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"A $600 phone?! Who's going to buy a $600 phone?!" -Steve Balmer
by mikekij 8y ago
"A $600 phone?! Who's going to buy a $600 phone?!" -Steve Balmer
- antris 8y ago"... and it won't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard"
- pastor_elm 8y agopeople line up to buy $400 nikes. A $1400 phone every 2 years doesn't sound so unreasonable.
- Analemma_ 8y ago“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”
- 24gttghh 8y agoAhh the Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra. What an awful name it had. An mp3 player one could slap a larger 2.5" HDD into, and with a replaceable battery. Mine still sits on my desk, a monument to a forgone era. The case front and back are aluminum and removable, which made it easy to spray-paint :)
- foobarchu 8y agoI do believe all of those are also attributes of the ipod. I definitely replaced both the battery and hardware inside of iPods back in the day, the only downside is that you risked dinging the seal getting it open.
- com2kid 8y agoI worked in Windows Mobile at the time. He was just quoting what the best market researchers had told him. We were given a LOT of market research papers with in-depth customer surveys where lots of people said, repeatedly, that they would "never pay money for a phone". If you think back to then, phones were "free" with a 2 year contract. The idea of getting someone who was used to free to switch over to $600 overnight was, by any reasonable accounts, not going to happen. The market researchers did the safe thing and said that the status quo would continue. Of course they were horribly wrong, but again, in the moment, trusting literally every expert in the field is not the worst position to take. After all that I learned to be wary of market researchers.
- bosdev 8y agoConsumers are just as bad at predicting the future as everyone else. Market research is great for making iterative improvements or learning what people are frustrated with, but it's data, not knowledge, and definitely not prognostication.
- com2kid 8y agoThis is incredibly true, a huge lesson from the iPhone is that consumers can not tell you what they cannot imagine. Creating entirely new markets takes vision.
- scarface74 8y agoThey should have learned that lesson from the iPod - “No wireless, less space than a Nomad, Lame”
- com2kid 8y agoDon't forget iTunes. Part of why iPod succeeded because it allowed stress free easy access to a giant % of the world's music, all at one constant price. The iPod wasn't revolutionary in any respect, it was a perfectly executed version of what other people were already doing, that had a huge, incredibly well done, marketing push behind it, with even the smallest detail given attention. Also the white ear buds were genius. Everyone who used them was advertising the product.
- scarface74 8y agoHe was right. Hardly anyone did buy a $600 phone. Apple had to reduce the price within 6 months, the next year Apple and AT&T did the standard subsidization model. Now even Apple offers a payment plan.