The iPhone and Disruption: Five Years In | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone and Disruption: Five Years In

daringfireball.net

By the way, I highly recommend Clayton Christensen's book The Innovator's Dilemma, which was mentioned in the article. If I ruled the world I'd decree that no-one was allowed to allowed to apply the word "disrupt" to technology or business without reading the guy who actually defined the term in the first place.

It seems lots of commentors here could use a primer: a disruptive innovation is usually cheap, considered as "worse" by existing customers, and enters the market at the low-end. But it serves a new market who have different needs to the existing customers. Over time the disruptive innovation gets better until eventually it replaces the original. Classic example: PCs and mainframes.

(Note: technically the disruptive innovation doesn't have to be cheaper. It's just better on metrics the new market cares about but the existing market doesn't. Often that's price, but not always.)

http://i.saac.me/post/startup-related-words-youre-probably-u...

This last week I was re-reading what, for me as a 19 year kid, was a seminal article in understanding the power of the web and personal devices:

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~golbeck/LBSC690/SemanticWeb.html

Discounting the structured data bits (a lot to discount) it's amazing how close we are with tablets and Android/iPhones and Siri and Google Now. I fear the siloing of valuable data in apps, but I have to acknowledge that without the iPhone I don't think we'd be as far along as we are.

> What’s happened over the last five years shows not that Apple disrupted the phone handset industry, but rather that Apple destroyed the handset industry — by disrupting the computer industry.

That's a bit of a stretch. There is still a large difference between an iPhone and a desktop/laptop computer from a user point of view. I'd be very surprised if smartphone sales had any noticeable influence on computer sales (in the developed world). The traditional computer industry doesn't seem to have been much impacted by the iPhone and I can't see by what definition of disruption it was disrupted... Sensationalism is probably good for pageviews.

Well, that site is a notorious pro apple source so I don't see how they could have come to a diff pov on the smartphone disruption success story that is the iphone. The narrative is at the point of the post-pc world now, let us see how the masses react to these fantastic news.

I totally agree that the iPhone disrupted the cell phone industry. Where I disagree is that it disrupted the PC industry as well. It might have influenced the industry to some degree but it definitely didn't "disrupt" it.

I just started reading The Master Switch over the weekend, and I think what the writer here is talking about is the potential to completely destroy the current PC industry, much in the way that the telephone destroyed telegrams.

Whether it has or not won't be obvious until much later. I'm not hoping it has happened, nor do I necessarily believe it has. But I think 30 years from now we might be reading about how this was the defining moment in the death of PCs.

This may be completely obvious to everyone here already, but it was a whole new line of thinking for me after reading a bit of that book.

I'd say it disrupted the computing industry by converging the cell phone and pc industry.

Given that smartphone sales passed PC sales as of 2011 in a sense it did disrupt the computer industry as the focus of innovation is now in the smartphone/tablet space rather than the desktop and server space.

I do think however that saying that it destroyed the handset market is a bit much. The iPhone totally disrupted the embryonic smartphone market but the dumb phone market is still going fairly strong (if in volume rather than profit). The last numbers I saw had a 5:1 ratio between dumb and smartphone sales so there is still a ways to go yet.

PCs last longer these days, are no longer subject to significant performance improvements every couple of years, aren't frequently lost or dropped/broken/stolen, and don't come on plans with carriers that have you in a constant upgrade cycle.

True, but those points don't yield the PC an inherently superior computer from a utility standpoint.

Despite what you've said, non-PC devices are for core tasks (email, web browsing, messaging, etc.,) a highly-refined, elegant and convenient experience for many end users. Given a person who uses their computer almost entirely for the tasks I've mentioned (and there are plenty of this type of user), would it not be right to recommend them an iPad or other tablet?

What, exactly, would that user be gaining from a full-fledged desktop or notebook PC? That question is getting increasingly difficult to answer.

A hardware keyboard.

Microsoft is betting their future on a redesigned Windows with an unprecedented upgrade price of $39, and just pissed off their hardware vendors by launching their own PC devices.

And you don't think the PC industry is being disrupted?

Microsoft has redesigned Windows and lowered prices multiple times in the past, before the advent of the iPhone. I wouldn't call this a disruption. Furthermore, I would guess only extremely few people are choosing an iPhone rather than a laptop/desktop computer.

Microsoft redesigned Windows around tablet interfaces and launched their own ARM hardware to run it.

How much does it take before you'll call it a disruption?

I was specifically talking about the iPhone. Tablets definitely stand a better chance at "disrupting" the industry although this is also debatable.

I will call it a disruption when people start using iPhones/iPad instead of laptops/desktops. This doesn't seem to be the case for a large majority of people.

