What's made the iPhone successful?

Success of iPhone is phenomenal and beyond the imagination of consumers, analysts and competition alike. While 'Steve Jobs' and his pursuit for perfection has been the driving force, I'd attribute three reasons to its continued success - Design, AppStore and Marketing.

Design: 'Keep it Simple, Stupid'. There are more powerful mobile phones all over the world that are incredibly more powerful and feature rich than iPhone. But smart phone software had mostly been stripped down versions of the desktop software, ‘User Interaction’ paradigms from the personal computers with windows and menus with a key board are translated to mobile phones. iPhone redefined the mobile user interaction and kept it simple.

App Store: 1st generation iPhone is incredibly successful even with limited features. To sustain the innovation and maintain its leadership in a market that has innovators like Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Sony and RIM is a challenge. Opening up the platform and letting hundreds of other companies innovate is only part of the story. Providing a platform for these applications in iTunes AppStore, making it incredibly simple to explore, buy and install apps replicating the iPod/iTunes eco system is critical for the explosion of the app market. This increases the iPhone’s capacity to expand and retain the user base .

Marketing: Smart phones before iPhone have positioned themselves for business users and have been competing to capture the small but profitable market. iPhone instead marketed its smart phone for mass market. Its approach to market these ‘smart phone’ features to the mass market has opened up the incredibly large market. Apple's continued reliance on the ‘Apps’ instead of ‘coolness’ in its marketing campaign has taken iPhone beyond traditional Mac/iPod consumers would ensure its long term success.

Android, Open Handset Alliance and Google

Last week I was hoping for a mobile OS that is not targeted at smart phone market but one that could serve the consumer market and help the handset makers and carriers move away from the software business.
>>This would probably help the carriers and device makers move out of the software business and concentrate on providing hardware and services instead, which are their core business.

We got that and even more and Google had done that, it announced an open handset alliance and android platform.

The press statements are a bit vague on what it is coming up with, but based on what I have been reading an OS platform for phones (can be a smart phone or a normal consumer phone) that works on all kinds of hardware where developers can build apps that has access to local resources and the device makers and carriers can pick and chose the applications... And how it is different from WM/OS X/Symbian/ Palm/ RIM, the carriers still have the say on what they want to provide. The power is still with the carriers, but Google is making it easier for them to have good stable and capable solution and at their own terms.

Beginning of the End (Part One)

I think Nov 2007 will be marked as the beginning of the end for Yahoo! There are two big developments from Google, one in the social networking and one in the mobile space. These announcements not only demonstrate the brilliance of Google, but also Yahoo!s failure. Yahoo! was first in the game with its Yahoo! 360 and Yahoo! Go more than two years ago, but their lack of vision and lack of implementation is now costing them dearly

Yahoo had its best bet before facebook to make Yahoo! 360 a truly powerful social network. It was a great idea, as a platform it was better than other social networks at that time. Its the implementation that lacked. It couldn't even put up all the Yahoo! services on 360. I was hoping they would slowly but surely get there. The unrivalled user base and the content they generate on the Yahoo! is un imitable and can not be repeated. Facebook was not an open platform then, once the Facebook platform is opened up, it was a closed chapter for Yahoo! 360.  To match the facebook, Yahoo came up with another social networking platform called Yahoo! mash, which doesn't have any significant benefit compared to facebook. Still they have not learned from its 360 failure, and the mash team apparently couldn't convince other Yahoo teams to come up with their app for Yahoo! mash. Sure, it is still in beta, but there is no place for excuses in Tech world. With Open Social from Google, hmm its all over for Yahoo! social network plans unless it goes onboard the train run by its biggest rival. Clearly Yahoo! recognizes the glorious future of Social networks which is evident from its purchases like Flickr, Del.icio.us, jumpcut, mybloglog and many others long before Google paid any real attention (Orkut was stupid), but it failed to deliver it twice.

