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>they understand what they were facing Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand what they were facing. For example, the bullet "scaling the

by AlanYx 2y ago

>they understand what they were facing Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand what they were facing. For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to lower HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer to iPod UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the mindset of the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple could deliver a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be launch a series of individual phones at different prices, each with bespoke interfaces, just like all the players had been doing, over and over. With that perspective, the choice to keep developing parallel product lines (Maemo, Meltemi, Symbian, etc.) rather than throwing all their eggs into one basket is more understandable I guess, though ultimately completely wrong.

agos 2y ago
the mention of lack of Java was also very indicative of the mindset
ylee 2y ago
> For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to lower HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer to iPod UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the mindset of the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple could deliver a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be launch a series of individual phones at different prices, each with bespoke interfaces, just like all the players had been doing, over and over. Indeed. I referred to it at the time as the 50-model strategy.
alkonaut 2y ago
That Apple succeeded in having people pay $500 and up for a phone that was cool but frankly not very useful, was amazing. We should remember the original iPhone was more a tech demonstrator than anything else. It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it. There wasn't even an app store! You still needed to buy a digital camera and a garmin GPS and so on. This was a telephone in the old sense of the word (For younger readers, "telephone" used to mean a thing you made calls with). The fact we pay 2-3 times as much now for premium smartphones is no wonder. Now it's a PC power thing with a better camera. By the time the iPhone 3G arrived it was a marvel. It had ironed out most of the kinks of the early versions, added the GPS, App Store etc. But by then, the other dinosaurs were already dying. They murdered them with the initial versions of the iPhone, which really weren't even that impressive. The presentation shows they were aware of what was happening. But that Nokia didn't just make their portfolio two lines (really simple cheap feature phones and really expensive all-glass smartphones) on the day after this presentation came out, is strange.
- _fat_santa 2y ago
  > It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, I still remember seeing the demo of maps and the user being able to pan and zoom and was just floored. I really think the screen is what sold it then, even if it didn't have the apps, you could still browse the full internet on it which was a complete game changer. IMO the screen + multi touch is what drove sales of the first iPhone.
  - alkonaut 2y ago
    > you could still browse the full internet on it which was a complete game changer. It had the screen and the software do do that but not the bandwidth. But I guess people were more patient back then.
    - happyopossum 2y ago
      It had WiFi, which was rare in mobile phones back then (carriers wouldn’t generally allow it)
  - nudgeee 2y ago
    Agree on this. As a layman in Australia, i had a friend who was coming back from the USA and asked him to buy me an iPhone before its release in AU (late-2007 iirc, iPhone 3G launched in Australia in 2008) and promptly jailbroke it so i could get it on an Australian carrier. When i whipped it out in public, take a photo at concerts, etc. random people would come up to me and ask me to play with it -- thats when i knew for sure Apple were on to something, a complete game changer that captured the attention of the public.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago
  The thing was all the faults with that iPhone was software. You can update software. Lack of copy & paste was a software feature that was no doubt in some product backlog for a while before getting picked up. And once it got picked up and shipped, suddenly every device people bought had that feature. I don’t recall any of my older phones having software updates that had major new features. Any update would have been some esoteric bug fixes or something. The idea that the phone was just another general purpose computer with an operating system that could be updated to a significantly changed interface was not a concept that existed in the mainstream at the time. All the players before were hardware manufacturers who were deeply in bed with the carriers. Phones were locked with whatever software happened to be installed at the time. Each phone had very different software that was fixed and unchanging. The entire ecosystem was built around that and Apple came along and made that model obsolete.
silvestrov 2y ago
also that most of the deck is about the hardware. There is almost no understanding of the software needed for an iPhone UI.
- anonu 2y ago
  However "Develop Touch UI" is point #2 on their action item list, after partnering with TMobile.
sho_hn 2y ago
> Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand what they were facing. The biggest one to note is the somewhat-hopeful comment that the lack of Java support was cutting off the iPhone from a "large swath of existing software" ... that barely anyone enjoyed using, and didn't amount to much mindshare or incumbent advantage.

