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Comment by Kronopath | Hacker News Reader

Finally, someone else who agrees that the iPhone was a disruptive product. It had all of the hallmarks of a disruptive product except for the low price. It appealed to a different set of values (i.e. usability and interface), ignored features that were seen as critical in the existing market of smartphone users (No third-party apps at launch? No copy/paste? No editing of Word documents?!), and it blindsided the incumbents (who focused on business users rather than the new market of everyday consumers). Nowadays you'd have trouble convincing people that existing smartphone users mocked the iPhone when it first came out.

It's worth noting that even Christensen didn't think the iPhone would be a success.[0]

[0] http://stratechery.com/2013/clayton-christensen-got-wrong/

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The unlimited (even tho 2G) data plan was price-disruptive. Verizon wanted to charge me $45/mo for data for my Treo (again 2G/1xRTT).

The iPhone (mandated) plan from AT&T was $20/mo for data, including 200 texts.

Even if I didn't prefer the iPhone, that cost differential was a no-brainer to me.

Data plans were the disruption that made the iPhone more than "a faster horse." They allowed the iPhone's architecture to be feasible and the idea of the app store to be viable. Yes, touch screens are an improvement over pens, but the change that sunk RIM was logistical.

This is how it played out in Australia too. Pre-iPhone data was expensive. My pre-iphone "smart" phones were hobbled by a lack of data which the iphone didn't suffer from.

The first iPhone was barely a success. Apple had to give a price drop merely two months after it went on sale. The second iPhone, the iPhone 3G, was the breakout hit. Then Apple changed the rollout process and used a 'cheap' price[1] to accelerate sales.

[1]'cheap' initial payment with an expensive mobile contract.

Apple had to give a price drop merely two months after it went on sale.

I speak as someone whose first iPhone was a 3G, but I think it's possible that the price drop was part of the plan all along. It was be a smart price segmentation move: get everyone who's unbearably keen to pay a whole lot, then move on to people who are bit less unbearably keen at a slightly lower price.

That wouldn't explain the store credit they gave to the people who paid the original price.

(facepalm) Good point.

It HAD lower price: it disrupted the portable computers which were more expensive at that time.

You already needed to pay for a phone, so the real price compared to a portable was just how much more expensive the iPhone was compared to a standard mobile phone.

Due to the system with 2 year phone contracts in USA, that extra price was low.

This was state of the art around the time the iPhone hit: HTC8525 [0]. That is not a phone, that is a ridiculously small screen welded to a slow computer with terrible battery life; and it was $299 on contract at the time.

The disruption in the iPhone was technical, social, political and economic.

[0] http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/at-t-8525/4505-6452_7-32...

Nah, the old Windows phones were just fine. Did many of the things we now pretend that Apple invented. But they were for nerds. And huge phones sell reasonably well today.

The functionality was really already there. The "disruption" was aesthetics, marketing and ease-of-use.

And in the end, it's a phone, not a cultural revolution.

The functionality was really already there.

While I think this is mostly true (Nokia fans love to point out that every possible smartphone feature appeared on at least one Nokia product which may have shipped in the 1800s), there is one way in which this simply is not true, and it's a way which really did change everything.

The browser.

The difference in 2007 between browsing on the iPhone and browsing on any other phone was kind of like, well, comparing desktop Safari in 2007 to trying to browse in 2007 with Netscape 4. Maybe not quite that good. Phones often had only one font available to them, had very limited CSS support, often had no Javascript support. Windows Phone and the Nokia Communicator were the best of what had been out before then, and to say "they were for nerds" is an understatement. Only nerds would tolerate them.

Look at articles after the iPhone's introduction about data usage -- it absolutely skyrocketed, and it was all being driven by the browser. For the first time people actually had a real web browser in their pocket, and it really did make all the difference.

It wasn't just a phone by any stretch -- what made it disruptive was that browser in combination with the touch UI (by far the best way to use a browser on a pocket-sized screen). Revolutionary, or evolutionary? You can make a case either way, but the iPhone didn't upend the smartphone market just because it was pretty and had great advertisements.

Yeah, this is probably the only thing Apple really introduced with the iPhone - a capable browser making it possible to use the internet just like you would on a regular computer, more or less (no flash). But apart from that, all other functions already existed, and while on Windows Phone you had tons of free applications and most people didn't really pay for software, Apple made it a habit to ad-support or sell apps for a fee. I don't see this as a positive trend, but that's just me.

I think the iPhone being first with capacitive multitouch that didn't suck like resistive screens being used in all other phones at the time had something to do with its success also. But feel free to add that and another 10 or so "yeah, this is probably the only other thing introduced with the iPhone...."

But apart from all that, what have the Romans done for us?

