At the time of the iPhone announcement I had the HTC TyTN and was about 13-14 I believe. My reaction was very similar to Ballmer's. Windows mobile users had all

At the time of the iPhone announcement I had the HTC TyTN and was about 13-14 I believe. My reaction was very similar to Ballmer's. Windows mobile users had all these features and more for a long time already. It seemed like the only new thing about the iPhone was the UI and UX. Purely technically it had much less features. Thus most windows mobile power users just couldn't get excited about it. What we all underestimated is how much of a game changer the iOS UX was for market adoption. No average person wanted a "PDA", most people probably didn't even know much about these devices. It was something used by tech-savy business people. That irrelevancy of WM PDAs made it seem like iPhone was the very first to have all these features. And it indeed was the first device to bring that to the mainstream and led the whole mobile revolution. In retrospect it's so painfully obvious, but at the time it did really seem like a nice toy to most smart people. And one has to remember at the time UX wasn't as appreciated. iPhone pretty much started the UX revolution as well. I don't think it's as simple as making the wrong assumptions. It's more about being unable to see the future and how much a few simple things can change the industry. Like lol, even a few years in I still got the HTC TyTN II and couldn't care less about iPhones or the new Android at the time. As iPhone didn't yet dominate the market, you could still get some popular apps for WM. Only now after so many years I picked up that old TyTN II and can tell how horrible it all was.