HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Getting these vibes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

⬐ DocTomoe

In all fairness, Ballmer seemed to be right back then - the iPhone 1 had tons of problems with very little utility, and outside of fanboy circles was considered more of a joke. Not only was it ridiculously expensive, an unproven concept at the time and married to specific cell phone companies, battery life also was abysmal (they said it was up to a day, but from memory, people had to load their phones every four to six hours if they were doing anything with it. Compare that to the average phone back in 2007, which boasted battery times measured in days (weeks in case of Nokia)).

It only really got actually general-public traction after they dropped the lock-in to specific mobile providers and proved that screen typing was feasible.

⬐ saurik

It also had abysmal support for actual "phone" features... the showstoppers I remember were that it didn't support MMS--so no group text messages, which definitely made it feel like a "joke" given how many people I know relied on text messages (and no photos, though the phone I was using at the time didn't support that either)--and it didn't support any kind of ring tone groups, both of which being features that essentially all other competing phones (including Nokia brick phones) had supported for a long time. And that it didn't come with even a single game--even something as silly or stupid as snake--with no capability of installing a game felt somewhat ridiculously "Apple".

⬐ padjo

That’s not my memory of it at all. I remember it feeling like something from the future. The massive screen, the accelerometer, the light and proximity sensors and the overall slickness of the UI were really clearly a step change.

I didn’t quite realise at the time that it was a whole new device category that would essentially eliminate all other personal electronics but I remember it being clear that this was more than just another gadget, definitely not a joke!

⬐ seba_dos1

These kinds of sensors were the norm on smartphones already. Even Openmoko phones had them (and Neo1973 was announced before the first iPhone was), those were touchscreen-only too. Nothing the first iPhone did was revolutionary, you couldn't even use those sensors yourself as you couldn't develop apps for it (and there were Symbian games that used accelerometers already).

It had some exquisite marketing which tried to place it as a somewhat accessible yet luxury item and they succeeded. Then they pushed with their app store walled garden, and the rest is sad history.

⬐ _glass

I remember perceiving those phones as a new class of device, OpenMoko and the iPhone. My cousin's laptop broke, and he used his Nokia N810 instead. This last device was the most fascinating for me, doing everything in such a small size. In the same way that even now I feel that my iPhone is more of a laptop substitute than a phone. I remember for my first job interviews opening up my Macbook in Zurich to find the place, with the ubiquitous wifi at that time. Now you would use your phone.

⬐ seba_dos1

Fun fact - Nokia N810 (announced in 2007) was initially supposed to be a smartphone already, but ended up being just a tablet because of infighting with Symbian team, effectively postponing the release of Maemo-based phone until Nokia N900.

⬐ laumars

I was doing that years before the iPhone on my PDA.

I also used GPS navigation with Google Maps on my feature phone years before the iPhone was released.

I’m not dismissing the iPhone as a bad device (I have an iPhone and other Apple hardware) but it certainly wasn’t first to market on any of this stuff. If anything, I’d describe it as a device that popularised the emerging trend rather than defining it.

⬐ padjo

Sure there were lots of devices doing subsets of the features of iPhone but the feature set and execution of the iPhone was in a completely different class.

The fact that the same fundamental design still dominates 15 years later shows how remarkable a feat of product design it really was.

⬐ laumars

I didn’t say subset of features (because it literally wasn’t a subset of features). And the modern iPhone is very different from the originally released device.

This is exactly the kind of revisionist history I was on about.

⬐ flantasticle

Agree. It wasn’t really until around the iPhone 4 that the iPhone seemed to find its stride, which was released at least three years after this interview. Before that it’d be hard to argue it had greater utility than other high-end smartphones of the day.

But what Jobs and Apple had was a longterm vision… And exceptional marketing.

⬐ dagmx

I’d argue it was the iPhone 3G. Cheaper, had an App Store and had the data speeds to combine with that burgeoning app ecosystem.

It’s arguably the phone that made GPS navigation popular for everyone, and consuming media on your phone on the go. It kickstarted an entire economy with the App Store.

Coming from Symbian UIQ (on a Sony P1), that was night and day. The first iPhone wasn’t that interesting other than the multitouch capabilities for people with high end smartphones.

The iPhone 3G made everyone sit up and take notice. You could get apps to do all the stuff you’d buy one off gadgets for , and it was way easier than downloading and installing jar files, hoping they’d support your phone.

To me the iPhone 3G was the point where it went from “okay this thing is a weird luxury statement” to “why would you buy any other competing product?”

it took quite a while before Android really found it’s footing too. To me the Galaxy S was the first real competitor to the iPhone , partly because Samsung saw what made the iPhone great and honed in on it. It’s the phone that made me switch to Android before switching back eventually to the iPhone X after a string of Android phones getting no updates in Canada, and a huge run of hardware issues with no easy way to deal with them. Come to think of it, my first Galaxy S had to be sent back because an entire SKU had bad memory.

⬐ laumars

I had an Android G2 (I think it was called) which was one of the first Android handsets and it was brilliant.

It already supported everything the iPhone didn’t (apps, copy paste, MMS, etc) plus had a slide out keyboard.

I still rate that phone as one of the best handsets I’ve ever owned.

⬐ dagmx

I think you mean the G1 if you’re talking about having a phone prior to when iOS 3 launched.

The thing is that lots of phones had a lot of the iPhone features before the iPhone came out. Heck, a Symbian S90 or UIQ device would have had more features on paper than both early iOS and Android.

That’s not what made it unique, and I didn’t really get that till I switched to the iPhone 3G. It’s never been Apple’s MO to just be features on a spec sheet.

At the time smartphones were for business people or techies. A ton of buttons and various attempts to hide them (slide out, flip out, etc…) and various attempts to become media devices (ngage).

The iPhone (the OG and the 3G) changed all that by being simple. It introduced an easy way to get apps, a giant screen with which to consume content and most importantly, it introduced multitouch+capacitive touch to the masses. It wasn’t the first at any of those but it was the first to put everything in such a streamlined package and pair it with a decent screen.

What they did was redefine who smartphones were for. It went from business people and techies to normies in the blink of an eye.

There were all screen devices before them (the LG prada) , more feature full phones like the Symbian, Blackberry, Windows CE and Android devices. iPhone killed off all of those that couldn’t get in line with the path it built.

I used to be a die hard Android guy, but they really only took off in mass appeal much later. Maybe it was because Symbian and Blackberry devices were dying , but it also coincided with Android offerings simplifying like the iPhone and focusing on streamlined experiences.

⬐ seba_dos1

> What they did was redefine who smartphones were for.

To be honest, I'm not sure why the original iPhone is even considered a smartphone. It was a shiny feature phone disguised as one, so it sure targeted other kinds of audiences than smartphones did back in the day. I remember being excited about rumors since I expected an actual smartphone, but got incredibly disappointed once it was actually announced.

⬐ pmontra

It was 2G when Europe has been 3G for a while. No copy and paste anywhere, but that wasn't probably a big problem (can't remember.) It was more of a fashion / luxury statement than a useful phone. The incredibly large screen would be very useful for web browsing, but 2G... Remember, no apps on the first ìPhone.

Edit: can't remember this too but maybe its 2 Mpx camera was a great one in 2007 (for a phone.) After all the view finder was unprecedented in size and it had wifi to download (or usb through iTunes?). No video recording, no selfie camera.

⬐ seba_dos1

> can't remember this too but maybe its 2 Mpx camera was a great one in 2007 (for a phone.)

It was comparable to what mid-end smartphones offered in 2007, like Nokia N75. Higher-end ones, like Nokia N95, already offered 5MP cameras with ~3" screens.

⬐ Daub

Steve Jobs greatest iPhone achievement was in getting Stan Sigman, CEO of Cingular Wireless, to upgrade his network to be equal to the iPhones demands. Prior that that, the tail (carriers) wagged the dog (phone manufacturers).

