[rickdeckard]

> Partanen was also at Nokia’s post-iPhone launch meeting, and recalls that there was little concern in the room. “We felt okay,” he says.

Which is a perfectly reasonable reaction, the first iPhone was an iPod with a sub-par Browser and a bad mobile phone, in a device which barely managed to last one day on a charge.

Others also had sub-par browsers, comparable/more versatile Media Players and MUCH better phones, running a week or longer on a single charge.

The way Apple destroyed the competition was by creating so much hype around their product that they could demand concessions from carriers, most of all revenue-share (and a scheme where the ~1000USD device-price included marketing budget the carrier could then "consume" from Apple), two moves which decoupled Apple from Market-pressure and created an incredible influx of money into their R&D.

[rickdeckard]

For YEARS to come, carriers refused to rectify this skewed market, so while Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, Samsung, LG had to continue jumping through hoops and could only earn money at the point of sale, while Apple's monthly income accumulated based on the total amount of active devices.

In the end, it also wasn't the carriers who rectified that situation either. After Apple was technically ready to support more carriers, they moved away from their "one carrier per country" exclusivity-model, so they also had to concede on revenue-share compensation.

But by that time Apple already had the search-deal with Google, so revenue-share continued to from the search-traffic generated in Safari.

All of those were genius moves, disrupting the economy of an industry which separated the product from provided services, ultimately gaining total control over the user and all services provided, degrading the carrier to a mere ISP (who was even happy about it because the average revenue per user was higher).

Nonetheless, it destroyed the entire mobile phone ecosystem (especially outside of US, where market-forces were less in control of the carriers)

[mjg59]

Oh, come on. Yes, compared to any modern device the iPhone was a piece of shit (no cut and paste when shipped? No 3G?), but as someone who owned a high end S60 device at the time, the iPhone was a breath of fresh air - the Maps experience on its own was enough of an improvement to justify it. The problem Nokia and others had is that they were judging potential iPhone buyers against the people buying their smartphones, not against the market waiting for a smartphone that wasn't an absolute piece of shit from a UX perspective.

[rickdeckard]

> [..] the Maps experience on its own was enough of an improvement to justify it

To justify what?

What exactly are you defending in such an emotional way...?

[mjg59]

The Maps experience on the iPhone was sufficiently better than on any other platform that it was justification in itself for many people to buy one. But you're also massively underselling the media aspect - iTunes integration was compelling enough that Palm implemented iPod imitation in the Pre so it would work with iTunes. Was the iPhone compelling to the niche enthusiast market that was on Symbian or Blackberry? Probably not, but that market was small and already saturated and the idea that the iPhone was unappealing in the market it was actually selling into is ridiculous.

[rickdeckard]

I don't know why you're coming to the rescue of the iPhone here. Everyone knows it was a successful product, no one said that the iPhone was "unappealing in the market".

Quite the opposite, the demand was so high that Apple could set requirements to carriers that were impossible before AND after...

[mjg59]

"The way Apple destroyed the competition was by creating so much hype around their product that they could demand concessions from carriers" is very easy to read as people buying iPhones because of hype and not because they were meaningfully better than the competition in ways that many people valued. Is that not what you meant?

[rickdeckard]

> people buying iPhones because of hype and not because they were meaningfully better than the competition in ways that many people valued. Is that not what you meant?

No, hype and demand are not exclusive to each other. You can create hype around good or bad products. The key aspect is that hype is not entirely grounded on quantifiable practical values of a product but a demand which is amplified by an emotional desire.

Which is exactly what Apple did, and this move allowed them to make demands towards carriers no other company could.