Now they have all these disparate and wonderful services which would eventually fade away once people start having their content on all these apps that are going to be out there on the Open Social unless they become a part of it.

 

Sorry Yahoo!, you couldn't think big enough.

How about mobile OS for non smart phones??

Device independent mobile operating systems like Palm, WM, Symbian, Blackberry all target at mobile phones with data plans/ web access and mainly aiming at providing advanced features which most of the mobile users do not need or do not want to pay for. Of course there is an option of buying these phones unlocked and just not pay for the dataplan, but there is also this mental picture in the common masses on what a smart phone means. We now have the device makers and carriers come up with their own versions of the software that they ship with the devices. There are no open standards and this system is a closed one and doesn't allow innovation. There are some java apps out there that are supported across multiple OS,
but the utility is minimal where u need to download the apps over the air?


There can be many advantages of having these open OS platforms even in the non smartphones. There can be many applications that can be designed and built for mobile phones with PC - Mobile Eco System like iPods which doesn't need web access. This would probably help the carriers and device makers move out of the software business and concentrate on providing hardware and services instead, which are their core business.

This is one rung lower than what Google is suggesting for the 700MHz spectrum. And a good first step in that direction.

World Wide Widget Web

You see Google Gadgets and iGoogle, Mac OS X Dashboard and iPhone, Yahoo Widgets, Yahoo Badges and Yahoo Go, MS Vista Sidebar gadgets and Live gadgets, Opera Widgets and Facebook applications. They are not all the same, but they are everywhere. These small applications give access to your online services like Email, News, Weather, Calendar, Maps and the like and they run off the servers. The desktop versions still work even when you are offline and syncs when you are connected.
All these services point to the direction of pervasive computing, where you have access to your data everywhere. The widgets are important because eventually they work the same way on your PCs, your Mobile phones, your mp3 players, your in-car entertainment devices, your GPS devices, your televisios, your game consoles, tivos, your digital photo frames and many other platforms. Right now, you have multiple platforms, operating systems for each and every one of these segments and its a hassle because the developers cannot build their applications for every new platform that crops up now a days. The only unifying aspect as of now to some extent are the web browsers with unified standards. But the web browsers are built for PCs with a mouse and a keyboard. And we see how the developers are struggling from many years to port that to the mobile devices with small screens and still there are no where close to interoperability. they all still suck. Now add the future generations of internet connected devices like set top boxes or gps sets. The web browser doesn't make much sense.
Since most of these widgets essentially use the web technologies, I guess there soon would be a time where you can simply port widgets from one platform to another. Google already does that with its desktop and iGoogle versions. Yahoo does that with same base code for mac and win. Other companies would join and probably release simple tools to just port widgets from one platform to another and it might not be very long before that happens.
That makes it easier to adapt to the newer electronics and gadgets connected to the web and it is of course good for the tech companies as it gives them more places to reach to the customers with out having to invest a lot for development. Companies like Slide and Widgetbox have a lot to look forward to.

Lets see how long it takes for the W4 to materialize.

Thats a pattern... i can recognize that.

Oh! we are so nice.. we are so great... we want to make the world a better place to live in... we are the greatest company... we love people.. we do no evil... we empower people.. hmmm...

for the 12 questions asked, this guy was able to parrot the same statement 7 times irrespective of what the question is... OK it is good that Google is participating in the auction for the 700MHz spectrum and proposed some constraints that will sure help every one in the US to make it more open.. but to act like they are doing all this for the greater good of the world and not to increase their dominance beyond the PCs. may be they want to do good to people while making money. But not even once he mentioned that they are doing this to reach more people for longer periods and make money off that. He kept repeating the same phrase and want to stress that they this because telecom companies are evil and they are the robinhoods.