⬐ Gravityloss

At least in USA.

It's the similar thing with a lot of online business:music, videos , movies or ride sharing. First it's illegal and then someone big enough does it and it's a great business. Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Uber etc...

Technologically certainly fairly interesting but the real roadblock was regulations and contracts and conflicts of interest.

⬐ retskrad

The iPhone is unironically one of the greatest products in human history. The world pre and post the arrival of the iPhone is very different.

⬐ a_humean

The iPhone was/is a good product, but I think mass indoor plumbing and the washing machine along with many other inventions ranks higher than the iPhone.

⬐ laumars

Decimal, the printing press, light bulbs, the power grid, telegrams, landlines, wireless data transmission (radio, TV, cell phones), computing machines, transistors, ARPNET, WWW, etc… to name a few.

All of which revolutionised humanity and were needed for the iPhone to ever exist. But also all of which were evolutionary ideas that emerged from several inventions predating it, already inching technology in that direction.

In short, we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

⬐ 8bitsrule

Was reading the thoughts of a living old-timer the other day, and to them running water was the killer app. After that, indoor toilets.

Landlines were also important. Walkie-talkies, less so.

⬐ Normille

No matter what your opinion of Apple [and mine is pretty low!] it's churlish to deny this.

Yes, people wil point out that Phone X had a touchscreen, Phone Y had a browser, Phone Z had something else. But the iPhone was the first phone to bring them all together in one package.

I used to run an Apple user forum way back before the iPhone was released, when all we had were the occasional rumour that Apple 'might be' thinking of bringing out a phone.

Smartphones are so ubiquitous now that I reckon people forget just how much excited anticipation there was at the prospect that Apple would do for the phone what they'd recently done for computers [remember how revolutionary the coloured iMacs seemed at the time?] and portable music [the iPod]. Back then no-one was enthusiastic about their phones. They were just some utilitarian gadget you carried, like a wallet, a pen or your car keys and there was an almost messianic belief that, if Apple brought out a phone it would be an equally miraculous device.

The launch of the iPhone actually kick-started [for better or worse] the promotion of the formerly humble phone to the ranks of 'gadgets you dreamt of owning'

⬐ gambiting

That's like a funniest thing I read all day, assuming you are being serious. Was an iPhone revolutionary in terms of smartphones? Sure. But calling it a greatest invention in human history, within 100 years of literally thousands of other groundbreaking inventions, is just hilarious.

⬐ Normille

I'd agree as far as the "i" part of "iPhone" goes. In my opinion, the internet is right up there with the greatest inventions in human history.

⬐ westoncb

It’s not that crazy, assuming they’re equating it with everyone having a general purpose computer in their pocket (probably a greater impact on society than the previous personal computer revolution). But yeah, maybe a bit over the top...

⬐ gambiting

I mean, even if you are, what does that have to do with an iPhone specifically? People had all kinds of smartphones before iPhone even launched(that were perfectly fine for browsing the internet, reading email, taking and sharing photos etc.....even if it wasn't the most polished experience), and even for years after it was just a weird curiosity that only rich people could afford(outside of select few markets like US). Calling it the biggest achievement of humanity reads like a really poor joke, unless I don't know, you are relatively rich and iPhone was your first smartphone, then I guess it felt revolutionary, but that's an extremely narrow perspective, and again, comparing it to human achievements of just the past 100 years it pales completely, for the simplest example I'd say the internet was a bigger and better invention.

⬐ seba_dos1

> People had all kinds of smartphones before iPhone even launched

Not only that, but Apple never even had (or was anywhere close to having) a majority on that market. The actual popularity of modern-day smartphone skyrocketed due to Android devices replacing all sorts of feature phones.

⬐ laumars

I’m not going to deny that the iPhone was a successful product but what people often forget is that the world was already shifting that way.

Feature phones could already do what the iPhone did (and in some cases even more). Multi-touch devices were available before the iPhone. PDAs had also been about for years and did everything the iPhone could do and more. And Android wasn’t far behind the iPhone and also improved upon the original iPhone.

In fact the original iPhone wasn’t even that good compared to the competition. It was lacking a lot of features people considered “must haves”. Native applications (everything was web apps originally), copy/paste, the ability to background applications, etc. And Ballmers point about the lack of a hardware keyboard was absolutely right for that era.

Apple have successfully rewritten history here, like victors often do. And so people often credit the iPhone as being uniquely revolutionary. It certainly was industry changing but it wasn’t singularly responsible for that change.

I say this as an iPhone user with an Apple Watch and other Apple hardware. So I do buy into the Apple ecosystem. But I’m also an old fart who has lived long enough to have first hand experience, both as a user and as a software engineer, pre and post the iPhone.

⬐ 2muchcoffeeman

No one had the sheer power of Apple though. In Australia, when the first iPhone hit, Apple was able to dictate certain things with carriers if they wanted to carry the iPhone. Plans suddenly got better and cheaper. You could just walk into an Apple store and get an unlocked phone (although the 3GS was first available only through carriers). iPhone launches had people camping out for days so Apple managed to exert their influence for years.

Before this, data was really expensive, phones were all locked. None of the other device makers exerted their power like this. Or even had that sort of power. The iPad also had a similar effect with data only plans for iPads.

⬐ laumars

I can’t speak for the Australian market but in the U.K. it was a very different story. The iPhone arrived locked into one specific carrier (O2 IIRC) when most handsets were available on multiple carriers. As a result, a contract for the original iPhone was more expensive than most other handsets.

There certainly where handsets that were locked to specific providers but even in those cases it was much easier to unlock them than it was to unlock the original iPhone.

In fact the iPhone has actively worked against interoperability. Take charging, everything has standardised in USB-C except for the iPhone. Their app ecosystem is another walled garden (other handsets ran a third party OS but Apple rolled their own). Lack of a support for SD cards, etc.

If anything, one of the biggest achievements of the iPhone is successfully programming people to be OK with being locked out of their own hardware. A trend we’ve seen Google, Microsoft, Tesla and others follow suit in.

If it weren’t for the fact that they are (presently) strong advocates for privacy, it would be hard to say something positive about Apple. But given the current technological climate, they’re definitely the lesser of two evils.

⬐ Normille

  >Apple have successfully rewritten history here, like victors often do

Nope. See my previous post on this. I'm unfortunately old enough to have been around and involved in Apple forums pre-iPhone and there's no re-writing of history here. There really was genuine excitement at the prospect of an Apple phone. Maybe we were all a bit more naive back then. But it did seem at the time like Apple had the magic touch and anything they came up with would be revolutionary.

It's a long long time since I've had any interest in Apple or their products. But I wonder if the same excited anticipation still exists today [eg. with rumours of Apple producing an electric vehicle]?... or was it mainly due to Steve Jobs's cult of personality and mastery of hyperbole.

⬐ laumars

> There really was genuine excitement at the prospect of an Apple phone.

“Excitement” isn’t what we are talking about here though. I get excited about buying a new car, but it doesn’t mean that new car is industry defining.

> But it did seem at the time like Apple had the magic touch and anything they came up with would be revolutionary.

Only for a subset of people though. Lots of people didn’t like Apple products much and used other products with similar features (sometimes more, sometimes less).

What we are talking about here is technology (something tactile) and not peoples emotional state about said technology (subjective and personal).

Also I was both a consumer and a software engineer both pre and post the iPhone too.

⬐ seba_dos1

> Nope. See my previous post on this.

They absolutely did. Just look at plenty of confused people in this very thread, who attribute things like downfall of standalone GPS devices or the rise of mobile app market to the original iPhone that didn't even have these features at all, or praising it for including sensors (camera, accelerometer) that were already common in smartphones back then.

