10 ms·

I think Apple succeeded because they were outsiders. I worked for a telco 2 years after the iPhone came out and for years I met a lot of people who denied what

by bborud 3y ago

I think Apple succeeded because they were outsiders. I worked for a telco 2 years after the iPhone came out and for years I met a lot of people who denied what was happening while it was happening. Because “we know how this works”. 15 years ago a lot of telco execs thought smart phones would be a small niche for the next 10 years. And would play only a minuscule role in “emerging markets”.

rusticpenn 3y ago
Nokia N900 was pretty awesome and Maemo was a great OS. Unfortunately killed by internal politics.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  On of the big tech letdowns in my life. I was excited about the N900, but to young to really drop that amount of cash on a new fancy phone and I didn't want to buy the first product of the platform. But then it just sort of died. There was one more release but by then it was clear where it was going. It wasn't even released widely. Such a sad end.
  - seba_dos1 3y ago
    I'm not sure if I'd call a phone that served me well for a decade a "letdown". There were hardly any phones around worth switching to from N900 for this whole time.
    - tekla 3y ago
      The N900 and Maemo was almost immediately abandoned following launch (<2 Years). Not even Nokia cared
      - seba_dos1 3y ago
        ...which didn't matter at all because the community has been doing a pretty good job with CSSU and it was only several years later when it started to truly show its age.
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      Yes. That just shows how promising it was. But if you only bring out an initial modal and then basically never follow it up, you are simply not competing against competitors who bring out new hard-ware and soft-ware every year and also do hardware-software co-design. Its nice that it served you personally, but as a platform it was a gigantic bust.
  - badgersnake 3y ago
    It wasn’t the end, the N9 was the more refined and frankly quite brilliant follow up. Unfortunately they failed to launch it in any major markets because they’d pivoted to Windows. Had to ship mine from Australia. For me when it launched it was the best phone you could buy. Apple caught up quick though.
- losvedir 3y ago
  Eh, I had one and in the end I just didn't find it that great. It was slow, the resistive touch screen was finicky, and there wasn't good apps or software for it. I remember being in a bar once with a friend and we were racing to get directions on our phone to the next bar we were going to (maps and directions on the phone was a magical thing back then), and his iPhone had the results on google maps before I had managed to finish waking up the phone and loading... Here (?) Maps, or whatever it was called. In the end, I just gave the thing away to a random HN user[0] (gosh, more than 10 years ago! Wow). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6647864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6647864
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    I had a friend who used his N900 as a server at home, with an USB network card and all :D The N950 was a lot better and even the N9 had its moments. But like the GP said, both were killed by internal politics and the move to Windows Mobile. Which eventually tanked their whole mobile phone business unit.
- lnxg33k1 3y ago
  Oh I remember having a netbook during Maemo times, as a Linux user was really hoping it would succeed and bring a true Linux experience to mobile world
- xp84 3y ago
  I bought an N800 when the iPhone was new. Figured the extravagant data plan wasn’t important and that the wide (it felt like 18:9!) screen MUST be a better idea for using the web. Ironically the mobile web was basically built after that, and built specifically for portrait screens!
panick21_ 3y ago
This also comes out in the Blackberry story. They were like 'AppStore' the Telcos will never allow that. And Apple just pushed the idea threw and got it done.
- hasmanean 3y ago
  I remember being excited by the potential of apps when I heard about Symbian…but some part of me knew that any product named Symbian would never succeed. It’s the type of name you come up with in round 3 of a name-brainstorming session, when the perfect name will only be found in round 10. They obviously gave up too early.
  - bborud 3y ago
    It wasn't so much the name as it was that you needed a special cable and a PC to install one of the dozen or so apps that existed for Symbian phones. (There were probably more, but in all honesty, none of them were worth the cost of the cable). In fact, at the time I would argue that only perhaps 1-3% of people who owned Nokia phones even knew their phone ran Symbian. It wasn't your pocket computer back then - it was the phone that isn't tethered to the wall. People just didn't spend a lot of time obsessing over it. I remember pointing out to someone at Nokia that perhaps the app install experience should be streamlined a bit. His response was something along the lines "well, there isn't much call for third party applications on mobile phones" and then went on to explain how it is silly to develop a more streamlined download and install experience until a clear demand for third party apps materializes.
    - seba_dos1 3y ago
      > In fact, at the time I would argue that only perhaps 1-3% of people who owned Nokia phones even knew their phone ran Symbian. That would be good, because the vast majority of Nokia phones ran S40 rather than Symbian-based S60. Symbian appeared in lower-end phones only at the very end with Symbian^3. Earlier it was pretty much exclusively used in higher-end and business-oriented models. Also, I'm pretty sure that all you needed to install either .sis packages (on S60) or .jad apps (on both S40 and S60) was the built-in browser, and it was already like that since at least Nokia 3410.
mrweasel 3y ago
When the first iPhone came out I worked for a large regional telco, and you're correct, they did not believe in that thing at all. We where having lunch with one of the sales people and she gave the iPhone three months, something like that, arguing that a new BlackBerry was on the way and once that hit the shelves everyone would forget about the iPhone. Fun detail, one of my coworkers where tasked with implementing the unlocking feature, customers could either pay to have their iPhone unlocked or was entitled to after six months. He absolutely hated Apples API, which seemed weird, because it was totally reasonable, just really secure and radically different than anything else in the telco world.
rvense 3y ago