The sheer performance of the iPhone blew away Windows Mobile. It was an order of magnitude more responsive than any mobile device before it. The scrolling, the swipe gestures, the pinch to zoom ... it was essentially the first time we had desktop grade performance in your pocket.

I don't really agree with you here. It's not because the interface is made for speed and gestures that you had "desktop performance" in your pocket. It's just a different approach. The first iPhone could not really do any multitask at all (if I remember correctly) so trying to compare a mono-task system versus what the Windows Mobile devices could do at the time is frivolous.

// The functionality was really already there. The "disruption" was aesthetics, marketing and ease-of-use.

And the fact that the old windows phones crashed daily. Was riddled with bugs (some never got fixed) and from an accessibility point of view was a terrible piece of hardware. Good riddance.

Apple made the smart phone easy to use, and gave it much needed elegance. Over night it turned the smart phone market into a consumer smart phone market.

Before the iPhone, "most people" had regular flip or candybar phones that had very basic games at best and very little internet capabilities.

Now it seems like "most people" have a smartphone of one type or another. That's a huge change.

> The "disruption" was aesthetics, marketing and ease-of-use

The iPhone (and smartphones in general) have disrupted multiple markets: * Photography and video * Portable music players * Email and messaging devices * Phones ... and many others

The thought I ran into many times with many people during this "disruption" period basically went along the lines of:

"I could buy a new camera, a video camera, a new iPod, a netbook, GPS device, etc - or I could just get an iPhone."

This theory doesn't stroke the egos of iPhone owners enough to be popular on Apple blogs. It also leaves them open to Android taking it further because cheap compromise devices are easier to make than magical high-end disruptors.

Not at all. It was the technical underpinnings of the iPhone that made the aesthetic and ease of use disruptions possible. If what you are saying were true, all Microsoft had to do was re skin the old Windows Mobile with a fresh user interface and all will be well. They tried that of course and it totally failed.

The old windows mobile was a complete dog. Let's take just one example, individual processes could only be allocated up to 32 megabytes of RAM. Really. That's one reason why it could never have run a decent browser, or really a decent anything else. That alone rendered it fundamentally crippled compared to iOS full 32 bit preemptive multitasking kernel. Yes iOS is fully multitasking, only user apps are restricted in their multitasking privileges by the sand boxing system, but background services have none if those limitations.

It was limitations like this that meant projects like Courier would never have been able to compete with iOS. It's why Microsoft had no choice but to develop an entirely new OS core for their mobile platform, losing crucial years of competitiveness.

Google was lucky. Although Android was never originally intended to use multitouch gestures or an accelerated UI layer, at least it was based on a Linux core so had the fundamental technical underpinnings to support competitive application level services. This gave Android a few years head start on Microsoft, even though they were a few years behind Apple, just enough for them to occupy the low end of the market and eventually mount a credible challenge in the mid and high end.

I also felt that the iPhone was a disruptive product. But it took this article to help me articulate the reasons why.

In all of Christensen's examples cited in “The Innovator’s Solution”, the incumbents tended to move upmarket at the time the disruption was introduced. In the case of the cellphone industry, the incumbents were moving downmarket.

This is important because it shows that a company wanting to disrupt an industry needs to position themselves at the opposite end of the prevailing market direction.

But simply zagging while the industry is zigging isn't enough - the disrupting company also needs to employ the appropriate strategy at the same time. Hence, if your disruption is targeted to the cheap end of the market, then Christensen's "good enough" strategy is absolutely the correct one. But, if your disruption is targeted to the high end of the market, as Apple's iPhone was, then you better be offering a degree of quality that no one dreamed of offering.

This kind of deflates Christensen's compelling rhetoric somewhat. Before Christensen's books, conventional marketing was that in order to succeed, you should see where the industry is headed, and track in the opposite direction. Position yourself against your competitors, not be like them.

From the article:

While BlackBerry was guided to omit consumer features from its enterprise buyers, Nokia never secured enterprise buyers of any significance

I wonder if BlackBerry would've prospered by doubling down on enterprise buyers, maintaining their keyboards, and ignoring the consumer market. From what I can tell, BlackBerry haphazardly attacked the consumer market where Apple was the strongest.

In my opinion, this is exactly what they should have done. They should have focused on providing value to businesses that the iPhone couldn't, and then incessantly emphasized those features to their enterprise customers.

Yes and then with the improvements to activesync in 2007/2010 the iPhone and Android devices had good enough security and monitoring for most organizations.

I can only speak anecdotally here, but in my experience as an IOS contractor if blackberry had doubled down on enterprise buyers, it wouldn't have mattered. Top executives were buying iphones despite the enterprise features, and they were forcing their internal IT departments to make room for them. It's also the reason that so many enterprise apps are made for iphone while android is ignored, the top brass want to see their companies app on their smartphone.