⬐ Normille

Now you're nit-picking. Your original comment was that Apple had rewritten history to make the iPhone seem revolutionary, when it wasn't. Which I disagree with. As another old fart, I was there at the time and remember just how revolutionary it seemed on launch --not as rewritten history, years later.

Now you're using the fact that people can't remember for sure which iPhone model introduced feature X or feature Y as evidence that history was rewritten by Apple, when all it shows is that, years later, people can't accurately remember the minutiae of which details changed between which models.

⬐ seba_dos1

I was there as well. I witnessed the announcement of OpenMoko, iPhone, Android, drooled over Nokia Internet Tablets that were way outside my price range, browsed discussions about them on Slashdot like crazy. Got excited over rumors about a smartphone from Apple just to be extremely disappointed once it actually arrived. There really wasn't anything revolutionary in actual devices, the whole "revolution" was cultural and marketing-induced. The craze over iPhones wouldn't have happened at all without iPods being as popular as they were, and other smartphones were already heading towards everything Apple did anyway. There was a period of time where Apple was actually bringing some innovations to the table a few years later, but that didn't last long anyway.

⬐ laumars

Exactly.

And iPods wouldn’t have existed without MP3 players, which themselves were just a natural evolution from Walkmans and other portable music players. The cassette is an evolution of reel to reel tape and the industry was already primed with vinyl. And vinyl wasn’t even the first format for music playback.

As I posted elsewhere, we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

The only people who call things “revolutionary” are marketing firms and fanboys.

⬐ Messier43

I agree with the rewriting history part, but perhaps not by apple itself, but by people falsely attributing stuff to apple.

The only revolutionary that apple had was a unified big promoted appstore and marketing as magic and pompous as they usually do. They did not have a single feature that they invented or was revolutionary.

At that time people were already happily surfing, navigating, filming and listening to music on other phones like the Nokia N95 (which was a beast at this time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95), including the possibility to install Symbian apps. What was missing, were proper App stores to find those apps.

Also capacitive Touchscreens were on the market. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

The the only revolutionary thing Apple provided were Appstores and lots and lots of marketing.

⬐ CoryAlexMartin

A problem that I've come to notice with a lot of tech people is they either don't notice or don't value good implementation, even if that implementation is leagues ahead of everything else. It's important to develop taste and be able to look beyond feature lists.

It doesn't matter that the LG Prada had a capacitive touchscreen or that the Nokia N95 had a web browser: the iPhone had a smooth, vibrant and responsive multi-touch operating system with natural scrolling and a surprisingly good touch keyboard.

On the LG Prada you're poking at list items and dragging scrollbars while the device beeps at you and choppily redraws those lists like a terminal.

On the Nokia N95, you're navigating the web with a jumpy cursor controlled by directional buttons, and typing with a numpad.

There was nothing like the iPhone, and now everything is like the iPhone.

⬐ seba_dos1

> A problem that I've come to notice with a lot of tech people is they either don't notice or don't value good implementation

That may be because Apple's implementation was absolutely lacking. The first iPhone was a vibrant, shiny feature phone disguised as a smartphone. They put their bet towards marketing and fashion, not tech and revolution - which paid off for them, as it turned out that was enough. Don't be surprised that techies aren't impressed by that though. In fact, I don't think the iPhone would be so successful if it didn't come out from Apple even if it was exactly the same as it was - it would likely find its niche, but it wouldn't be a significant threat to Nokia and others.

(actually, the real iPhone wasn't that much of a threat either, it was Android that actually killed Nokia - or made it kill itself to be exact)

> There was nothing like the iPhone, and now everything is like the iPhone.

Many things were either like the iPhone already or were heading towards being like the iPhone. Apple's implementation advantage comes from the fact that it was designed from scratch as a touch-based interface, while existing platforms were only slowly iterating towards that, but they were getting there regardless. Some existing players, like Nokia, had teams that were already going there, and other teams that were actively sabotaging those efforts, which obviously left the door for Apple wide open.

Apple's implementation sure was good enough, because marketing alone would quickly dry off otherwise. It wasn't revolutionary though. I'm certain that we would have very similar trends too had Apple not gone into mobile phone market at all. Maybe we wouldn't end up in a world where restricted walled gardens are the expected state of things on computers that we carry with ourselves all the time. Or maybe it would be worse, who knows. It wouldn't, however, be much different in how we interact with those devices, because writings were on the wall and Apple just happened to enter the market with a new thing at the right time with enough preexisting clout, as evidenced by multiple companies working on implementing Apple's "revolutions" at the same time as Apple, or even beating them by years in some cases.

⬐ CoryAlexMartin

> That may be because Apple's implementation was absolutely lacking. The first iPhone was a vibrant, shiny feature phone disguised as a smartphone. They put their bet towards marketing and fashion, not tech and revolution - which paid off for them, as it turned out that was enough. Don't be surprised that techies aren't impressed by that though.

They bet on coupling capacitive multi-touch technology with a novel and responsive user experience that takes advantage of that technology to the fullest extent.

> I'm certain that we would have similar devices soon afterwards had Apple not go into mobile phone market at all.

It took competitors a considerable amount of time to even approach the iPhone in terms of quality of implementation, and that's in a timeline where they had the iPhone to use as a benchmark. How long do you think it would have taken them without the iPhone? Would they have ever? Would we have to use scrollbars, like on the LG Prada? Would we still be using miniature keyboards? How much baggage from the old days of cell phones would we still be carrying with us?

I remember telling people in 2007 and 2008 that every phone was going to become like the iPhone, and still encountering plenty of doubters and naysayers. Some people simply don't get it.

I'm not the biggest fan of Apple these days, and I think touchscreens are overused, and I think some of the things the iPhone did have resulted in a decline in user experience, but it's absurd to confidently proclaim that the iPhone didn't cause a dramatic shift in the cell phone industry and beyond.

⬐ seba_dos1

I'm under an impression that people who are talking about iPhone's "quality of implementation" have either never used iPhones or never used their competitors.

⬐ CoryAlexMartin

Maybe you're not sensitive to choppy UI rendering and high input lag, or you simply don't value responsiveness. In which case, perhaps the devices that came in the iPhone's wake were adequate to you.

⬐ thunderbong

IMHO, it was not so much as iPhone won, it's more like all other phone companies lost.

Nobody innovated, nobody focused on the developer or bothered with creating a platform for developers although developers were asking for it. Sony, Nokia, Ericsson had big fan bases.

There were any number of customizations that people all over the world created for them. But those phone companies didn't care.

Each year, all these phone companies would come out with new form factors to keep their fan bases hooked. That's it. No standardization, no nothing.

They all lost. And deservedly so. And we were left with Google cannibalizing open-source to create Android. Even then, and now, companies only accepted Android because they saw the rise of iPhone. It was a threat. They had to scramble to get something together.

Everyone else just gave up. Even now, all I hear is, "It's not an easy task to create a new phone because you have to create everything from the ground up". It's this attitude which has been the death of mobile communication.

Instead of having something that everyone could use and build upon, we're left with brittle pieces of proprietary software, completely at the mercy of two behemoths who call all the shots.

The PC revolution happened but nobody learned anything from it.

⬐ iamphilrae

I very much agree. Ironically the only relevant 3rd option who truly felt like they were trying to innovate was Microsoft+Nokia (the real Nokia) with Windows Phone.

But failures to market and encourage adoption, and perhaps staining it with the “windows” brand, just led it down the path of being forgotten about by developers and so it withered and died.

⬐ vlunkr

In his defense, the main objections he has are the price, the lack of a physical keyboard, and the fact that Apple had never sold a phone before. In hindsight those seem funny, but in 2007 you would have heard those same talking points everywhere.

If only we all had decided collectively that 500$ really was too much for a phone. No it’s like no one even checks the price tag because their carrier is slowly milking it out of them instead.

⬐ whizzter

It might've seem funny to those that hadn't seen the future in 2002.