I grew up on the internet in the late 90's and I have to admit I really underestimated how big of an appetite "normies" would develop for being constantly bombarded with "content".
- al_borland 3y ago
  Facebook played a huge role in that. The growth of Facebook happened at the perfect time with the iPhone, where I think they really helped each other grow. Zuckerberg said Photos was the killer app inside of Facebook that really made it blow up. Smart phones are the perfect device to feed photo sharing sites.
  - mbreese 3y ago
    That dovetails nicely with the trends in cameras. When Flickr first started, all of the most popular cameras were DLSRs. Cameraphones were around, but not as common (and Nokia is on that list!). However, as soon as smart phones (iPhones) became popular, they then started to dominate the rankings. In 2010, the iPhone 3G was the most popular camera, with traditional DSLRs right behind. Today, the top 5 are all different models of iPhones. One comment I remember (but don't remember when/where I read it) was that the best camera was the one you already had with you. If you want to take a picture, but don't have a camera, you're out of luck. But when you carry a smart phone around with you at all times, that becomes your go-to camera. 2006 - https://web.archive.org/web/20061123164557/http://flickr.com/cameras/ https://web.archive.org/web/20061123164557/http://flickr.com... 2010 - https://web.archive.org/web/20100130213746/http://www.flickr.com/cameras/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100130213746/http://www.flickr... 2024 - https://www.flickr.com/cameras https://www.flickr.com/cameras
    - al_borland 3y ago
      >One comment I remember (but don't remember when/where I read it) was that the best camera was the one you already had with you. This is something I’ve heard (and said) a lot. Probably why you don’t remember exactly where you heard it. I’m guessing it’s a pretty old adage. The camera phone, and more so the smartphone, really changed photography. One of my favorite pictures is one I took on a crap flip phone, it’s 352x288. It’s a garbage quality shot, and I wish it was better, but in an age before camera phones, it wouldn’t have existed at all. Getting it off the phone also required deliberate effort, where it’s now just a couple taps to send it out to the whole world.
magnuspaaske 3y ago
The beautiful thing with the iPhone was that it wasn't a "smartphone" per se, but rather just a beautiful new kind of device and then people would get used to the smart features later. I had a PDA a couple of years before the iPhone and while it was certainly novel to have a digital planner as a teenager the "electronic calendar" or "email on the go" use cases just weren't really big. Listening to music and reading news on the go were great use cases though
- RandallBrown 3y ago
  I remember when the iPhone came out there were hundreds of articles about how the iPhone was specifically not a smartphone.
- rxyz 3y ago
  Of course it wasn't a smartphone before the App Store update.
usrusr 3y ago
No other brand could have had much reach beyond a tiny luxury niche at the price point required to build the iPhone in 2007. It was the iPod that paved the way in the early aughts, when it was quite literally the only way to liberate ones entire Napster hoard from the confines of the minitower. Had the market not been primed by that freak wave incident, those telco execs' predictions might have well become true.
- acdha 3y ago
  The iPod was key but not for the reason you’re thinking: it wasn’t the device itself as LG and Nokia had devices in 2007 which were pricier (LG’s Prada even beat Apple to the touchscreen market) but rather that the iPod’s dominant status as the prestige music player meant that AT&T wanted the “iPod phone” badly enough that they were willing to give up the control which carrier greed had used to strangle the American smartphone market until that point. The high price of cellular data plans is the most obvious factor - people used to fear letting an app use more data than they expected and getting hundreds of dollars in overage charges – but the other thing was the lack of AT&T control of the device. The carriers used to put ugly skins, disable features which competed with their paid services, lower call quality to serve more devices per cell tower, or use huge percentages of your device storage for undeletable bundled promos, but worst of all was how apps were sold. You didn’t have standard terms but “call us” agreements negotiated with each carrier, with high entry fees and percentages based on your company’s total revenue. There were exceptions like the Treo and (IIRC) Windows CE devices which allowed arbitrary app installs but a lot of devices were locked down by the carrier, and the combination of market fragmentation, limited access, and expensive data meant that not many people were even attempting to write apps. Even if money was no object there just wasn’t enough of a supply.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    Right, there was a lot of bending over carrier side riding on the waning but still strong "white earbud cables" ad image. Carriers were still dreaming of being able to recreate the glory days of paid SMS I guess. The project that got us from zero cameras in phones to zero phones without cameras in what felt like weeks, MMS, was still pretending to not be quite dead yet. An interesting perspective. From that angle it looks very much like the "not a smartphone because no apps" wasn't Apple not being ready yet, but Apple deliberately pretending to get a foot in the door.
shp0ngle 3y ago
Thing that people forget is iPhone was not an instant success - the first gen was expensive (for the time, for a phone), it had no app store, no 3G so the internet was slow. For a time dumbphones were still overselling smartphones. It got better as mobile internet got quicker and people got used to the shorter batteries.
- guappa 3y ago
  It also didn't support MMS, so you couldn't send your photos. Unlike every other phone with a camera that existed at the time.
  - shp0ngle 3y ago
    hacker news was already around back then. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1187049600&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1139270400&page=0&prefix=false&query=iphone&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1187049600&dateRange=custom&... funny to read today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394
    - guappa 3y ago
      Odd that people were concerned about typing in phone numbers. I had written a visual basic program when I was a school kid to dial using the modem and avoid having to remember phone numbers. Smartphones didn't exist at the time. Also I had a friend who had an iphone and claimed that the assisted writing was as fast as typing on a computer keyboard. So we raced. I won, by far.

