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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

The best quote in the article:

"The iPhone will not substantially alter the fundamental structure and challenges of the mobile industry," Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said in a report this month.

There are three reasons that Apple is unlikely to make much of an impact on this market -- and why it is too early to start dumping your Nokia shares.

This is comedy gold, but is also a good reality check about the mainstream news we read today. Not all predictions made by supposed experts will be accurate.

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And not all purported experts are even experts (no surprises here, I'm sure).

I don't know anything about the analyst referenced in the article, but there are two factors contributing to these types of prediction errors.

1. Most analysts don't have prior industry experience in their field before becoming an analyst. Although they (usually) pick up enough as they go along to understand the terms and major issues, they have little depth and are unable to reason from first principles. I work for one of these large analyst firms and my estimate is that less than 10% of our analysts have relevant industry experience. We are not unexeptional in this.

2. Vendors invest heavily in analyst relations. While this helps to better inform the analysts, it also pushes the vendor's world view. Invites to conferences and events, access to senior execs, early access to information, etc. also help reinforce the bond between the vendor and the analyst. So, not only are analysts biased towards that which they know best, it is also harder to write something negative about a company/product where you personally know the people involved.

From what I understand, it doesn't matter so much if an analyst's forecasts are wrong, so long as they keep their bank's high-touch clients in the loop with vendors (trade commissions). Clients value this kind 'soft' information more than they would over some dodgy EPS figure.

""The iPhone will not substantially alter the fundamental structure and challenges of the mobile industry," Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said in a report this month."

I'd actually argue that the quote above is substantively correct (in the US).

2006: Phones are sold largely on contract, by various retailers, including the manufacturer; churn is driven largely on pricing, network performance, and network-effect factors.

2014: Phones are sold largely on contract, by various retailers, including the manufacturer; churn is driven largely on pricing, network performance, and network-effect factors.

The iPhone changed the experience of using the mobile phone, and what we did on our mobile phones - not how we buy them, nor did the change the base reason people switch carriers - not in the long game anyhow, people still switch because of dissatisfaction with their existing provider, or that the grass appears greener on the other side.

Data became significantly more important.

We went from being nickel and dimed on minutes and SMS with unlimited data to being nickel and dimed on data with unlimited minutes and SMS.

And before the iPhone data charges where horrific, £/$/€'s per MB (not GB). If you were only nickel and dimed you were doing well. To get the initial exclusive iPhone contracts the telcos had to offer unlimited data which made a smartphone useful in a way that the earlier models weren't.

That is how the iPhone changed the market for the better at least in the UK and even if you don't have one. Competitive pressure may have caused it to happen eventually but we can all thank Steve Jobs for speeding up that important change.

It has significantly increased the challenges for telco's in they are increasingly a dumb pipe (e.g iMessenger) and limiting their ability to value add or profit take.

And for manufactures it opened the way for software to overtake hardware as defining feature of a phone, a massive structural shift in the industry IMO.

You cannot possibly legitimately believe this claim. You must have fallen far, your type of correctness is utterly naive.

This is telco, not mobile industry.

You're cherry picking a small part of the industry. The carriers. For the broad mobile industry, the changes have been fundamental.

Feature phones are Dead. Traditional Phone Manufactures are on life support. Blackberry is dead, Nokia is losing their shirt, they are losing money. Samsung and Apple together are taking 103% of the profits in the industry. Hey, that doesn't add up? Well, because the competitors are at -3%.

The app ecosystem has paid out $15B+ in revenue to developers. This is a fundamental market shift for phone application developers.

These are fundamental and important shifts in the mobile industry.

If I've learnt nothing else over the last 25 years, I've at least learnt that 99.99% of analysts couldn't find their arse if you not only gave them a map but stapled the map to their hands, their hands to their arse, and pointed at it shouting "IT'S THERE! THERE! THERE!"

I wish I could get paid to spout nonsense all day long with no repercussions on the accuracy.

And I bet Charles Golvin now has an iPhone, probably two of them.

For a mere $199 you can get his thoughts on the latest iPhone models.

http://www.forrester.com/Apple+Doubles+Down+On+Its+Premium+B...

I love this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U - Balmer, I miss you.. there will never be someone so clueless as you.

Ballmer and others were not wrong to laugh about the iPhone because it was just a bad smartphone compared to what was available at that time for someone that wanted to do more than browse the web. Until iOS 5 and 4S one would be making significant sacrifices when choosing an iPhone.

Thanks to playing their cards right and arrogance and stupidity on part of Nokia they won, but it wasn't always clear it would be like that.

Tell me, which sacrifices did I have to make with iOS 4 and my old iPhone 4? Because I remember jailbreaking, installing SSH servers, custom apps, and stuff like that. It was the most full-featured phone at the time.

I got on board with the 3GS and IOS 3.0. I can't say that your complaints are justified. The web experience was pretty good because you would 'zoom' in on the part of the page you were reading. It had enough memory to run 1 app at a time but each app worked smoothly. I also jail broke mine and was using ssh to login to my home PC while on the bus to work and it was pretty epic at the time. No other phone could do that kind of thing and now I guess the rest is history.