I had a SonyEricsson p900 (The p800, p900 and p910 series was released from 2002-2005) and it had a numpad for quick dialling, but for "smart" usage you really only used the touchscreen that covered most of the front real-estate (and a dial-knob for navigation since they hadn't figured out how to make UI's like Apple did later).

By 2006 however though I was looking to upgrade but SE chickened out and released successors (P990,M600,W950) that _decreased_ touch-screen realestate in favour of num/keypads on the front. It's really sad that they had everything in their hands but fubbed out totally.

But by 2007 the time was definetly right for the iPhone, disappointed by SE I began looking around and there was some "open" phone with touchscreen as well as that LG Prada. I even made a sketch of an ideal device a few weeks before Jobs came on screen.

Late 2006 sketch.. https://whizzter.woorlic.org/jonasphone.jpg

And yes, about as soon as iPhone 3G went on sale in Sweden I got one.

⬐ Semaphor

I still miss my two last physical keyboard phones. Nokia E71 [0] as my last pre-Android/Apple-era phone, and HTC Desire Z (T-Mobile G2 in the USA) [1] as my first Android.

Thinking about it, I’d love an updated E71. Small, high-res touch screen, Lineage OS or something similar, physical keyboard. But that would be niche enough that it’d probably be very expensive for what it is.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E71

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z

⬐ random314

He might be laughing on screen, but internally he was panicking. By the next year he had dismissed Peter Knook and installed myerson and shuttered windows mobile 7 to completely rebuild from scratch windows phone 7.

⬐ rvense

As far as I remember, in those days here you often paid nothing or very little out of pocket for a new phone. It was more like an extra 10-20EUR on your monthly subscription. At least for the phones normal people had.

⬐ yftsui

It was the same in the US, you could get a new phone for $199 every two years, without any additional statement charge.

However it all changed after T-Mobile’s “uncarrier” bluff, now it’s all about lock you in 36 months with monthly payments and some credit against the payments.

⬐ Gordonjcp

It was also a "smart phone" with no data connectivity. Not much use giving it all these features and leaving it with a 2G radio stack.

⬐ qbasic_forever

2G had full internet access, it's just that every smartphone until the iphone had _terrible_ browsers. I had a Windows Mobile 5 device and it was pretty bad, like using IE6 again but low resolution, extremely slow, and navigating with a horrid little joystick to select links.

⬐ Gordonjcp

It was unbelievably slow, and everyone was already on 3G by the time the first iPhone launched.

⬐ NavinF

The first few iPhones also had terrible browsers. When my dad got one in ~2008, Safari would consistently crash 5 seconds after loading apple.com as soon as an animation was triggered. Still a hell of an improvement over my Razr flip phone’s browser.

⬐ seba_dos1

And around that time, Firefox was being ported to Maemo, being essentially a full-blown browser with mobile UI. It worked on Nokia N810 and N900 first and was ported to Android afterwards, serving there for a few years still before it got reimplemented with Android native APIs.

Maemo also came with their own MicroB browser that utilized Gecko engine already and performed really well.

⬐ ZGDUwpqEWpUZ

2G has mobile data (via GPRS/EDGE) and the original iPhone absolutely supported it.

You could browse the web on cheap phones much earlier, but the rendering engines were limited (some mobile subset of HTML?). A big selling point of the iPhone was that it included a full browser.

⬐ Gordonjcp

Yes, but it was 64kbps at most, when everywhere had 8Mbps 3G coverage.

⬐ ZGDUwpqEWpUZ

EDGE goes up to 384Kbps, and everywhere most certainly did not have 8Mbps 3G coverage in 2007.

https://www.wired.com/2008/08/global-iphone-3/

⬐ Gordonjcp

Even in the remotest corners of Europe we had absolutely romping 3G coverage.

⬐ seba_dos1

3G sure was pretty common in 2007. US was always behind when it comes to cellular networks.

⬐ ZGDUwpqEWpUZ

> European T-Mobile users reported the fastest 3G Download Speeds: 1,822 Kbps on average.

Getting 8Mb was rare, hence the link. The other poster is taking the theoretical maximum for 3G, and understating 2G, rather than just admitting that his original statement - that the first iPhone didn't have mobile data at all - was just wrong.

⬐ seba_dos1

Yeah, but effective 2Mbps was a pretty decent connection speed in 2007, while theoretical maximum of 384Kbps was already underwhelming. Source: I used 2G data around that time extensively :)

⬐ seba_dos1

I used to browse the Web with Opera Mini, which was a J2ME midlet, on feature phones such as Motorola C651 and Nokia 6230i :) It worked by rendering the full blown site server-side and sending it back in a simplified format for the phone to display, which worked much better than bundled browsers which weren't very useful for much more than WML or XHTML-MP. I have also chatted with people via XMPP extensively thanks to Bombus (remember when Google Talk was a fine, open and federated XMPP implementation and pretty much everyone was reachable there? Those were the times...).

Smartphones such as Symbian ones already had more usable native browsers though.

⬐ Schroedingersat

It's hardly slow. Just checked local plans for what I get for $20/mo prepaid and it's about $150usd/mo for one of those awful folding things.

⬐ jhugo

> No it’s like no one even checks the price tag because their carrier is slowly milking it out of them instead.

Eh, iPhones are still popular in many countries where paying outright for your phone is the norm.

⬐ Normille

And thanks to those people who have to have the newest shiny-shiny and allow themselves to be 'milked' that I can pick up a few years old ex-flagship model on eBay for a couple of hundred £££ or less. So long may it continue.

⬐ mytailorisrich

For those who are not familiar, the other guy is Mike Zafirovski, Nortel's last CEO before they went bust.

To me this really makes this video a fine historical document.

⬐ riskneutral

What a terrible leader

⬐ Normille

  >What a terrible leader

How can you say that!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMrhoOHNOrI

Sorry. I couldn't resist dredging up this old classic. It used to be compulsory viewing any time Steve Ballmer was mentioned.

Although, on a more practical level; with winter approaching and huge energy price rises on the horizon, the burning feeling of vicarious embarrassment you get while watching this might be a warm blessing on those cold December evenings ahead.

⬐ b800h

As mentioned in comments on the video, he's responsible for XBox and Azure, so not all bad.

⬐ random314

An Azure that was going to be Windows only.

What Ballmer actually succeeded in doing was entrenching windows inside every enterprise Fortune 500 by basically bundling everything from Office, Sharepoint, SQL server etc. This business is still going strong and switching to a subscription model. Before Ballmer, Microsoft was a consumer OS company.

⬐ bbarnett

Before Ballmer, Microsoft was a consumer OS company.

Microsoft was always a business facing company. Companies used NT from the start of time, and every business on the planet has been using Windows since the 90s. Microsoft has spent its entire lifetime slowly strangling and destroying other businesses, and pulling them over to their product lines.

Word vs Wordperfect is one example. Wordperfect used to be completely dominant.

Ballmer may have etched up Windows dominance a few points in a few markets, and I agree he continued this trend. He continued to expand into new markets. But it seems very weird to hear someone say he is responsible for getting businesses to use Windows, or caused M$ to focus on businesses.

⬐ michelb

Pretty sure he just said whatever he needed to say to promote Microsoft. I can't take anything what any tech leader said/says as truth or their honest opinion. They all have something to sell.

⬐ seba_dos1

Well, who would have thought back then that Apple would actually succeed in making the whole industry be taking multiple steps back for many years ahead?

⬐ suction

None

⬐ threatofrain

Steve Jobs said on stage at the iPhone launch that the killer app was the phone app. IMO that was wrong — the killer app was Google Maps, back when GPS navigation devices used to cost $200+. This made the economic value of the iPhone a lot more solid and subsequently destroyed the entire device category.