by AlanYx 2y ago

agos 2y ago

the mention of lack of Java was also very indicative of the mindset

ylee 2y ago

> For example, the bullet "scaling the user experience to lower HW specs may be challenging. iPhone mini may be closer to iPod UI" comment still suggests they were stuck in the mindset of the time. They thought it was unlikely that Apple could deliver a horizontal platform, rather Apple would be launch a series of individual phones at different prices, each with bespoke interfaces, just like all the players had been doing, over and over. Indeed. I referred to it at the time as the 50-model strategy.

alkonaut 2y ago

That Apple succeeded in having people pay $500 and up for a phone that was cool but frankly not very useful, was amazing. We should remember the original iPhone was more a tech demonstrator than anything else. It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it. There wasn't even an app store! You still needed to buy a digital camera and a garmin GPS and so on. This was a telephone in the old sense of the word (For younger readers, "telephone" used to mean a thing you made calls with). The fact we pay 2-3 times as much now for premium smartphones is no wonder. Now it's a PC power thing with a better camera. By the time the iPhone 3G arrived it was a marvel. It had ironed out most of the kinks of the early versions, added the GPS, App Store etc. But by then, the other dinosaurs were already dying. They murdered them with the initial versions of the iPhone, which really weren't even that impressive. The presentation shows they were aware of what was happening. But that Nokia didn't just make their portfolio two lines (really simple cheap feature phones and really expensive all-glass smartphones) on the day after this presentation came out, is strange.

_fat_santa 2y ago
> It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, I still remember seeing the demo of maps and the user being able to pan and zoom and was just floored. I really think the screen is what sold it then, even if it didn't have the apps, you could still browse the full internet on it which was a complete game changer. IMO the screen + multi touch is what drove sales of the first iPhone.
- alkonaut 2y ago
  > you could still browse the full internet on it which was a complete game changer. It had the screen and the software do do that but not the bandwidth. But I guess people were more patient back then.
  - happyopossum 2y ago
    It had WiFi, which was rare in mobile phones back then (carriers wouldn’t generally allow it)
- nudgeee 2y ago
  Agree on this. As a layman in Australia, i had a friend who was coming back from the USA and asked him to buy me an iPhone before its release in AU (late-2007 iirc, iPhone 3G launched in Australia in 2008) and promptly jailbroke it so i could get it on an Australian carrier. When i whipped it out in public, take a photo at concerts, etc. random people would come up to me and ask me to play with it -- thats when i knew for sure Apple were on to something, a complete game changer that captured the attention of the public.
cruffle_duffle 2y ago
The thing was all the faults with that iPhone was software. You can update software. Lack of copy & paste was a software feature that was no doubt in some product backlog for a while before getting picked up. And once it got picked up and shipped, suddenly every device people bought had that feature. I don’t recall any of my older phones having software updates that had major new features. Any update would have been some esoteric bug fixes or something. The idea that the phone was just another general purpose computer with an operating system that could be updated to a significantly changed interface was not a concept that existed in the mainstream at the time. All the players before were hardware manufacturers who were deeply in bed with the carriers. Phones were locked with whatever software happened to be installed at the time. Each phone had very different software that was fixed and unchanging. The entire ecosystem was built around that and Apple came along and made that model obsolete.

silvestrov 2y ago

also that most of the deck is about the hardware. There is almost no understanding of the software needed for an iPhone UI.

anonu 2y ago
However "Develop Touch UI" is point #2 on their action item list, after partnering with TMobile.

sho_hn 2y ago

> Parts of the deck suggest that they didn't fully understand what they were facing. The biggest one to note is the somewhat-hopeful comment that the lack of Java support was cutting off the iPhone from a "large swath of existing software" ... that barely anyone enjoyed using, and didn't amount to much mindshare or incumbent advantage.