This. Not to mention anecdotally the ego contests involved (e.g. my friend is on the board of Big Name Cultural Institution and they have a really nice iOS app). Of course, Big Name Cultural Institution has a budget 10x yours. But really having an iPhone app was a status symbol. It has since become a critical business need but back in 2010 it was mostly about board member's egos.

This is correct. As someone who was programing a "mobile website" targetting the company's fleet of blackberries, it was clear the blackberries days were numbered. A fortune 500 company blackberries were king, but my boss made sure that we testing on ios/andriod as we starting to see non blackberry phones at work. The non blackberry phones were from higher ups who could push for support.

Didn't work[1]: when the CEO of your company demands that IT let him use his iPhone, then no amount of IT-friendly features is going to keep your enterprise a Blackberry only shop.

[1] To some extent Blackberry did this. While they did launch consumer models, their enterprise sales force remained strong, and new enterprise-friendly features kept shipping.

If you stick to a very literal reading of Christensen, the iPhone was disruptive to the PC market, but was simply a much better smartphone that its competitors. A product can be both better and worse depending on what you compare it to.

> It had all of the hallmarks of a disruptive product except for the low price.

The essentially feature-free RAZR flip-phone was $600 without a contract and sold like hotcakes.

and a really ugly design with horrible keypad!

I wonder what differentiates a disruptive product from a better product? It seems like the qualities you listed are hallmarks of all good products, right?

A better product is one the public can imagine.

A disruptive product is one that the public cannot conceive of, such that its introduction alters the standards in an industry.

A better product is the HTC8525[0] over the HTC8500. A disruptive product is the HTC8525 versus the iPhone.

[0]http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/at-t-8525/4505-6452_7-32... - The leading WinMo smartphone in Q4 2006, pre-iPhone.

This does not seem in line with the understanding of the word used in The Innovator's Dilemma, the book that popularized the word in a business sense. Guyzero's response above matches much more closely to it.

Normally, I'd agree, but in the case of the iPhone, the disruption was more profound than simple off-the-shelf components.

I can go into detail, but the standard ideas for Disruption tend to be technical in nature whereas the iPhone was a profound multi-faceted assault on the world. There are so many elements of this attack, it's hard to know where to begin, but it was certainly more than just a newfound set of components (a lot of the iPhones physical technology was not new).

But, I hear and agree with your point. Guyzero makes a great post above and it's certainly worth reading :).

I had to laugh when I read this. How can I not upvote something so good-natured, especially when it's a response to blunt HN criticism like I delivered?

Re-defining what is a well-defined english word using hipster-startup-hack-bias is contrived and self-fulfilling. The phone caused disruption in the world, done, done, and done. Now quit trying to fit the word disrupt into every conversation. Products create a rift, or they don't. Products are worth their value, or they're not. There's no magical "disrupt" criteria to satisfy the startup hivemind rubric.

Personally I'd consider a fairly major book written by a harvard professor to be a bit more than a "hipster-startup-hack-bias re-definition." In the study of technology management, the term "disruptive innovation" has become a term of art that encapsulates a complex set of concepts into a single term. It's no more a "re-definition" that using the term "material impact" in regards to corporate finance.

Harvard professor or not, he simply coined a term to refer to a new technology deprecating an old one, so much that it becomes the new market that companies compete in. Yes, the iPhone did that. Where's the debate -- it's a fact that everything became 'touch' since then. The term 'disruptive' just cheapens the discussion and brings it to a baseline level of 'startup culture' drudgery. The term is used so often around here that it's become something of a pseudo-intellectual discussion starter.

While I agree that the term is overused, in its genesis of popularity, it referred to a real (and previously unnamed) phenomenon: wben an un-(or less-)profitable market eats a more-profitable one, such that players in the grown-up market are misled by listening to their customers.

If you built a hovercraft, it would destroy the car market, and everyone would expect that. But Blackberry did not expect the iPhone to kill them---there were all sorts of business-y feautures it lacked. "Blackberries are fine!" said RIM's customers.

And that is worth naming, I think. We have a whole jargon around the startup ideal of constant, low-level iteration, when that is precisely what screwed Blackberry.

So while I will be the first to admit that I certainly didn't predict the iPhone, some of the iPhone's success was based on Apple leveraging their success with the iPod. The existence of iTunes and an ecosystem of third-party accessories based on the Apple 30-pin connector certainly helped the iPhone, not to mention Apple's brand cachet which was on an upswing at the time.

it's an interesting thought experiment to consider if the iPhone would have succeeded if instead of Apple it had been put out by, say, Danger.

Some thoughts.