⬐ mvladic

The killer feature was the multitouch interface and removal of the keyboard. The same was with Macintosh, they removed the focus from the keyboard to the mouse. It is much easier to know what to do when you have several buttons on the screen instead of generic keyboard with many keys. I remember Steve Jobs emphasized this during the iPhone introduction event.

⬐ ulfw

Maybe in subsequent phones but the initial iPhone didn't even have GPS, only WiFi triangulation which worked only so-so and only in cities (with well... WiFi).

⬐ FPGAhacker

It was cellular triangulation.

⬐ simonebrunozzi

I disagree. I'd put Google Maps on #2. #1 was solidly the camera app, and the various apps (remember Burbn? [0]) that allowed the user to modify, post online, etc.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Instagram

⬐ seba_dos1

Several smartphones already had a GPS receiver back in 2007. The original iPhone did not.

⬐ yftsui

Google Maps didn’t have turn by turn navigation until late 2009, you probably mistaken the original iPhone with iPhone 3GS.

⬐ slavik81

I didn't buy an iPhone until the 3GS, but I never used turn-by-turn navigation. I just needed a map with directions that I could refer to if I got lost. After I got it, I also discovered how useful it was for planning trips by bus. Did the original iPhone not have Maps at all? I think it would have been a killer app even without turn-by-turn.

⬐ yftsui

Well, people don’t carry a Garmin when they ride buses I guess? iPhone’s navigation didn’t become reliable enough to replace a Garmin / Tomtom till 2011-2012.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

Ballmer's thoughts were rational at the time, but wrong.

Strong Steve Ballmer vibes about this comment.

"It doesn't have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

Sure the iPhone was such an evolutionary product - practically indistinguishable from my old Nokia.

⬐ donio

Do you disagree? What then makes the iPhone 1 (as originally released) more of a smartphone than a feature phone?

⬐ klelatti

Here's the wikipedia definition of smartphone:

> A smartphone is a portable device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, which facilitate wider software, internet (including web browsing[1] over mobile broadband), and multimedia functionality (including music, video, cameras, and gaming), alongside core phone functions such as voice calls and text messaging.

Basically a feature phone does calls and text messaging - if it has a decent email client, web browsing and multimedia it's a smartphone. The iPhone 1 was a smartphone.

⬐ donio

I guess my definition is wider than that. I was thinking of phones like the touchscreen Nokia Asha phones, they have web browsing, navigation, music, chat, maybe basic facebook/twitter and the usual phone stuff but no app support. I wouldn't call those smartphones either.

⬐ klelatti

Asha had Java ME apps and was a borderline smartphone in 2011. Sure neither had App Stores but in 2007 no-one used having an App Store as the criteria for being a smartphone or not.

What we expect from a smartphone moves on of course but you have to judge by the standards of the time. I fact you could argue that by modern standards there were no smartphones pre iPhone 1 - that the poor browsing experience for example would disqualify the Blackberries and Motorolas of the time.

I remember several years ago, there was a quote in an article with the former head of IBM, Samuel J. Palmisano, where he dismissed AWS with a quote along the lines of, "Just one of our business deals is bigger than the entire AWS business."

Same hubris as Steve Ballmer about the iPhone.

https://youtu.be/eywi0h_Y5_U?t=64

Famous last words.

Reminds me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

⬐ andrepd

I don't see the connection.

⬐ dustinmoris

> I expected Musk-hype in this thread but nothing quite so ridiculous as these idiotic "analyses"

Of course there is a ceiling which any product maker will hit eventually, but the OP made a prediction that Tesla could become the worlds biggest car manufacturer and the response to that was to label this an "idiotic analyses".

This reminds me of how Ballmer was laughing at Apple and literally 12 months later Apple was the leading smartphone maker and has been the most successful smartphone company to date and the first company in human history to even cross the 1 trillion valuation mark. So yeah... I wouldn't write off Tesla as becoming the largest car manufacturer in the near future and certainly not call it an idiotic analyses.

Do you see it now?

⬐ andrepd

It is an idiotic analysis on the basis of a couple cherry-picked data points: the performance of rival companies on this particular quarter, plus the performance of Tesla in the past year, plus the assumption that all future growth will be extrapolated from each single data point.

⬐ inflagranti

I'm pretty sure Samsung is leader in sales, maybe second when it comes to profit though.

In any case, issue with Tesla is that's it's priced to just not be the leader, but the whole car market and then some.

If there are already trends that other car manufacturers area outselling Tesla, clearly trajectory is not towards even market lead.

I'm open to being wrong here and I'd agree that my initial comment was stated in a provocative way, but let me clarify a bit.

Revenue growth isn't the whole story. If you're extracting rents from legacy locked-in products or enterprise deals that doesn't necessarily mean you're a competitor on the new paradigms (phone, cloud, web).

At the time Windows phone was a failure and they missed that entire platform because of Ballmer (there's hints of your argument in this video, "we're making money with windows mobile"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

MSFT cloud wasn't doing well and was overly focused on .NET

They were too focused on Windows rather than recognizing the strategic value they could provide outside of it: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/

Today I'd make a similar argument for Intel. Intel doubled down on old style fabs and is not competitive with TSMC. They failed to compete on mobile. They're ignoring the end of x86 and mocking Apple: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/02/08/2221233/intel-b...

Increasing revenue is a good sign, but it matters how. If you're making short-term decisions to extract money from legacy stuff at the expense of new products - that's bad for your long-term future. It can take a while to catch up to you, but it eventually will. Then you'll just limp a long as a dinosaur that makes enough money to survive but nobody really wants to work there and you're done doing interesting projects. That's basically what I mean by irrelevant.

⬐ jariel

I see where you want to go with that, but I'm not sure you made the argument you're trying to make.

Ballmer didn't 'make money from extracting rents and screw everything else up'.

Ballmer entrenched and expanded MS core products i.e. Office to the Cloud and along with that massively expanded revenues, which continue to this day, long after his departure, with no signs of slowing down.

He completely screwed up Search and Mobile, but those were risky new things, that's to be expected. Frankly he should have had 1 of 2 ...

But he also established XBox and Cloud; the former is a very successful play into a very difficult space (though maybe not as nice in terms of profits) - remember, Google just completely failed at this. The later, is now a hugely successful and growing business, and frankly, over the long haul has a shot at actually going toe-to-toe with Amazon.

Microsoft has 10's of thousands of sales people and direct access to every single CTO in the world if companies with > 1000 emoloyees. Much the same way they are going to stomp Slack, they have that kind of advantage (though not the same leverage) against AWS. Point being - he started a massive business.

Azure now has revenues of more than Windows did when Ballmer started, and it's growing by 40% YoY.

So yes 'revenue' is not the 'whole story' if someone is bilking a cache cow and running everything else into the ground ... but that's now what happened.

Ballmer 'grew and entrenched the cash cows' and made some other huge bets, some of them working out to the point where they are now also, big growing foundational aspects of the business.

'The Market' took a long time to recognize this, but all the historical sales numbers are there for everyone to see.

I believe that once Analysts realized that 1) Windows and Office is 'here to stay' and 2) due to AWS, Azure is going to be huge ... that they revised their view on MSFT from a 'old company' to a 'well run growth company'.

Satya seems great and has made some good moves, but nothing of the magnitude that Ballmer did. At least not yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

Did you forget when the CEO of Microsoft laughed it off and said it was crap? [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

⬐ untog

Like I said, there was a vocal minority. Did you forget that he was widely mocked for being so dismissive of an obviously very impressive product?

⬐ icedchai

To be fair, if you remember 2007, the first generation was lacking in many areas. You couldn't send MMS messages. Receiving MMS was awkward and was done through an AT&T web site. You couldn't install apps. You couldn't take videos, only photos. It was slow, etc.

My first iPhone was a 3G, but felt the iPhone really started taking off with the iPhone 4. It felt like a huge leap.

⬐ hoytschermerhrn

I mean yeah, what else would the CEO of a competitor say?