It's not necessary for it to be a majority to be a market disruption.

Microsoft having to lower prices is more a function of the total cost of a PC these days. When an average PC cost $2000, suddenly $200 for an OS upgrade wasn't huge. Now when your PC costs $100-$200 then a $200 OS upgrade suddenly hurts the pocket.

Also for Microsoft's strategy to succeed its essential for them to get as much of their market using Windows 8 and Metro as quickly as possible. Hence the sacrifice of the existing cash cow in the hope it will birth a new cash cow.

Lots of business users only need smartphones or tablets day-to-day where previously they needed laptops, they don't want to carry a laptop all day and now make do on a smartphone so they do.

Given a limited budget I'd expect they'd choose an upgrade phone/tablet over a laptop that they rarely use and is most likely locked down by IT anyway.

At home, I've seen people who have a desktop and laptop - when they get a phone and tablet, they stop using the laptop.

This. I won an iPad 3 at a conference and got a zagg bt keyboard case. With mail and issh it has reduced my need to bring my laptop home to zero.

The biggest disruption being that the phone, mp3 player, email, etc. were just "apps" and none was any more important than the others. So, instead of making a phone that is great for just one segment (see the ill fated ESPN phone), the phone is now a platform with personalized features for each user via apps and it's always on, always connected, always up to date.

Funny enough, the web is being disrupted by smartphone apps and yet web devs are crying "fad" just like the hardware guys were yelling "fad" when the iPhone came out, but web apps on desktops aren't growing like mobile is (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/07/mobile-is-where-the-growth-i...)... and so what happens to all the web app companies who are just hoping mobile doesn't kill their web apps or web sites?

In many industries it's as simple as making a product that does 80% or 20% of what the leading product does, but has a iPhone, iPad, Android app and you're likely to make sales on that fact alone. It's like going from desktop to web all over again.

I'd place less emphasis on "apps". Remember, the original iPhone was released with a total of zero third-party apps; all third-party content and functionality was delivered via the Web.

The disruptive event was the sudden confluence of always-available data, a decent web browser, and an interface friendly enough to make use of it. "Apps" had been around for years on the "smartphones" of yesteryear, be it J2ME, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, etc. They were a clunky mess, however, and you had to pull out a stylus or fuddle around with a tiny joystick to use them. Their browsers just plain sucked.

Webkit on a device that could render full-screen Web pages like candy is what Apple contributed to the cellular arena, and that is what changed the game. Coincidentally, the browser is the main point of what reviewers of the era missed; most of them were lamenting the lack of apps.

I'd agree. Connectivity was the game changer. Functional Internet everywhere? Sign me the fuck up.

Native mobile apps in my mind simply bridge the user experience gap that HTML5 is having a hard time filling. It does some crunching too, but most apps that are worth their salt are either games or apps that do some processing before or after connecting to the Internet.

all third-party content and functionality was delivered via the Web.

Or apps installed via jailbreak methods. My recollection of the time was that while the iPhone was certainly an interesting device, it was the third-party apps that made it a "must have" device.

> the web is being disrupted by smartphone apps

What does this mean? Christensen has a specific definition in mind when he uses the word "disrupt" (which definition is being used in the linked article), and I can't see how it fits into this sentence.

Regarding the original quote:

They’ve launched an innovation that the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat: It’s not [truly] disruptive. History speaks pretty loudly on that, that the probability of success is going to be limited.

This could still very well be true. One possible 20-year-out future is that wearable computing has completely replaced handheld devices (or indeed most devices of any kind). The era of touchscreen smartphones will be looked back on fondly as a strange transitional blip.

Now, the likeliness of this scenario is a totally different discussion. But calling the game 5 years in feels a bit premature.

(Perhaps the massive wealth Apple has accumulated in the iPhone/iPad era will cement their ability to dominate all future tech. But maybe not, in a post-Jobs environment...)

If you pick a long enough time span everything is eventually transitional.

The iPhone itself did not bring anything new except a slick interface coupled with multi-touch. We already had powerful smartphones, for example ones running Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

But the iPhone brought smartphones to the public's attention, and the iPhone later brought the App Store.

The "slick interface" is, I think, the entire genius of the iPhone (especially when compared to its competition). Sure the functions of the iPhone were all (mostly) present in competing devices when it launched, but it was hard(er) to leverage them on Windows Mobile or Blackberry because the interface wasn't nearly as polished and easy to use. (If you doubt that statement, try using a web browser on a 2007-era Blackberry. Even today, with much more of the internet being "mobile aware", the experience is so awful it is almost disingenuous to say that those devices can browse the internet at all).

Simply put, it was very much the "slick interface" that "brought smartphones to the public's attention", and ultimately, illustrated how powerful having a pocket computer really is.

