Honestly, I don't think you're giving them enough justice. It was more than just a "nice set of improvements", as the corpses of PocketPC, Symbian, Palm (and soon maybe) Blackberry can attest.
>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 do understand that it wasn't the iPhone that killed Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian and (maybe) Blackberry, right?
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...
You can drive somebody else out of business without a revolutionary product. Look at how the US car companies got hammered by the Japanese for decades. Japanese cars did not fly or even hover. They were just better cars, but they still kicked Detroit's ass around the block again and again.
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.
>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.