by bborud 3y ago

rusticpenn 3y ago

Nokia N900 was pretty awesome and Maemo was a great OS. Unfortunately killed by internal politics.

panick21_ 3y ago
On of the big tech letdowns in my life. I was excited about the N900, but to young to really drop that amount of cash on a new fancy phone and I didn't want to buy the first product of the platform. But then it just sort of died. There was one more release but by then it was clear where it was going. It wasn't even released widely. Such a sad end.
- seba_dos1 3y ago
  I'm not sure if I'd call a phone that served me well for a decade a "letdown". There were hardly any phones around worth switching to from N900 for this whole time.
  - tekla 3y ago
    The N900 and Maemo was almost immediately abandoned following launch (<2 Years). Not even Nokia cared
    - seba_dos1 3y ago
      ...which didn't matter at all because the community has been doing a pretty good job with CSSU and it was only several years later when it started to truly show its age.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    Yes. That just shows how promising it was. But if you only bring out an initial modal and then basically never follow it up, you are simply not competing against competitors who bring out new hard-ware and soft-ware every year and also do hardware-software co-design. Its nice that it served you personally, but as a platform it was a gigantic bust.
- badgersnake 3y ago
  It wasn’t the end, the N9 was the more refined and frankly quite brilliant follow up. Unfortunately they failed to launch it in any major markets because they’d pivoted to Windows. Had to ship mine from Australia. For me when it launched it was the best phone you could buy. Apple caught up quick though.
losvedir 3y ago
Eh, I had one and in the end I just didn't find it that great. It was slow, the resistive touch screen was finicky, and there wasn't good apps or software for it. I remember being in a bar once with a friend and we were racing to get directions on our phone to the next bar we were going to (maps and directions on the phone was a magical thing back then), and his iPhone had the results on google maps before I had managed to finish waking up the phone and loading... Here (?) Maps, or whatever it was called. In the end, I just gave the thing away to a random HN user[0] (gosh, more than 10 years ago! Wow). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6647864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6647864
- theshrike79 3y ago
  I had a friend who used his N900 as a server at home, with an USB network card and all :D The N950 was a lot better and even the N9 had its moments. But like the GP said, both were killed by internal politics and the move to Windows Mobile. Which eventually tanked their whole mobile phone business unit.
lnxg33k1 3y ago
Oh I remember having a netbook during Maemo times, as a Linux user was really hoping it would succeed and bring a true Linux experience to mobile world
xp84 3y ago
I bought an N800 when the iPhone was new. Figured the extravagant data plan wasn’t important and that the wide (it felt like 18:9!) screen MUST be a better idea for using the web. Ironically the mobile web was basically built after that, and built specifically for portrait screens!