True. But the iPhone was far from the first in its category.

You might say, however, it was the first good device in its category.

The same thing is true for the iPod.

I had one of these in 1998/1999: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300

It's more important to be good than to be first. Otherwise Microsoft would be the king of tablets right now.

Most people in the cell phone industry said the same thing five years ago.

But, having used both WM5/6 and Symbian, those phones weren't just less slick, they were nightmares to use compared to what we have today. It really was baby software.

It wasn't for everyone, that much is true. But I liked Windows Mobile on my iPAQ PDA (not a phone), it was fine for me. As a technical user I didn't mind the interface, it was familiar to some extent and had the complexity that I loved about Windows.

I'm sure the professional accountant, likely an abacus user, would likely have derided mechanical calculators when they arrived on scene.

I'm not even going to mention horse carriages vs. automobiles.

The point is that they were not good enough for the task. For example I had several "smartphones" before my iPhone and really browsing the web was so much of a pain that, if you were near a computer, you'd turn it on wait 5 minutes for it to boot and still get your task done quicker than trying with your phone.

In fact going home to check something on computer (or ringing someone up) was often preferable to using an early smartphone.

Windows mobile didn't solve the web problem before the iPhone, several vendors solved the email problem before the iPhone though, which was easier, but just a small part of the problem.

Yeah. Web browsing on Windows Mobile was terrible. Only slightly better than WAP.

Especially with a stylus, /shudder, I don't miss that at all.

To be fair, it isn't quite as bad as browsing on a feature phone with optical trackpad. Styli also have enough precision to avoid zooming in when clicking on links.

On the other hand, it's a dreadful browsing experience in practice.

> The iPhone itself did not bring anything new except a slick interface coupled with multi-touch.

This is about as useful as saying "the space program brought nothing new except the ability to go to space."

> But the iPhone brought smartphones to the public's attention

Why?

Because the interface worked so much better than anything that came before it.

The market doesn't necessarily give points for trying. You win when you make something people want. People want things that work well. Until the iPhone, smartphones simply didn't.

>This is about as useful as saying "the space program brought nothing new except the ability to go to space."

But the point is that we had already, metaphorically, been to space. We just did it better this time and went to the moon, too.

I think a better metaphor is that we'd already been to space, but this time we let everyone do it, not just astronauts (i.e. the technically inclined)

This is a complete fallacy and ignores everything inside.

The iPhone wasn't just the hardware—though it was very good for what it did, with e.g. Android taking 3 years to match the multi-touch or accelerometer sensor quality even on their flagship phones.

What made the iPhone shine was the software, where they took the mature base and frameworks of OS X and used them to power a phone. While competing smartphones were still running on underpowered embedded kernels, iOS was supremely modern, fully threaded, with full separation between CPU and GPU, needed for that butter smooth response. And on top of that were frameworks for image/media processing, vector/PDF rendering, a mobile GPU-accelerated version of WebKit, etc. All the stuff that powers QuickTime, iTunes, iLife, was all there, and in non-neutered, slightly modernized form.

Thanks to this, Apple could nail both the feature set and performance of their built-in apps, and it opened the door for the app store to explode with innovation. The difference between a good UI and a bad one isn't a skin, it's how responsive everything is and how easy it is to do sophisticated things. It's a camera app that starts up instantly, a photo gallery that can generate and load thumbnails without lag or hitches, a built-in search engine that is fast and language-aware, ...

must be a slow day at DF. "Hly crap, a general computer in my pocket?!" has to have crossed everyone's mind the instant Jobs showed it.

Yes. It's the iPhone disruption... That over half the market there that's android? Doesn't count cus they entered later (well they were working on it before but launched later) and therefore nothing they contributed counts. Yes clearly

"All of this, because of the iPhone."

Look at Android before and after the iPhone was announced:

http://www.tekgadg.com/storage/Android_before_after_iphone_t...

Gruber & his audience know (believe? Is there doubt?) that.

I played with the Android SDK back in 2007. It was totally a BB clone before the iPhone came along. Granted, Android was designed to support multiple resolutions and form factors, but the default was a BB-like device until 2008.

Are you claiming that Apple was not inspired by any previous device for the IPhone?

There were a bunch of full-screen touch devices way before the IPhone.

What about the Mac UI? If not for Xerox, it would have been completely different.

You miss the entire point about why the iPhone was revolutionary. Yes, there were other touchscreen devices (mostly capacitive and plastic). There were fundamental rethinking of the hardware internally which hadn't been done before. However, it was about the software. The software on the iPhone was leaps and bounds ahead of anything that existed. It made the experience fun, beautiful and intuitive which was not how smartphones were previously.

technoslut: I did not say that the IPhone is not revolutionary but it doesn't mean it didn't take inspiration from earlier products.

