It's worth investigating why, in such a feature-driven industry, a product with good marketing but so lacking in features is so popular. From my perspective, t

It's worth investigating why, in such a feature-driven industry, a product with good marketing but so lacking in features is so popular. From my perspective, the feature-driven nature of the industry is exactly what left the door wide open for someone to invade with fewer features and greater usability. The dogged pursuit of feature bullet points and checkmarks may help you sell to a particular demographic, but most people were never able to exploit those features. The most dramatic illustration of this is how Mobile Safari appeared in HTTP daemon logs out of proportion with the market share that the platform had relative to existing smartphones that already had mobile browsing. Edit: Actually, that's the 2nd most dramatic. The most dramatic illustration, to me, is how the device was so simple to use that the TV advertisements could demonstrate it by showing a pair of hands. Sure, the ads stretched the truth on the performance, but nevertheless they were essentially tutorial in nature. Meanwhile, other smartphones showed people dancing and smiling: anything but how their phones were used. A feature-driven industry is an industry ripe for invasion by someone who has internalized what Antoine de Saint-Exupery meant when he said "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."