"Brand Management"

http://news.com.com/Googles+battle+for+wireless+spectrum/2008-1039_3-6199374.html?tag=st.num
Sacca: "The 700MHz spectrum auction represents the last big chance that the United States has to create an opportunity for meaningful change in access to the Internet for the broadest set of people possible."
"We have fought hard on a number of fronts to make the Internet as available as possible to the largest number of people as possible."
"What is going to make the Internet most available to the broadest number of people at the lowest price possible?"
" Google is willing to do anything necessary to introduce some competition into this space and to really drive the prices of service to where they are most affordable to the broadest number of people. It is reprehensible that there are still so many people left off the Net."
"We are deeply committed to changing this industry for the benefit of end users."
"we are trying to do what we can to remove obstacles that are standing in the way of making the Internet available to the largest number of people possible."
" We are trying to look one by one at those obstacles to see where we can have an impact to make the Internet available to everyone. "

Funny he said this -
" I think we do have to question when Verizon and AT&T jump to accept any proposal. We have to look at what their ulterior motives are."

iPhone's succeess

iPhone crossed 1 million sales in less than a week.to put that in perspective, Windows has 3.2 million licences sold in the first quarter of 2007 and that account to about 60% percent market share. So total of 5.1 million smart phones. Ammaaazzzinnnggg!!!

• the iPhone is not competing with smart phones, and I think the people who bought iPhone are not existing smart phone users.



• it is clear that people have enough money in hand, but they did not find any of these existing phones worthy of their money.

It sounds like all these million users are iPod users and are upgrading to iPhone. would these guys have bought it irrespective of the features?Did they buy it just because they want to own that coolest thing in town. Does that mean iPhone is going to cannibalize iPod market to certain extent.

It is rumoured that wide screen iPod is on its way with the touchscreen goodness with out any kind of wireless connectivity (no phone, no safari). What would happen then? is ATT going to bite the dust? Or would people be willing to pay that extra money to ATT when they can still own all the coolness with one time payment and probably less upfront.

It'll be interesting to see the statistics of the early adopters, how many of them own nanos, video ipods and existing smart phones. That'll probably tell us how many iPods vs iPhones will apple sell in the future.

But when I think about it, I think you can throw all the Market research and analysis to trash. Apple would probably defy all the conventional wisdom and sell these gadgets in millions anyways.

Apple is already came to half the market cap of MS. Its probably going to reach MS very soon. On the other side, MS's hopes to get hold of the living room is under serious threat with the failure rate of 33% and less than desired success of IPTV so far. If MS doesn't get its act right and overwhelm the TV set top box market by this holiday season, it is as good as gone. Come next holiday season, I expect to see a completely revamped Apple TV that's going to storm the living room, the fourth leg.

Can MS at least get hold of the tail, i.e Cars?? By the ways things are going, it doesn't look like it.

Get over it...

I am another guy who is tired of the iPhone coverage in the media. I can't believe that some one dropping a iPhone is worth covering. Now I see all these warnings and notes to the prospective buyers on the cons of buying an iPhone. What features it doesn't have and how pricey it is and that ATT is evil.
Wait! Ten Things You Should Know Before You Buy an iPhone


Now get over it... when does price become an issue with Apple products. iPod is always pricier than each and every mp3 player in the market. What abt the features? I would say each and every mp3 player in the market does more than what an iPod does.
You can shout over the roof tops, but you cannot stop people buying iPhones. They are not buying it for the utility, they are buying it because it is iPhone. And these guys do not even care about what other phones are in the market and what those gadgets can do. They do not do research on what kind of features it has. If they need to change their ways of using a phone and settle for less functionality, they would do so. You take out the maps, safari, youtube, weather and maps, they would still buy it. They just buy it because it is iPhone. and you made the iPhone what it is.

Steve Jobs chickened out??

The reviews of the iPhone from the hand picked reporters is out a couple of days ago and the verdict is Unanimous.
Apple iPhone is a ground breaking product and is fun to use. But ATT sucks.

