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by InclinedPlane
5173 days ago
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"Nobody would have predicted that in January 2007." To be fair, plenty of people did. Plenty of people didn't, of course: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2008/10/22/revisiting-the-dumbes... The fact that so many people couldn't wrap their heads around the iPhone's success is rather shameful. Sure, there's a lot of solid reasons why there was plenty of friction and many hurdles, but at the end of the day money is supreme. Is it shocking that $1400 of guaranteed revenue per phone would ultimately be embraced by the carriers regardless of their reluctance about some aspects of the process? Ultimately what happened was that so many people fooled themselves into the idea that they understood the market and the industry better than they actually did. More so, they didn't want to admit that this development coming out of left field represented a superior understanding their their own knowledge, which was too much for their egos. |
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If you add "in a world where, each month, there are a zillion devices with $1000 guaranteed revenue that, if you are lucky sell well for maybe a month" : yes.
At the extreme, it can be not worthwhile to sell a product with a $1.000.000 guaranteed revenue if, in order to make that sell, you have to instruct personnel at thousands of shops, provide marketing materials for those shops, buy advertising space, etc.
It is not only that $1400 that makes the iPhone attractive, it also is the fact that you just have to put up a hand-written sign "we sell iPhones" to sell them in large quantities, not for a few months, but for over a year, without any changes to the model. That is what surprised many people.