Well, Android certainly hopped on, but most of the basic innovations and vision came from the iPhone and Android took them and did their own thing with them. They copied. Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, HP, etc. all have taken turns copying their peers at something. Good for them, it is the right decision. Otherwise, Android would have turned out a lot more like the Microsoft Kin.

I'd say Palm were really the first to provide a usable pocket computer. iPhone did not come out of nowhere.

Being first is about as useful as saying "first!" and there is zero value in "coming out of nowhere". What matters is creating something great.

The iPhone turned the industry on its head. Palm did not.

Most useless discussion ever. But still, how do you define "turned the industry on it's head"? By the amount of money that is made in a market segment? I developed mobile apps long before the iPhone existed. I still get requests for web development.

The iPhone very clearly disrupted the market for mobile phones. Whether or not someone else had the same idea at the same time (but couldn’t bring a disruptive product to the market) doesn’t really matter. Current market shares don’t really matter.

This Android defensiveness is getting on my nerves. Worse than rabid Apple fanboys in the 90s.

imo, the android defensiveness stems from the rabid Apple fanboys of the past ~5 years (eg daring fireball).

My advice is to not be so sensitive. Android is very successful. There is no need to jump in loudly screaming whenever someone mentions Apple or the iPhone.

Your advice works for the Apple fanboys too. IPhone is very successful as much, if not, more than Android.

It's interesting though that it was Apple dissing Google in its WWDC keynote (how its latest OS is in most phones unlike Android's). Google, unlike last year, didn't diss Apple at all at Google I/O.

Can we just not do this? I already lived through the "MACS SUX PCS ROOL" 90s, and I don't really want to deal with the modern Android vs. iOS incarnation.

Next, someone will be saying "right tool for the job", a Linux desktop guy will pop in to say "you're both wrong!", some benevolent Windows user will pipe in with "Macs are mostly good for design." I can't remember what gamers would say, but it was probably something equally inane.

To this I all say: No. Stop. There is nothing interesting here to say. We've done this before, and it had more to do with tribal us vs. them simplification than it did with any genuine mature comparative analysis of the options.

"All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again."

But how will they feel Right On The Internet with that sort of perspective?

Exactly, we aren't rooting for football teams here, no need to act territorial.

In addition, its a factual reality that Android came out after the iPhone. That doesn't discount its contributions however, just puts into perspective its place in history.

June 2007: iPhone launches

July 2008: iPhone 3G

October 2008: HTC Dream, aka T-Mobile G1, the first Android phone, launches: has both touchscreen and keyboard

June 2009: iPhone 3GS launches

October 2009: Motorola Droid and the big Verizon advertising campaign starts making a dent into the iPhone market share.

I think you are not very clear on the meaning of the word disrupt:

interrupt (an event, activity, or process) by causing a disturbance or problem: a rail strike that could disrupt both passenger and freight service.

a disruptive product is a product that breaks with what was before and changes the course of its class of products.

It relates to market share only insofar that it needs enough share of its market to make an impact on it, which is not necessarily a majority.

Now, I think it’s a bit silly trying to say that mobile phones/smartphones/pocketable computers didn’t change after the introduction of the iPhone (see also link below by alanh: http://www.tekgadg.com/storage/Android_before_after_iphone_t..., or check how many phones with and without keys are available today, or the success of the “app store” model).

Apple's disruption is not the hardware, the software, or the integration of the two.

Apple's disruption is spending several hundreds of billions of dollars on marketing to tell people what they could do with the hardware and software.

Androids, Windows Mobile, Blackberry could do everything the iPhone could do, and usually faster, cheaper, and better. But they never told anyone how to do all the cool stuff, or even that the cool stuff was possible. Which is a shame, because most people actually credit Apple with inventing the smartphone, more than a decade after smartphones hit the market.

If so, why didn't Microsoft spend their money on marketing instead of replacing WM6?

Microsoft targets enterprise customers. Their customers are swayed by personal relationships, not television ads.

Ha. Yes Microsoft targets enterprise customers. By purchasing tons of print ads in PC Magazine etc. Take a look at the SG&A for both companies and you'll see that for a company that doesn't manufacture many tangible goods (the xbox is a blip on the radar compared to Apple's manufacturing) sure spends a lot of money, much of it on advertising:

http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/sga_expense#series=type:co...

utter nonsense. rather than regurgitating the same old facts to dispute you, i'll just hope you work for one of my competitors.

Oh, here it is. The inevitable "Apple is only successful because of marketing" comment.

Have you even used a mobile web browser before the iPhone?

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