I can't help but wonder how similar all these reviews sounded, right from the keyboard and the testing for scratches. As if they got step by step instructions on how to test this product. In particular each of these guys said the same thing about the keyboard, that u'd get used to key less keyboard. hmmm, can't imagine if any of these reviewers would patiently test a product for 5 days to get used to in order to give a positive feedback on the keyboard. May be a call from Jobs himself helps. yes he did spoke personally to each of the reviewers. That shows the marketing genius of Steve Jobs.

But even after all these every one is disappointed with ATT service. We are told that Jobs even considered taking the MVNO route like Helio. But he seems to have chickened out.

If he wanted to give out the best ever product to the customer, he could have opted for 3G and go for an MVNO and could have controlled the entire eco system, just like he does with itunes - ipod, mac os x - ilife - .mac. As far as availability of edge in more places than the current 3G service like HSPDA/ EVDO, they are covered in the places that matter, that is most the cities across the US where the bulk of the iPod market and also the smartphone market is. And having 3G doesn't mean that the phone do not work in the non coverage area. He seems to have gone for the ATT option and EDGE for two reasons, not daring to go all alone for the afraid of losing? And for better battery life and the device size?? (Then why do you put up charts comparing the talk time and size of an EDGE phone with 3G counterparts). Also, he must be getting a lot of subsidies from ATT to control the price to $599.

I think he could have gone all alone and could have succeeded to the same extent. Who is buying iPhone for features anyways? He should probably comeup with a UMPC on the same platform with GPS and other extra features like GPS sans phone.

Bring in the JOY!!

I recently bought a camcorder for my sis, a Panasonic gs85. And it has got this joystick as one of the input devices on the camera. And I realised what an amazing input device joystick would make for many many devices. I'm not a gamer, so I didn't use a joystick or any similar input devices much before using this camcorder, so this is revealing to me. No need to use the touch screen, just use the joystick to go up and down the menus.

Take my favourite, television remotes as an example, there are separate buttons for channel up and channel down, page up and page down, volume up and volume down resulting in a device every one hates. Replacing it with joystick doesn't need any drastic technology changes, it should still be able to work with the same RF and IR technologies that remotes use now.

Or take any mobile devices, be it mp3 players or phones or pdas or GPS devices or digital cameras or UMPCs, most of the browsing we do on the menus are these same controls, that is up down, left and right and page down. How easy it would be to browse your menus with a joy stick. You don't even need to worry about technology as it is on device and you can keep what ever you want on these devices.

I know quite a few devices already have joystick. But still the percentage is very minimal, when compared to the number pad. I can think of many amazing things that you can do with out lifting your finger if you have the right interface. So, spread the joy.

Forget PCs

The clock on home personal computers as we know them is ticking, especially with emergence of the newer markets like India, China. The future is with mobile phones/PMPs with larger screens, that you can hold in your palm and large HD televisions. There majority would have mobile phones in a few years with most of them having seen or used a PC.

What do you your PCs for at your home? To communicate using emails, messenger and to get entertained with your music, videos and to get information on weather, tv shows, movies. It's about ICE, Information, Communication and Entertainment.

• Gaming is moving to hard core consoles with fancy controllers,
• Digital Music moved to high capacity ipods and PMPs ,
• watching digital movies and browsing multi megapixel photographs are moving to High def Television,
• emailing and messaging and social networking is moving to mobiles and smartphones
• Browsing news and getting weather and traffic information would move to the 3G mobiles with RSS feeds and easy to use search apps (yahoo onesearch) and TV sets with IPTV/TiVo/Xbox/Wii/AppleTV connections and qwerty remotes.
• With more applications moving to web based solutions, ofcourse to a host of enterprise solutions that are moving to hosted models, the browser is going to be the only software that you need. Thanks to google, you now don't need to download docs, pics, mp3s when you get them in email. (eventually videos).

All this is pointing to the decline of the time share for a Home PC. And the functionality would move away to TVs and Mobiles and possibly UMPCs. They might be only used to serve content, (Windows Home Server?? anyone).

At work? You are struck with PCs for your life time. Corporates cannot move and adapt as fast as consumers do.