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The iPhone was/is an internet product. The barrier was the UI, and portability.
by scruffyherder 6y ago
The iPhone was/is an internet product. The barrier was the UI, and portability.
- rusk 6y agoThe barrier was getting people to take it seriously enough to the point where you could create a mass self-sustaining market. There were some great smart devices before iPhone, in particular Nokia and Palm but even going back to Psion and I remember noting when the first iPhone came in just how poorly specced it was compared to the incumbents. But riding high on the success of the iPod, Jobs could position the iPhone as a fashion accessory. The other smart thing he did was open up the platform for developers. At the time I think smartphone development was limited to crappy Java Apps, which solved the issue of the segmented market by offering a lowest-common-denominator set of APIs. Arguably for a platform to sustain itself and grow you need a virtuous cycle of a large marketplace feeding an active development community, which is sufficiently empowered to make great things for the platform thus further attracting customers to the platform.