The iPhone's marketing was very good. I'm not sure there was anything revolutionary about it.

Edit: Rather than answer individuals below, I'll state my terms here. Revolutionary indicates a complete change - the overturning of all that was before. We already had phones, we already had pocket computers, we already had phones that were pocket computers, we already had phones that were pocket computers that you could get extra programs for, we already had increasing use of them as time went on. We already had.

It wasn't just marketing. It really was a transformative product.

That's not a knock on Apple, by any means. I think they're brilliant at taking an existing consumer product and dominating it by making something that's radically better designed and made. They are very willing to let other people pioneer a category and prove the market before coming in to crush their competitors, drive their executives before them, and hear the lamentation of their women. One could argue that given their particular skills, that's a much better use of their time and money than pioneering anything major.

>Apple definitely forced the pace of evolution in that market substantially, but they didn't create an entirely new market.

Here's one example: mobile and mobile apps. Look at the number of start-ups (and established companies) in mobile, compared to just a few years ago. The app store model made buying, downloading and installing mobile apps, brain-dead simple for users which exploded the market.

You have to give them more credit.

It certainly didn't help, but to this day (and probably for the foreseeable future), there is still a larger non-iPhone slice of the market to divide up. Existing smartphone players could have stuck with incremental improvements and held onto more than enough to survive.

As evidence, I'll note that iPhone didn't pass Symbian until somewhere between Q2 and Q4 2011 (depending on which analyst you believe) - after Nokia announced the switch to Windows Phone. Existing players could have survived the iPhone, but something else happened...

I'm happy to agree that Apple's App Store was a revolutionary approach to software sales, though. That really did transform a market entirely. But the iPhone itself was not revolutionary in the same sense.

The App Store provided an entirely new sales and delivery platform for inexpensive smartphone software programs.

This is a $2B market for software that didn't exist before. I'd call that an entirely new market. Perhaps not big by Apple scale, but lots of companies would kill to have a $2B market.

Did Apple do much better with a more powerful device and a large user population used to buying music and other media from them? Absolutely. But that's still doing it better, not doing something entirely new.

I think Apple's (correctly) viewed as the company who "makes it work" with the right combination of technology that is cutting edge enough, but integrated superbly. When they are really out on the leading edge, the results are mixed (e.g. Newton), although that may have changed with greater vertical integration and supply logistics in recent years.

On that level, though, how "entirely new" does something have to be before it gets that stamp. If a given company invents something but doesn't bring it out of beta, and another company becomes known for commercializing it and bringing it to millions, who gets / deserves the most credit?

That being said, it is clear many Apple fans (and Apple themselves, frankly) have gone way past a reasonable division of credit. Considering the last decade-plus of smartphone history, the idea that Apple should be suing HTC (among others) over products they developed with Andy Rubin's ex-Danger team is laughable. If either (or both) had spent a bit more time and money on patent lawyers in the early 2000s, they could have sued the iPhone out of existence. At least at HTC (at Google is a more complicated question), I'm sure there are a few people who regret that they didn't.

Apple did, thought, create a revolutionary new distribution mechanism. But imagine for a sec that some third party had invented the App Store. Who would they have sold it to? Apple, Nokia, and Microsoft. Or perhaps AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The market for that innovative product was large companies who sold a lot of phones. Apple just happened to have an exclusive on it, and used it to crush their competitors.

This is one of those truisms that technologists love to repeat over and over again. "It already exists, so it is not revolutionary." I think it just a curse of the people working on the tech.

To technologists, the tech isn't that amazing or revolutionary. "We already had that 5 years ago!". What they miss, and will probably continue to miss as long as there is technology, is that what is amazing is making it available to everyone in an accessible format.

It's the go-to example, but that was the genius of Apple. Sure, all the tech was already there, but what was revolutionary was starting the path to putting a computer in every home.

A machine or piece of technology by itself isn't any more amazing than anything else. Having it available and easy to use for all of humanity is very revolutionary.

Absolutely. But I feel compelled to point out that the wealthier slice of the developed world isn't "all of humanity" by a long shot. Right now the revolution that is encompassing all of humanity is the mobile phone itself. The smartphone's going to get there, but it still has a long way to go.

That's stretching it a bit, don't you think? Apple devices are neither ubiquitously available (i.e outside US), nor are they within the price reach of "all of humanity"

edit: oops, I did not read fpgeek's response before posting

Post iPhone: Apple/Google control software ecosystem of mobile phones.

Revolution: A forcible overthrow of a government or social order for a new system.

By your own definition; _same_ system, just different controller, so no revolution.

In this case, I would suggest that while the system may seem similar, the end user experience differs greatly, for better or worse,

(I was going to go into a whole rant about why ubiquitous pocket computers are revolutionary, but maybe I'll let someone else tag in on that one if it's in question ...)

It seems that a true revolution happens not when someone invents a new thing, but when someone figures out how to make it useful to masses. Printing press is much older than Gutenberg. Steam engine is much older than Watt.

Basically, the gist is that to be successful, idea/offering/product/service needs to not only be 1) technologically advanced, yet feasible, but also 2)desirable from a user perspective and 3)viable from a business perspective.

Only when you put strongly advanced yet feasible, desirable and financially viable innovations out there do you get really successful and revolutionary advances.

Lots of cool tech fails to make an impact because it doesn't solve a need or can't be clearly fit into a business case – and you can repeat that story for any of the three key parts of this model.

