Reflections on the iPhone
January 11th, 2007The Macworld keynote has passed and Apple has introduced the iPhone and Apple TV. The biggest surprise of the keynote was the lack of announcements: no iWork or iLife updates and silence regarding Leopard. Everyone thought that Apple was announcing a phone and the iPhone still surprised everyone.
Like many Apple products before it, the iPhone must apparently be seen and held to be fully appreciated. Cade Metz of PC Magazine got to play with it for ten minutes and said:
“…an absolute revelation.” “Seeing the device in action is one thing—but actually using it is another,” Metz said. “Each application is impressive in its own right, from photo-management software to the Safari Web browser, but it’s the overall touch-screen interface that takes the breath away.”
A revelation. As if it came from the God of consumer electronics.
It’s funny to think that before the iPhone was introduced, there was a belief that small devices could not be made to be simple to use. What did the Palm CEO say in November regarding the prospect of an Apple smart phone?
We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone, PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.
I wonder if he feels stupid right now.
Today, I saw that a Palm VP was quoted as saying the following:
How do you compete with vaporware? You sell the product that only costs half as much, and is available now. Palm’s not going to try to market against product that they haven’t seen yet.
Palm’s strategy is apparently to not think about competing with the Apple iPhone until they have one in their hands. That gives them six more months of good times. This makes zero sense to me. It seems like you’d want to try to start making a better product today to compete in the future.
The other interesting subtle point that Palm is making is that the Palm phones are cheaper than the iPhone and that that’s a competitive advantage. This seems like the same strategy that Creative attempted to take when the iPod first came out. Look at us; we’re basically the same thing but cheaper! The iPod was sexier from the start and they didn’t understand that most consumers don’t care about a feature set when they buy a product. It took several incarnations of the iPod and economies of scale to make the iPod cheaper than Creative’s comparable offerings. At that point, Creative had no competitive advantage. I think history just might repeat itself with Palm taking the place of Creative. My tip to Palm is to start working on making your phones awesome as opposed to cheap.