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Comment by asharpe | Hacker News Reader

Wow - how could they be so wrong. I especially like the incumbents: Nokia and Motorala ... where are they now?

Motorola just finished launching their what appears to be fairly successful Motorola X and G lines under the Google name (after being purchased by Google) and is being sold to Lenovo.

Motorola is making the best phone I've used to date.

Nokia is making amazing camera phones with Microsoft.

In my world it's "where is apple now?" None of my coworkers were super pumped about the new iPhone. Before they left the company they were pumped about iOS 7 but just barely ("thank god they got rid of skeumorphism").

To me, despite how wrong this article was, the headline itself looks like it'll be coming true. Apple has been playing defense these last two or three years. Immense props for their initial creation, but the movement it spawned will end up much more wildly successful than Apple will. And the iPhone will fail in a late, defensive move.

I haven't seen the new moto phone anywhere myself or heard it make any news other than Verge type site reviews, so what does "fairly" successful mean?

Nokia isn't making anything amazing these days, i suppose they are making the phone with the highest megapixels and phoney ads pretending it was shot on the phone.

> Nokia isn't making anything amazing these days

Uh, what? I ditched my Nokia a while ago (I hated the ecosystem) but the Nokia Windows phones are undeniably rock solid hardware.

I'm not saying the Nokia Windows phones are good or bad, but they aren't amazing and rocking the market right now. But your comment brings up another point, it's not just about the hardware these days like it used to be for phones, software is just as important.

Exactly! When I saw the headline, that is what I thought it would be about: how apple has been playing defense and is destroying itself. They have been innovation free since the iphone 4 and it shows. Unfortunately, they made the wrong call on screen size and it's taken them 4 years to catch up. They also really need to drop this one-model-per-year schedule. Competition is too strong now. They need to release their BS "s" models midyear.

> And the iPhone will fail in a late, defensive move.

Any day now, any day...

Didn't Google just sell Motorola for $3B after acquiring it for $12B?

It's not a "they", it's a "he". This is one dude's perspective who obviously lacked some vision. Most people who played with the iPhone when it came out knew it was going to be huge. It was just so much better than anything on the market. My guess is the writer had a bit of an anti-Apple bias based on the tone of his early paragraphs.

This is not a blog post, there was far more than one person behind this article. Which is why ignoring the browser and only saying "as well as having wireless Internet access for e-mail" vs "as well as having wireless Internet access for e-mail and web browsing" was a huge mistake.

About the January 9th demo: It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. http://gizmodo.com/the-iphones-first-demo-was-buggy-as-hell-... Note gizmodo is talking about the actual devices the demo worked fine but at the time it was far from being ready to be released.

You took the words right out of my fingers!

It just goes to show how accurate and prescient many "news" organizations really are.

Not to mention those IT Research firms like Forrester and Gartner that put their finger to the wind and try to guess which way the wind will blow, then announce it the trade magazines.

I actually worked at Bloomberg when this article came out (in product). While he was writing this in the news organisation, we were busy providing one of the launch apps for the iPhone under strict confidentiality. Also, 5 of my colleagues queued up for hours to buy them on the first day ... one actually bought two - one to keep as a collectors' item.

This is an opinion piece by one writer.

You may have a valid point, but this article doesn't support your claim whatsoever.

It wasn't just one writer or person in the industry saying this at the time. I'm not sure why this article got posted here today, but I think it's likely to make us reflect at how terrible some of these analysts and firms are even today.

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