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Comment by TimGebhardt | Hacker News Reader

Somewhere out there, the guy who invented the Handspring Treo is sitting in a rocking chair yelling at his TV: "Apple didn't invent anything! They stole my ideas!"

Get over it. Apple stood on the shoulders of giants and has the best marketers in the world.

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I keep waiting for the "Apple is all marketing" meme to go away but it just refuses to. When Apple introduced the first iPhone the commercials they aired simply showed someone using the device. No clever marketing or cheap sales tactics; just letting the device speak for itself. Marketing doesn't make a product usable. Saying Apple is all marketing is nothing more than a thinly veiled barb at anyone who has ever bought an Apple product, as if they naively let themselves be duped into paying too much for too little. Give it a rest, already, it's tired.

I'm a Mac owner. They make great products. But people don't know about great products without great marketing (the tech-startup entrepreneur's trap). Great products don't just speak for themselves, people need to know about them.

I'm tired of people thinking that Apple divined the design of the iPhone out of the ether like Einstein did for his theory of general relativity.

They iterated on some great ideas, combined them with a lot of stuff that existed before, refined them, and sold them.

You're missing the point. The first iPhone commercial (not counting the "Hello." spot during the Oscars) was literally someone using the device and someone narrating: "This is how you turn it on. This is your music. This is your email."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7...

They let the device speak for itself, which was an innovative departure from the typical message of 'look how cool you'll be if you buy this'. Not many products could survive -- let alone crush the market like iPhone has -- left to speak for themselves.

How am I missing the point? You make it sound like the marketing was really innovative, whether or not the product was (it was a great product that could speak for itself, you're absolutely right). It (the marketing) was different and fresh for the period of time, same as the product.

I'm not saying that the iPhone isn't innovative or that it's success is solely due to clever marketing. I'm saying I'm getting tired of these threads where people think that Steve Jobs heard the word of God like Muhammad and recorded his schematics and source code and the iPhone came right out of left field. It was a combination of a great product, at the right time, with the right sales pitch. All of us would be so lucky as to find the product-trifecta.

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