There was no SSH client for Windows Mobile? Or the Nokia N? Or go back even further to the Danger Sidekick? Not saying the iPhone wasn't a smoother experience but other phones could do "that kind of thing".

I also jail broke mine and was using ssh to login to my home PC while on the bus to work and it was pretty epic at the time. No other phone could do that kind of thing

PuTTY has been supported on Nokia phones since 2004: http://s2putty.sourceforge.net/news.html

I didn't use it, but I did have a Python interpreter running on my E65 (with APIs for camera, GPS, calling, etc) before the iPhone 1 was even released.

I used my clamshell feature phone to login to my home pc via ssh. Granted, the typing experience was pretty painful, but it did work. People seem to forget that 'app stores' have been around a lot longer than the iphone. It's just that the earlier versions of app stores, carrier decks, were managed by carriers who cared a lot more about preventing apps from interfering with their business than they did about providing their customers with good, useful apps. And they ran on operating systems that were customized or custom written by carriers who saw them primarily as a marketing tool useful for pushing their more expensive services.

http://www.midpssh.org/

>People seem to forget that 'app stores' have been around a lot longer than the iphone

And they rightly forget them -- they were awful, over-expensive crap. $10 for some BS casual game, $30 for a TODO app etc. And don't get me started on the Java ME crap.

I think that more importantly they were either run by carriers or crippled by carriers.

iPhone changed the whole carrier/manufacturer/customer dynamic for the better (this is coming from a diehard BlackBerry user).

My iPhone experience started with the 3G. It did everything I had previously used a "smart" phone for, in addition to the tasks I had for my iPod and Palm V: contacts, calendar, appointment alarms, phone calls, music, email, web browsing.

That's pretty much the core of what I still use a smartphone for. My iPhone is sitting here next to me playing me music as it has done all day, keeping me in touch with my partner who is interstate, reminding me that I have to put the bins out tonight, and otherwise staying out of my way.

What else did a smartphone need to do that the iPhone couldn't?

Until the 2008 (3G) here wasn't an app store. If you didn't saw what was possible in a jailbreaked version and belive that Apple will fix some of the biggest problem it actually was a fairly expensive toy.

and there's nothing my MBP can do that a ZX80 couldn't.

I'm not sure you remember what smartphones were like circa 2007. http://cellphones.techfresh.net/lg-env-smartphone-hits-veriz... I know I do.

I used to have this bad boy http://www.asus.com/Mobile_Phone/P535/ and as hard to believe as it might sound, there is nothing current smart phones can do that it could not.

>Ballmer and others were not wrong to laugh about the iPhone because it was just a bad smartphone compared to what was available at that time for someone that wanted to do more than browse the web.

That's totally untrue. It destroyed everything of the time -- I know, I had smartphones since 2000, Sony stuff, Nokia stuff etc.

Same here, I've been using WinMo for quite a few revisions and prior to that I had two Treos. The iPhone was an excellent smartphone that was as usable, if not more, than the others for day to day use.

It was bad in many ways, but extremely good in (at that time) unexpected ways. I remember I held off from buying the first one when it came out because of the bad things (the camera, for one), but from the moment the iPhone was unveiled I knew I would buy one as soon as these things improved. I think many others thought the same thing.

iPhone 1, the one without appstore and 3G destroyed everything? :) I would say a phone like e90 or P1i let you do much more than the iPhone allowed you to, it was barely smart in any way.

I don't understand why people like to rewrite history. At the behinning the fight wasn't at all decided.

At the time of the video I think this is a very good response. It didn't take until the 3GS to sway me over to the iPhone, because of simple things that Apple didn't get right first time, such as limiting satnav apps, no copy and paste, the infancy of the app store.

And he's right about price. The iPhone was not cheap, and there is a market for cheap smartphones. I think what they missed is what was happening with Android as that is what stole the market he was aligning Microsoft towards.

Not once did he say it wouldn't work for Apple. He reaffirmed their vision at the time and concluded saying "lets see what happens".

What Microsoft failed to do is innovate on their own products hard enough. And sadly for Microsoft, their consumer brand is just not as cool as Apple and probably never will be.

This was one of the easiest things they could have gotten right. A phone you buy from the manufacturer instead of the carrier? That was revolutionary ... Verizon sold gimped versions of the RAZR and then charged you a monthly fee to ungimp them!

That wasn't the only factor; all my Nokia phones I purchased from Nokia directly.

This.

In Europe, carrier and manufacturer were decoupled for some time before iPhone, so it was not revolutionary in that regard.

Were they actually generally ever coupled in Europe in the first place? In Finland they weren't.

It reminds me of stuff like these:

> Crytek jumps on Steam Machine hype train, announces Linux support[1]

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/03/crytek-jumps-on-steam-...

Scary thing is, he is now Principal Analyst at Forrester Research.

"Lead analyst covering all aspects of consumer mobility and the digital home. Responsible for a continuous stream of research and strategic advice to leaders at Fortune 1000 companies."

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