panick21_ 3y ago

This also comes out in the Blackberry story. They were like 'AppStore' the Telcos will never allow that. And Apple just pushed the idea threw and got it done.

hasmanean 3y ago
I remember being excited by the potential of apps when I heard about Symbian…but some part of me knew that any product named Symbian would never succeed. It’s the type of name you come up with in round 3 of a name-brainstorming session, when the perfect name will only be found in round 10. They obviously gave up too early.
- bborud 3y ago
  It wasn't so much the name as it was that you needed a special cable and a PC to install one of the dozen or so apps that existed for Symbian phones. (There were probably more, but in all honesty, none of them were worth the cost of the cable). In fact, at the time I would argue that only perhaps 1-3% of people who owned Nokia phones even knew their phone ran Symbian. It wasn't your pocket computer back then - it was the phone that isn't tethered to the wall. People just didn't spend a lot of time obsessing over it. I remember pointing out to someone at Nokia that perhaps the app install experience should be streamlined a bit. His response was something along the lines "well, there isn't much call for third party applications on mobile phones" and then went on to explain how it is silly to develop a more streamlined download and install experience until a clear demand for third party apps materializes.
  - seba_dos1 3y ago
    > In fact, at the time I would argue that only perhaps 1-3% of people who owned Nokia phones even knew their phone ran Symbian. That would be good, because the vast majority of Nokia phones ran S40 rather than Symbian-based S60. Symbian appeared in lower-end phones only at the very end with Symbian^3. Earlier it was pretty much exclusively used in higher-end and business-oriented models. Also, I'm pretty sure that all you needed to install either .sis packages (on S60) or .jad apps (on both S40 and S60) was the built-in browser, and it was already like that since at least Nokia 3410.

mrweasel 3y ago

When the first iPhone came out I worked for a large regional telco, and you're correct, they did not believe in that thing at all. We where having lunch with one of the sales people and she gave the iPhone three months, something like that, arguing that a new BlackBerry was on the way and once that hit the shelves everyone would forget about the iPhone. Fun detail, one of my coworkers where tasked with implementing the unlocking feature, customers could either pay to have their iPhone unlocked or was entitled to after six months. He absolutely hated Apples API, which seemed weird, because it was totally reasonable, just really secure and radically different than anything else in the telco world.

rvense 3y ago

I grew up on the internet in the late 90's and I have to admit I really underestimated how big of an appetite "normies" would develop for being constantly bombarded with "content".

al_borland 3y ago
Facebook played a huge role in that. The growth of Facebook happened at the perfect time with the iPhone, where I think they really helped each other grow. Zuckerberg said Photos was the killer app inside of Facebook that really made it blow up. Smart phones are the perfect device to feed photo sharing sites.
- mbreese 3y ago
  That dovetails nicely with the trends in cameras. When Flickr first started, all of the most popular cameras were DLSRs. Cameraphones were around, but not as common (and Nokia is on that list!). However, as soon as smart phones (iPhones) became popular, they then started to dominate the rankings. In 2010, the iPhone 3G was the most popular camera, with traditional DSLRs right behind. Today, the top 5 are all different models of iPhones. One comment I remember (but don't remember when/where I read it) was that the best camera was the one you already had with you. If you want to take a picture, but don't have a camera, you're out of luck. But when you carry a smart phone around with you at all times, that becomes your go-to camera. 2006 - https://web.archive.org/web/20061123164557/http://flickr.com/cameras/ https://web.archive.org/web/20061123164557/http://flickr.com... 2010 - https://web.archive.org/web/20100130213746/http://www.flickr.com/cameras/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100130213746/http://www.flickr... 2024 - https://www.flickr.com/cameras https://www.flickr.com/cameras
  - al_borland 3y ago
    >One comment I remember (but don't remember when/where I read it) was that the best camera was the one you already had with you. This is something I’ve heard (and said) a lot. Probably why you don’t remember exactly where you heard it. I’m guessing it’s a pretty old adage. The camera phone, and more so the smartphone, really changed photography. One of my favorite pictures is one I took on a crap flip phone, it’s 352x288. It’s a garbage quality shot, and I wish it was better, but in an age before camera phones, it wouldn’t have existed at all. Getting it off the phone also required deliberate effort, where it’s now just a couple taps to send it out to the whole world.

