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Comment by josu | Hacker News Reader

Had the iPhone failed it would have fit perfectly in that category. In an alternate universe nobody wanted a huge display with no physical keyboard.

When you introduce new products or services the market may or may not buy them, it's very difficult to predict beforehand. If your product is disruptive enough the market won't even exist, so you'll have to create it. If you fail it will be easy to blame it on "lack of product-market fit" but that will just be obvious. What else did fail? Why weren't these products able to create market demand?

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Its not that hard to predict though, and if you can't... either the idea might not be developed enough or you may need to grow slow until you get real feedback/sales

IMHO comparing some of these ideas to the iPhone is a copout. As a kid I watched Inspector Gadget and saw Penny's "computer book" and wanted one instantly. When I was older I watched Star Trek and they all had PADD (sp?) devices that were a large screen with no keyboard. iPhone wasn't a revolutionary new idea for which there was no demand... its just that Apple knew that the time was right and that they could technically pull it off. They certainly didn't just engineer the iPhone on a wing and a prayer hoping that they might figure out a business plan one day.

>iPhone wasn't a revolutionary new idea for which there was no demand... its just that Apple knew that the time was right and that they could technically pull it off. They certainly didn't just engineer the iPhone on a wing and a prayer hoping that they might figure out a business plan one day.

This also applies to Blackberry and Nokia, but they failed miserably. The reason why we don't see them on this list it's because they were well established companies, and they could afford failure. That's the main difference with a startup, you pull off a Maemo, a Newton or a Virtual Boy and that's it, you are done. And let's not forget about the ROKR E1. You make it look like the iPhone's success was a very predictable and obvious thing, but just take a look at the reviews from 2007.

Don't forget the HP IPAQ series and early Windows tablets. At the time the iPhone was released tablet anything was seen as dead by everyone except Bill Gates, who used a tablet at Microsoft, and Steve Jobs, who dreamed the idevices.

If Garmin had made the iPhone, I predict it would have failed. Anyone who has ever tried to enter an address into a Garmin GPS knows what I'm talking about. The iPhone keyboard actually worked well (as did the screen, browser, etc).

that's because the Garmin screen was resistive, not capacitive, and it was years before autocomplete tech.

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