1) The ecosystem did not spring into life with the iPhone; a lot of vendors were unsure initially but there was obviously tremendous benefit to Apple due to the iPod industry.

2) Danger would not have been able to launch the iPhone for a multitude of reasons. Even as a part of Microsoft, they couldn't have done it. I could go really in-depth here, but Microsoft is really bad at Art and Politics, which I would argue were the keys to the iPhones success.

3) The iPhone is a triumph for a number of reasons, but I tend to think the social conventions the iPhone destroyed were the most interesting part. I mean, I was working at AT&T when the iPhone dropped.

Before the iPhone:

* Everything was free phone at the low end and $199 at the top end

* Apps were pre-loaded onto phones

* Carriers drove handset manufacturers choice of OS

* No one ever waited for a phone

* Manufacturers did not care about UI/UX

* Phones sold on spec sheets

After the iPhone:

* Most people forget that the iPhone launched at a price point of $499 with no subsidy. They failed but this was Apple's attempt to kill free phones, and they (sort of) did.

* App store (year 2)

* Manufacturers drove handset sales to Operators (and outside of operators)

* People line up for phones all the time

* Everyone cares about UI/UX

* Phones sell by Operating System (And UI/UX)

I could go on and on. There are so many things that changed because of design decisions by Cupertino.

No, Danger could not have done the iPhone. Not because of technical limitations, but because of politics. Wresting that much power out of such a reinforced fiefdom was a herculean effort with commensurate results.

Appreciate the insight though friend :).

Well, they tried with the Kin, right?

Your Pre-iPhone world was different to mine.

* Everything was free phone at the low end and $199 at the top end

One of my friends bought a Palm Phone.

* Apps were pre-loaded onto phones

This may be true.

* Carriers drove handset manufacturers choice of OS

Maybe handset manufacturers, Palm, Blackberry, Nokia had their own OS.

* No one ever waited for a phone

This may be true.

* Manufacturers did not care about UI/UX

I read lots of reviews where people praised the Nokia UI over the alternatives.

* Phones sold on spec sheets

Spec Sheets?

I really don't think this was true for people I knew. People I knew bought phones as Jewelery. They wanted small size, and long battery life.

How much was the palm? $199 on contract? It certainly wasn't $499...

Those companies had their own OS but their content, schema and layouts were dictated by carriers. Only phones that were sold outside of carrier shops enjoyed true independence and those were few and far between.

People praised the Nokia UI, but where could you buy a high end Nokia phone when they were locked out of US carriers?

Spec sheets sold. Things like battery life were more important than OS. I think we're in agreement here.

I just think we had a different viewpoint on the industry. I sold thousands - tens of thousands of phones in the mid 2000's so I'm really familiar with the market at that time, but the view from my position is not a consumer viewpoint.

Example: Series2 TiVo - couldn't do HD like some of the cable set-top boxes, but was the first mainstream DVR and I much preferred watching a 30m show in 20m over "HD".

It's really a pretty specific idea initially coined in Clayton Christensen's book "The Innovator's Dilemma."

From the book, via Wikipedia:

"Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream."

So the canonical example would be PCs disrupting the market for mainframes or minicomputers. Or as described in the book, less powerful hydraulic excavators disrupting steam-powered excavators. It's a good book, anyone who is interested in the business of technology should read it.

The contradiction is that disruptive products are usually much worse products than the ones they eventually replace. No one who owned a VAX or a mainframe looked at the first IBM PCs and thought that the PC was a "better" product. But the PC started cheaper, stayed cheaper and got better fast enough to displace minicomputers while at the same time opening up an entirely new market for computers that didn't exist before.

So much of this hinges on how you define what "disruptive" means. There's an argument to be made that the iPhone started the trend of phones & tablets disrupting the entire desktop PC industry, starting as "worse" products that eventually replaced the "better" product. I personally don't think you could really say the iPhone "disrupted" Blackberry per se - their relationship is more like early Compaq to IBM where Compaq/Apple put out a much better product that broke down barriers holding the original product back (e.g. Compaq decoupling bus speed from processor speed allowing them to ship a faster computer with an ISA-compatible bus for expansion cards).

I suspect that it often boils down to marketing. A company selling you something somewhat better wants you to be thrilled and think it is revolutionizing everything, not "hmm this is somewhat better, I might prefer this if it doesn't cost too much more." Which may be the reality of many things which get called "disruptive".

Here's a blog post arguing that the iPhone wasn't disruptive, like PC vs mainframe - the PC was worse in every respect, but it was also dramatically cheaper.

Instead, it was obsoletive, like PC vs typewriters - the PC was way more expensive, but could do so much more, and once you had a PC it didn't make much sense to have a typewriter too.

http://stratechery.com/2013/obsoletive/

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