I suspect what Intel missed was that firms would be selling phones in very large volume for c$1000. That price includes enough margin to spend quite a lot on the SoC and associated research.

When the iPhone launched Steve Ballmer laughed [1] at the price and pushed a $99 competitor with MS software. The phone market was very, very different before the iPhone got real traction.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

>I think we give too much credit to an application that plays videos on a phone

And what Youtube or Instagram does? Doing laundry on a phone?

If it was a simple UX tweak situation the USA wouldn't be using it's muscles to force a take over by an US company. Unless of course there are no designers left in SV due to high rents. How much was that to take over TikTok USA operations? 50 billion? I am sure that you can hire designers for that money.

And any argument over a strong current situation reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

⬐ tomc1985

> the USA wouldn't be using it's muscles to force a take over by an US company

This is almost entirely Trump and his stupidity. Don't think he truly represents the USA, once he is out we will almost certainly have to wash our collective hands of him

And TikTok has yet to prove itself as more than a passing fad. Someone will add a new twist on TikTok's/Vine's formula and the kids will be off to obsessing over something else. They've already done so with Instagram, Snapchat, Vine...

⬐ mrtksn

>Don't think he truly represents the USA, once he is out we will almost certainly have to wash our collective hands of him

You can't wash your hands of him, He is democratically elected as a representative of you.

But I agree that TikTok is yet to prove itself. That said, I think it is an example what is about to come if the USA doesn't close off its market(which will lead to others close off their markets to foreigners and the internet will become balkanised) or break up its current Internet companies situation. Sure, FB and Google will continue to earn an enormous amount of ad money in the years to come just like Nokia continued to sell it's phones until it couldn't anymore.

⬐ athms

>He [Trump] is democratically elected...

False. The election of the President and Vice President is fundamentally undemocratic (by design). Only Congress is democratically elected.

⬐ tomc1985

> You can't wash your hands of him, He is democratically elected as a representative of you.

What I mean by that is that his actions do not represent the American public at large. The nature of his victory is highly suspicious and he did not secure a majority vote. I don't know how much you know about our politics but there is a lot of nuance that you are glossing over.

Additionally, his popular support is at an all-time low. Election polls for 2020 show him lagging considerably behind Biden. At this point he is very likely to be one of the few presidents that will not be elected to a second-term; the first in 28 years.

Whatever propaganda you are reading or seeing or hearing about us, you would do well to question it

⬐ systemvoltage

Exactly my point - it is the scaling that makes it impressive as I stated. And Google/FB are experts at doing just that. Lol at the video!

I am not defending US Gov. All I am saying is getting traction is extremely valuable and those are the numbers you hear (ARPU, etc) in quarter conference calls. $40 billion dollars is for the users not for the stupid UX/UI.

How is that reaction different than those that dismissed the iPhone in 2007 because it was sold for $500? Remember Ballmer laughing at the iPhone? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

⬐ jsight

Now $500 is pretty cheap for a powerful smartphone. Are you saying that in a few 12 years, $80k will be pretty inexpensive for a car like this?

This strikes me the same as Ballmer's reaction to the iPhone launch laughing at the perspective of such a device to gain any market: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

⬐ flywheel

You replied with nonsense. The fact is China is good at one thing: ripping off other countries inventions. Name one high tech thing in the last 1,000 years invented in China - no, not iteration, but INVENTED. Since gunpowder, China has stagnated.

⬐ linlucas

Huawei has more 5G patents than any other company. By far.

⬐ flywheel

I'll admit that one thing China is great at - downvote brigading posts about China, as evidenced right here. Still not high-tech though.

⬐ dang

You have been breaking the site guidelines quite badly, and repeatedly. That's not cool. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

⬐ DuskStar

And considering how much it's alleged they stole from Nortel, that's not irreconcilable.

⬐ pinkfoot

Synthetic bovine insulin, 1965.

⬐ flywheel

That isn't really "high tech", it's organic chemistry. We can split hairs about the meaning of "high tech" but that would be pointless.

Steve Ballmer's reaction(s) to the iPhone are the most hylarious. An example here [0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

⬐ umeshunni

I worked at Microsoft at the time the iPhone was announced (2007) and the reaction internally was this this thing would never take off because it couldn't access Exchange server emails. The logic was -

Smartphones are for enterprise users.

Enterprise users want Exchange on their phones (see Blackberry).

This doesn't have Exchange but has some nice UI.

Windows Mobile 6.X has Exchange.

We will improve 6.X UI in the next iteration and it will all work out.

iPhones, of course, got ActiveSync / Exchange support in ~2009.

⬐ PopePompus

I think the most telling thing in that clip is his statement, referring to the Microsoft phone software that "... it'll do internet." That was how companies viewed phone software before the iPhone; "do internet" was another box to check off. No concern about whether the browser worked well, or any remark about the walled-garden search results, etc. Could it usefully display most web sites? Could you browse sites for more than 1/2 hour before recharging? Who cares - it does internet.

⬐ numpad0

I’m not sure if I’ve seen that, but now that I’m grown up, those statements look defensive.

He ridicules the price first, then later on says “it may sell very well, (pause) or not,”.

What’s being said is “it’s a problem if it sells”, and the most fundamental reason he gave that it might not is the price, not, say, lack of Apple’s expertise in the field or perceived clunkiness of it.

⬐ rusticpenn

Its better than the burnt platform memo. He could have had a different view outside the cameras.

⬐ oblio

Well, it's obviously very funny in retrospect, but you have to put yourself in his shoes. Hardware is under-powered from what it seems, to make a general computing device that is small enough, has long enough battery life and doesn't cost a ton of money. Also people are very price sensitive about devices they only use for limited communication (phone calls, SMS, maybe some emails). They are far less price sensitive when that device becomes a general purpose computer and media machine and does basically everything they need related to getting information and entertainment, on the go at that!

He didn't know about the software keyboard innovations that Apple had created (for example the predictive keyboards, the haptic feedback, etc.) and Microsoft wasn't making the whole product so they couldn't optimize the experience as much in order to have reasonable performance and battery life with a small device.

Though I'll grant you that Ballmer was the king of over the top reactions ("Developers!" :-D ).

⬐ deanCommie

I think the most illuminating thing about Ballmer here is the way he speaks about features of Microsoft devices, and it shows why the company lost a decade of innovation under him: "it will 'do' Web, or will 'do' email".

These are feature check boxes to him. It's not a question of whether the feature is GOOD, whether browsing the web is a delightful experience that the users actually want to do on the device. Nope - it'll do web. That's it. No more questions.

⬐ themacguffinman

This is very much the enterprise mindset where purchasers often don't have to actually use the software, so you can sell them impressive checklists.

https://youtu.be/eywi0h_Y5_U?t=12

Luxuries have a way of becoming the norm. iPhone was a luxury, where Ballmer infamously laughed at its sky high price. [1]

1 day seems unnecessary sometimes, but more often it is fighting back trips to local retail for me. I.e. Terro Ant Bait with the recent change in weather in Portland.

[1] https://youtu.be/eywi0h_Y5_U

That wasn't Gates, it was Steve Ballmer. In an interview a decade later after this one he acknowledged to an interviewer that it might have been a mistake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

One error Gates later admitted making was not buying Allaire Corp because he thought the price was too high. His own staff members argued with him on that one. But after Allaire was sold to Macromedia J.J. Allaire started the company Onfolio with some friends from Allaire. Gates insisted after launch that Ballmer purchase it, primarily to acquire the services of J.J. Allaire.

During his time at Microsoft he created Windows LiveWriter and I've been told also worked on the creation of Azure. He left Microsoft and founded RStudio.