It seems obvious, right? Except you can point to an endless string of failures, big and small, that clearly didn't account for at least one of those three parts.

PS: Remember when people paid for ring tones?

http://www.demogeek.com/2009/07/31/how-to-add-custom-rington...

before the internet we already has arpanet, tcp/ip, newsgroups, telnet. there is nothing revolutionary about the internet? or is there?

Credit for revolutionizing a market should go to whatever brings it to that market in large enough numbers to matter. This is why we usually credit Ford for revolutionizing transportation, even though many interesting automobiles preceded his.

It's hard to see from the SV bubble, but most people were introduced to smartphones with Blackberry and Android. It wasn't long ago that the iPhone was seen as an interesting toy used by celebrities and a few friends by people outside of tech circles.

Apple revolutionized smartphone design, but they didn't revolutionize the industry. Google did that by creating a good smartphone operating system that anyone could use freely.

Android made it easy to make a good smartphone by removing the biggest hurdle. What matters in the history books is who had a lasting impact. Will the future look like Android where the basic software is free to duplicate and modify? Or will it look like Apple's tightly controlled system?

History doesn't seem to favor Apple's way of doing things. Apple's way can never create as diverse a market as Google's has.

Very important not to underestimate the polish and usability that iOS brought to the table. I remember looking into developing an app for symbian and realising how tricky it would be (tools, guides, lack of examples, crappy devices, etc).

Would it have been significantly different today? Sure. But by that standard, iOS would have been significantly different today without Android, too.

Well, the assumption is that social is some sort of platform. You'd figure, now that we have some semblence of the relationships between people, we can build applications would wouldn't have been able to otherwise with it. It seems like that would be the case, wouldn't it? We often lament that our software treats us badly, usually due to social faux-pas a human wouldn't commit (like inviting your ex-girl to your wedding in a wedding invitation app).

In the same way that when other products we have that sprouted other industries as a result. Cars(along with highways) helped made suburbs possible. The first apps for the personal computer probably seemed gimmicky (why would people want computers in their homes other than for recipes?), but people kept trying since it seemed like something should be there.

So therefore, we see a lot of people trying. And it's true what Steve Blank said about VCs liking fast and big returns, but they can also only invest in what companies people start. There are also a disproportionate number of startups in that space.

That said, there are a lot of copycats that haven't thought deeply on the matter and are just digging there just because that's where everyone else is digging. In addition, social/mobile seems easy to people to do. Everyone's a self-proclaimed expert because, "hey, I'm social and I use a smartphone!". Social/mobile is hard to get right.

I believe it's just what innovation looks like. You're going to get patterns like this, where everyone's chasing after the same big and lucrative stuff (what someone else in their thread called #LowHangingFruits). Once it's exhausted (or seems like it is), people will turn their attention elsewhere.

Minor point- at what point can we stop calling this organisations 'startups'? Surely there should be no such thing as a "big startup". Facebook is not a startup. Any more.

This is nothing new. What's new is that there are a lot more people connected and willing to use the web now. And their computing devices have ample power. And they have an installed version of UNIX. The network is growing continously. And we're still not done yet. It will grow more.

The formula for these startups is simple: Take something simple that nerds have long known how to do, using UNIX, e.g., share a photo, and make it so easy that anyone can do it. This made sense in the past, when few people had running copies of UNIX.

What is CGI? It's letting someone use UNIX utilities, or use a scripting language interpreter running on UNIX, who cannot run those utilities or that interpreter herself. (Not counting all those Windows servers.) Today it amounts to telling someone to use the web and CGI to run a script on a server somewhere that she could just as easily run on her own machine. A lot of the data that is kept on servers somewhere else could be stored on the user's local machine. Instead users are trying to figure out how to use all this extra space. So they fill it with music and movies. Then we tell them they should put that stuff in the cloud. With storage costs what they are, users can purchase enough external hard drive storage space to store their whole digital life. But they're being told to give their data to someone else.

We could just teach them how to run the UNIX utilities on their own machine. Or teach them how to use scripting languages to do basic tasks.

But we don't. We think of everything in terms of client and server. Even when every user is holding the power of a server, powerful enough to serve her needs, in he palm of her hand.

At some point, we'll reach the point of "self-service". Because it does not make sense with the computing power we now have to keep letting someone else do everything that could be simply done by users using their own devices. This not 1980, or 1990, or even 2000. An enormous number of people are using UNIX (via OSX or Android, for example) and they don't even realize it.

There is a place for "the cloud" and big jobs, but for most users, like the ones on Facebook, they can accomplish most things without having to use a server in some datacenter somewhere.

And this is more cost-effective. And if more people knew how to use the underlying UNIX system they now have on their laptops, tablets and smartphones, we could see huge advancements in their productivity.

Instead we're still trying to keep them hooked on using someone else's servers to do really simple things, so we can manipulate them and try to make money in subtle ways, indirect ways. We don't just charge fees for use, because we know we'd be undersold. Everything is "free", to the frustration of some would-be enterpisers. And why is that? Because the cost to provide these "services" is near zero. Someone else who knows UNIX can do the same thing. Even more, today the user could do it themselves with just a bit of know-how.

Stop trying to manipulate users and let progress proceed. Let them use the full power of the devices they have purchased.

facebook stock is just as bad as a mortgage backed security. yet i'm a speculator because i'm greedy.