magnuspaaske 3y ago

The beautiful thing with the iPhone was that it wasn't a "smartphone" per se, but rather just a beautiful new kind of device and then people would get used to the smart features later. I had a PDA a couple of years before the iPhone and while it was certainly novel to have a digital planner as a teenager the "electronic calendar" or "email on the go" use cases just weren't really big. Listening to music and reading news on the go were great use cases though

RandallBrown 3y ago
I remember when the iPhone came out there were hundreds of articles about how the iPhone was specifically not a smartphone.
rxyz 3y ago
Of course it wasn't a smartphone before the App Store update.

usrusr 3y ago

No other brand could have had much reach beyond a tiny luxury niche at the price point required to build the iPhone in 2007. It was the iPod that paved the way in the early aughts, when it was quite literally the only way to liberate ones entire Napster hoard from the confines of the minitower. Had the market not been primed by that freak wave incident, those telco execs' predictions might have well become true.

acdha 3y ago
The iPod was key but not for the reason you’re thinking: it wasn’t the device itself as LG and Nokia had devices in 2007 which were pricier (LG’s Prada even beat Apple to the touchscreen market) but rather that the iPod’s dominant status as the prestige music player meant that AT&T wanted the “iPod phone” badly enough that they were willing to give up the control which carrier greed had used to strangle the American smartphone market until that point. The high price of cellular data plans is the most obvious factor - people used to fear letting an app use more data than they expected and getting hundreds of dollars in overage charges – but the other thing was the lack of AT&T control of the device. The carriers used to put ugly skins, disable features which competed with their paid services, lower call quality to serve more devices per cell tower, or use huge percentages of your device storage for undeletable bundled promos, but worst of all was how apps were sold. You didn’t have standard terms but “call us” agreements negotiated with each carrier, with high entry fees and percentages based on your company’s total revenue. There were exceptions like the Treo and (IIRC) Windows CE devices which allowed arbitrary app installs but a lot of devices were locked down by the carrier, and the combination of market fragmentation, limited access, and expensive data meant that not many people were even attempting to write apps. Even if money was no object there just wasn’t enough of a supply.
- usrusr 3y ago
  Right, there was a lot of bending over carrier side riding on the waning but still strong "white earbud cables" ad image. Carriers were still dreaming of being able to recreate the glory days of paid SMS I guess. The project that got us from zero cameras in phones to zero phones without cameras in what felt like weeks, MMS, was still pretending to not be quite dead yet. An interesting perspective. From that angle it looks very much like the "not a smartphone because no apps" wasn't Apple not being ready yet, but Apple deliberately pretending to get a foot in the door.

shp0ngle 3y ago

Thing that people forget is iPhone was not an instant success - the first gen was expensive (for the time, for a phone), it had no app store, no 3G so the internet was slow. For a time dumbphones were still overselling smartphones. It got better as mobile internet got quicker and people got used to the shorter batteries.

guappa 3y ago
It also didn't support MMS, so you couldn't send your photos. Unlike every other phone with a camera that existed at the time.
- shp0ngle 3y ago
  hacker news was already around back then. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1187049600&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1139270400&page=0&prefix=false&query=iphone&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1187049600&dateRange=custom&... funny to read today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16394
  - guappa 3y ago
    Odd that people were concerned about typing in phone numbers. I had written a visual basic program when I was a school kid to dial using the modem and avoid having to remember phone numbers. Smartphones didn't exist at the time. Also I had a friend who had an iphone and claimed that the assisted writing was as fast as typing on a computer keyboard. So we raced. I won, by far.