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Apple set some standards with the iPhone, but Android brought smartphones to the masses. I would go as far as evolutionary for the iPhone, but it was still a ni
by mkr-hn 14y ago
Apple set some standards with the iPhone, but Android brought smartphones to the masses. I would go as far as evolutionary for the iPhone, but it was still a niche product. Some of the cars that existed before Ford were pretty slick, but few people owned one.
Credit for revolutionizing a market should go to whatever brings it to that market in large enough numbers to matter. This is why we usually credit Ford for revolutionizing transportation, even though many interesting automobiles preceded his.
It's hard to see from the SV bubble, but most people were introduced to smartphones with Blackberry and Android. It wasn't long ago that the iPhone was seen as an interesting toy used by celebrities and a few friends by people outside of tech circles.
- Retric 14y agoUmm, they have sold over 200 million iPhones, how is that a nitch product?
- mkr-hn 14y agoHow many had been sold when Google started promoting Android? I doubt it was more than a few million. Other companies outsell Ford a century later, but they still revolutionized the industry. We're talking about history here, not the current market. Apple revolutionized smartphone design, but they didn't revolutionize the industry. Google did that by creating a good smartphone operating system that anyone could use freely.
- Retric 14y agoAndroid outsold iPhone for the first time in 2010 at which time the iPhone had been out for 3 years. In 2012 they sold 50% more phones in 2012 which while significant is hardly the type of dominate market position your talking about. If you look at the iPhone growth in the US it's mostly a question of increasing the number of carriers vs increasing the market share at any one carrier, so no Google had little impact on promoting iPhone sales.
- mkr-hn 14y agoI'm talking about impact, not sales. I started off using sales as a measure of impact, so I can see where the misunderstanding came from. That's a possible measure of impact, but probably not useful here. Android made it easy to make a good smartphone by removing the biggest hurdle. What matters in the history books is who had a lasting impact. Will the future look like Android where the basic software is free to duplicate and modify? Or will it look like Apple's tightly controlled system? History doesn't seem to favor Apple's way of doing things. Apple's way can never create as diverse a market as Google's has.
- pbreit 14y agoYou're in a big hole already. Stop digging.
- mkr-hn 14y agoWhat?
- patrickk 14y agoI guess what he meant in essence was - would Android exist at all if iOS hadn't shown the world how great smartphone OSs could be? Just like Apple showed the world how good PC OSs could be back in the 80s. Very important not to underestimate the polish and usability that iOS brought to the table. I remember looking into developing an app for symbian and realising how tricky it would be (tools, guides, lack of examples, crappy devices, etc).
- mkr-hn 14y agoI guess it's an overreaction to the more zealous of Apple customers. They want to give Apple all the credit when their contribution was to create a significant stepping stone. I know most people who use Apple's products see the company as an important part of an enormous mix of players all doing something important.
- 14y ago