status to stop Apple from expanding much beyond their initial foothold in the market. But after the success of the iPod, Apple was already the acknowledged best at distilling a well-rounded, refined product from an immature market still experimenting with new ideas.

I do agree with that. I don't think the iPhone being a flop was ever a realistic scenario. The momentum they had with the iPod alone would make it at least a modest success. I was, however, one of the people who believed Apple's strengths would not fit well in cell phone space.

My thinking was simply that they had millions of loyal, happy iPod users that would be replacing their iPods at some point in time, and iPhone would be a natural upgrade path for them. And they had retail outlets where they could push the iPhone. But I was skeptical about them being able to deal with the mobile operators, and I underestimated how slow competitors would be to catch up.

> "Microsoft Research has a technology concept that uses the device's camera as a motion sensor, enabling motion control while using the device. This means devices will not need accelerometers and other complicated gyroscopes to get these features, and that existing Windows Mobile devices could be upgraded to full Windows Mobile 7 functionality."

Even to this day this makes no sense. How could a camera, which could be obscured by a case or finger, possibly determine the user's motion? How would this work in the dark? To say nothing of the battery this would consume.

I don't think there's any way to interpret that as anything other than Microsoft making excuses and trying to pretend that their existing mobile software efforts and hardware install base were still worth something in a post-iPhone market. It's probably what their investors and partners and some of their customers wanted to hear. It's definitely not what their engineers and product managers needed to hear.

> "...that existing Windows Mobile devices could be upgraded to full Windows Mobile 7 functionality."

And we now know that none of the Windows Phone 7 devices were themselves upgraded to Windows Phone 8.

There’s such an odd feeling to reading this on an iPhone a decade later.

Beyond mocking someone who was clearly wrong, is there something to be learned? How can we avoid this in our own current thinking about what may succeed or not?

Apple is about to launch another product that people are deeply sceptical of - their VR glasses. Very very few people I know seem to believe this is going to work and become a mass market product in the end (even people inside Apple, apparently).

Are they wrong? are they right?

What about the thinking distinguishes it from the incorrect predictions of failure for the iPhone?

It’s hard to say because we haven’t seen the glasses. If someone gives me a pair and they’re an order-of-magnitude quality improvement over previous VR sets, maybe they’ll be right. There is certainly some level of AR/VR hardware that would be amazing enough that the space takes off, it’s just that we haven’t seen it yet.

That’s where the iPhone was in 2008: order-of-magnitude improvement over every previous smartphone. The author of this piece recognized that and didn’t even dispute it; they just thought that Windows Phone would somehow be better (for nebulous reasons.) It wasn’t. The reasons for that might be worth discussing.

Someone did a retrospective on many of the naysayers in this article:

https://www.arnnet.com.au/slideshow/428957/pictures-five-yea...

I think, in the long run, the humility to admit wrong-saying does more for credibility than making excuses.

In college while working at the library, I overheard a young woman saying to her friend "just once I would like to hear him say that he was wrong and that I was right"

Well I can't claim to be a champion at relationships, I do believe this has served me well over the years.

"To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions." — Steve Jobs

This is what happens when you judge a product without using it first.

"Why are you not listening to the experts"

Kinda fun to read this headline a few posts after the "Russia killed its tech industry".

No Wireless. Less Space than a Nomad. Lame.

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