The swing of the article "Look we told you so" really rubs me the wrong way. But it seems to represent the view of a large part of the Automotive industry. Instead of driving innovation forward, they shy away of the problems that introducing such innovation could have. Instead it seems the industry relies on shaming innovators for the issues of first generation future tech. This reminds me a lot of Steve Ballmer mocking the first iPhone: https://youtu.be/eywi0h_Y5_U

The most likely outcome is that they will figure it out, and much earlier than any of their competitors.

⬐ kevin_thibedeau

Buying off the shelf parts is not innovation. Especially when they are not suited to purpose and you ignore the vendor's own reliability figures.

⬐ naikrovek

They did preliminary testing and the displays worked fine. Elon made a judgement call to give the go-ahead. His rationale being that no automotive grade screens that size we're available because no one did any testing on them.

It was only real-world exposure that revealed the mistake in part choice.

Did you RTFA?

Edit: ooh I'm so scared. Use ALL your alternate accounts to down vote me! Or, you could discuss where I'm wrong like a 12-year old.

⬐ Phillipharryt

Do you really think people are using alt accounts (a pain to get enough karma to allow downvoting on here) or could it just be they disagree with you making claims that aren't in the article?

It doesn't say anything about Musk's rationale.

⬐ tempestn

Even aside from making unsubstantiated claims, the "Did you RTFA?" line would be enough for a downvote from me.

⬐ naikrovek

Ok I can't argue that. It can be warranted when someone doesn't do the reading, however.

⬐ azhenley

I agree, but I bet we begin seeing other car companies using large displays and suddenly display manufacturers will start selling properly-designed, large displays.

⬐ bilbo0s

Well, just to be fair, that's something that would have happened with or without Tesla. You saw those prototype screens at auto shows like Detroit years ago. Crucially, the prototypes were all automotive grade.

In this case, Tesla simply wanted to be ahead of the curve. Worked for a while, then the known failure rate of the parts caught up.

Whether or not it was worth it depends on the strategic intent and whether or not that bet paid off. We'd really need more information to make that call. And Tesla is not going to give anyone on this thread access to the strategic and financial information necessary.

⬐ kkarakk

Most cars STILL have garbage grade(usability wise) ugly looking touchscreen interfaces, i think you over estimate tesla's competition

⬐ bilbo0s

The companies displaying display screens at any given automotive show, would not be Tesla competitors. They would be the display parts manufacturers. The point was that display parts guys have been trying to up sell auto makers for years. So the larger screens would have, and did, exist in any case. It's just that no one was buying. Too expensive.

But yeah, with or without Tesla, obviously the screens would have existed.

⬐ miskin

Yes, but this is the point - they stick to ugly looking touchscreens that are guaranteed to work. They could take screens from some tablet for few bucks, but they know that when they sell 100000 of cars and 20% would fail within two years it would cost them a lot to fix within warranty. If they start to fail after warranty, it would be huge impact on their good will and resale value on those cars would be damaged.

⬐ SmellyGeekBoy

Not that I've put much thought into it and not that it really matters in the context of the conversation, but if I was a manufacturer building a concept car I wouldn't bother using automotive grade components. It's not like they're built to drive any kind of serious mileage (if at all).

⬐ mannykannot

Reading between the lines, I think some of the owners who have the problem are really rubbed the wrong way by Tesla's decision to stop replacing broken units.

⬐ cmsonger

> The most likely outcome is that they will figure it out, and much earlier than any of their competitors.

Disagree. The most likely outcome is that many folks who paid a lot of money for a car end up with a car with a screen that's flawed in some way. (I own an S that has the yellow box.)

It is also possible Tesla "figures it out" earlier than their competitors; but that's less likely as the former is now a certainty.

⬐ mrpopo

I would prefer innovation to be driven by durability and usability standards, rather than huge, bright, addictive LCD touchscreens.

⬐ reitzensteinm

Tesla made a bold trade off and it was a clear win - until they stopped replacing the failing units.

But now the "good will" repairs are over, the smug attitude of the article is more or less deserved.

Steve Ballmer agrees wholeheartedly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

⬐ igravious

Typical Apple fanboy link.

⬐ aaronbrethorst

My Google Pixel disagrees with you, but you do you, bro.

⬐ igravious

I'm not saying you're an Apple fanboy, I'm saying the link is.

But if your counter-point was “They laughed at the iPhone and look how successful that was” then posting Steve Ballmer's response to the iPhone (a YouTube video titled “Ballmer Laughs at iPhone”) is dumb because he of all people is hardly going to have said, ”Wow that sure is an amazing phone Apple just produced, Windows Phone sucks in comparison”

⬐ scarface74

Let's look at the difference between Ballmers reaction to the iPhone and Gates reaction to iTunes.

http://allthingsd.com/20100211/bill-gates-on-itunes/

⬐ igravious

Interesting, quite the contrast. I guess that Gates spoke so freely because this was an internal memo and off the record to the best of his knowledge–and Ballmers is putting on a brave public face. I like how Gates is honest about he knows and what he doesn't know. Funny, back in the day I really really liked eMusic, I wonder if Microsoft ever considered buying them.

⬐ scarface74

EMusic wouldn't have solved the problem that Gates mentioned. Apple has negotiated rights with all of the major labels. EMusic just had independent artists.

What's even funnier that iTunes came out at a time where there were already subscription based services and they all basically failed. Years later Spotify was able to come along and be successful.

⬐ dang

Please don't post flamebait.

This reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U (Ballmer Laughs at iPhone)

It's not a two doller item, my friend. So how many tens or hundreds of millions do they have to sell for it to become a thing? lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

There is also this Steve Ballmer reaction to the original iPhone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

It's funny in retrospect but the iPhone didn't really start to take off until the 2nd generation, when the price came down, 3rd-party developers were let in, and it added 3G.

The comments on the physical keyboard were clearly off-base looking back, though. I remember when the iPhone came out the criticism for a lack of a physical keyboard was extremely common and most competitors responded by using sliding keyboards, which clearly never caught on.

I had read they had a "Dream" android phone prototype they were working on that was blackberry like [1]. There was also rumored to be a second one that was more iPhone like slated for down the line, but when the Apple demo happened Google immediately scrapped their blackberry like phone and the second one became the first.

Interesting that Google recognized the importance and adapted quickly while Ballmer laughed it off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

[1]: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2974676/this-was-the-origi...

⬐ moojah

If you walk through the new London Google office by kings cross, you can see the original android phone right by their restaurant. It looked just like a blackberry / Nokia E62..

Well, they do have a track record at this sort of thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

Steve Ballmer's infamous remarks on competition with Apple, after the iPhone announcement in 2007:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

"Let's take phones first. Right now, we're selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year. Apple is selling zero phones a year. In six months, they'll have the most expensive phone by far ever in the marketplace, and, let's see."

Times change.

⬐ blub

I assume you foresaw what would happen, bought Apple stock and you're posting this from your yacht. Because it was very reasonable to say that in 2007, and he even included a "let's see" at the end.

What would one expect? For him to cower in fear and start crying? It took many iterations for the iPhone to catch up and many screw-ups from competitors, Nokia in particular.

⬐ Alex3917

And he was right, they had to substantially lower the price almost immediately.

⬐ stouset

"Had to"!?

You have selective memory. They did in fact lower the price, but they were literally selling them as fast as they could make them at the time. They sold over a million in the first three months, and ran out of the 4GB model entirely in that period.

⬐ zbyte64

And also lacked a keyboard. I mean how do you check your email without a keyboard?!?

⬐ Ezhik

I understand why people reacted the way they did.

Honestly, when iPhone first came out it was pretty much a toy. No apps? Even dumbphones could run J2ME stuff!

It's only when iPhones got the App Store that things got serious.

But anyone who didn't see the danger of that "toy" running actual apps, or didn't see the need to revamp their user interface to beat, ended up losing.

⬐ hughw

iPhone was great before apps. The full featured touch browser was a revelation. You could look up anything, from anywhere. I still spend 70% of my time in the iPhone browser, not in apps.

⬐ stouset

By "reacted the way they did" you mean "bought all of them as they hit the shelves"?

Apple captured 20% of the smartphone market the first quarter the iPhone was released, outselling Nokia, Palm, and Motorola combined.

Nobody was seemingly all that upset they couldn't play yet another crappy J2ME version of "snake" that took 45 seconds to load. Roughly 0% of consumers knew what the hell J2ME even was. They did, however, see a cell phone with an actual web browser instead of some low-res, Javascriptless WAP disappointment. Not to mention a YouTube client and a decent camera plus photo app.

⬐ dingaling

I did wonder that to myself as I stood in the rain yesterday trying to compose an email on a damp screen with the phone typing garbage due to conflicting inputs.

Touch screens are great for consumption and lousy for creation. Even this comment required eleven corrections to the swiped words. Twelve.

⬐ protomyth

I do believe the Razor when it came out was in the $500+ range. Of course, it dropped quite a bit.

⬐ NovaS1X

It's off-putting how he mentions "business won't like this". Like, they're the only market that matters. This aligns pretty well with my negative experiences with Microsoft products. It's an all businessmen/sales mentality.

Maybe it was hard for them to see that consumer hardware/software would become the predominant force in modern tech.

⬐ toast0

Business was the vast majority of who was buying smartphones at the time.

⬐ stouset

And their failure to predict, understand, or react to that shift in the market is precisely why they're in the position they are today.

⬐ wvenable

It should have been obvious from RIM's early success in the consumer market, for which they didn't try for or really support, that smartphones were well on their way to being a major consumer product.

Microsoft themselves used the strategy of Windows at home and at school to sell to Windows to businesses (and vice-versa).

At Microsoft Steve Ballmer played the role of the extravert. He was the guy who went out and sold and sold hard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk

I think his contribution to the early Microsoft was underrated. But I think Gates realized it. Maybe that is the real reason why he replaced Gates. But lacking a trusted tech partner to tell him when he was wrong might explain the Ballmer record as CEO ;<).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

Even those whose job it is to get these things right routinely don't.

Example A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

I always wonder at what point it was that Balmer realized their strategy was a failure.

⬐ sumedh

Using Ballmer to make your point is like cheating. He was not a tech guy, I guess that is one of the reason why MS went back to a techie like Satya.

I can think of a fair number of execs who did not understand the implications. One of the classics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

> Imagine if Microsoft went around rattling the cage every time Apple released some product

You mean like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR A PHONE?

In all seriousness, you made a few blaming statements early on in this thread which is the most likely reason got the reaction you did from Solomon. I'm not opposed to people making observations, but speaking for others really has no place here!

Specifically talking about the "PR machine" comment. Say what you mean!

⬐ egeozcan

Well, for the sake of the argument, it did make them look bad.

Chromebook is like the flipside of that Ballmer quote[1]: "that is the cheapest computer in the world and it appeals to everyone because it even has a keyboard"

[1] http://youtu.be/eywi0h_Y5_U

⬐ alexbecker

That's some video quality.

"Steve Ballmer Laughs at iPhone" in 2007

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

I love this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U - Balmer, I miss you.. there will never be someone so clueless as you.

⬐ martin-adams

At the time of the video I think this is a very good response. It didn't take until the 3GS to sway me over to the iPhone, because of simple things that Apple didn't get right first time, such as limiting satnav apps, no copy and paste, the infancy of the app store.

And he's right about price. The iPhone was not cheap, and there is a market for cheap smartphones. I think what they missed is what was happening with Android as that is what stole the market he was aligning Microsoft towards.

Not once did he say it wouldn't work for Apple. He reaffirmed their vision at the time and concluded saying "lets see what happens".

What Microsoft failed to do is innovate on their own products hard enough. And sadly for Microsoft, their consumer brand is just not as cool as Apple and probably never will be.

⬐ blub

Ballmer and others were not wrong to laugh about the iPhone because it was just a bad smartphone compared to what was available at that time for someone that wanted to do more than browse the web. Until iOS 5 and 4S one would be making significant sacrifices when choosing an iPhone.

Thanks to playing their cards right and arrogance and stupidity on part of Nokia they won, but it wasn't always clear it would be like that.

⬐ kenrikm

I'm not sure you remember what smartphones were like circa 2007. http://cellphones.techfresh.net/lg-env-smartphone-hits-veriz... I know I do.

⬐ adamnemecek

I used to have this bad boy http://www.asus.com/Mobile_Phone/P535/ and as hard to believe as it might sound, there is nothing current smart phones can do that it could not.

⬐ None

None

⬐ manicdee

My iPhone experience started with the 3G. It did everything I had previously used a "smart" phone for, in addition to the tasks I had for my iPod and Palm V: contacts, calendar, appointment alarms, phone calls, music, email, web browsing.

That's pretty much the core of what I still use a smartphone for. My iPhone is sitting here next to me playing me music as it has done all day, keeping me in touch with my partner who is interstate, reminding me that I have to put the bins out tonight, and otherwise staying out of my way.

What else did a smartphone need to do that the iPhone couldn't?

⬐ Kesty

Until the 2008 (3G) here wasn't an app store. If you didn't saw what was possible in a jailbreaked version and belive that Apple will fix some of the biggest problem it actually was a fairly expensive toy.

⬐ octo_t

and there's nothing my MBP can do that a ZX80 couldn't.

⬐ Nikker

I got on board with the 3GS and IOS 3.0. I can't say that your complaints are justified. The web experience was pretty good because you would 'zoom' in on the part of the page you were reading. It had enough memory to run 1 app at a time but each app worked smoothly. I also jail broke mine and was using ssh to login to my home PC while on the bus to work and it was pretty epic at the time. No other phone could do that kind of thing and now I guess the rest is history.

⬐ MichaelGG

There was no SSH client for Windows Mobile? Or the Nokia N? Or go back even further to the Danger Sidekick? Not saying the iPhone wasn't a smoother experience but other phones could do "that kind of thing".

⬐ trothoun

I used my clamshell feature phone to login to my home pc via ssh. Granted, the typing experience was pretty painful, but it did work. People seem to forget that 'app stores' have been around a lot longer than the iphone. It's just that the earlier versions of app stores, carrier decks, were managed by carriers who cared a lot more about preventing apps from interfering with their business than they did about providing their customers with good, useful apps. And they ran on operating systems that were customized or custom written by carriers who saw them primarily as a marketing tool useful for pushing their more expensive services.

http://www.midpssh.org/

⬐ coldtea

>People seem to forget that 'app stores' have been around a lot longer than the iphone

And they rightly forget them -- they were awful, over-expensive crap. $10 for some BS casual game, $30 for a TODO app etc. And don't get me started on the Java ME crap.

⬐ seestheday

I think that more importantly they were either run by carriers or crippled by carriers.

iPhone changed the whole carrier/manufacturer/customer dynamic for the better (this is coming from a diehard BlackBerry user).

⬐ icebraining

I also jail broke mine and was using ssh to login to my home PC while on the bus to work and it was pretty epic at the time. No other phone could do that kind of thing

PuTTY has been supported on Nokia phones since 2004: http://s2putty.sourceforge.net/news.html

I didn't use it, but I did have a Python interpreter running on my E65 (with APIs for camera, GPS, calling, etc) before the iPhone 1 was even released.

⬐ fredsted

Tell me, which sacrifices did I have to make with iOS 4 and my old iPhone 4? Because I remember jailbreaking, installing SSH servers, custom apps, and stuff like that. It was the most full-featured phone at the time.

⬐ coldtea

>Ballmer and others were not wrong to laugh about the iPhone because it was just a bad smartphone compared to what was available at that time for someone that wanted to do more than browse the web.

That's totally untrue. It destroyed everything of the time -- I know, I had smartphones since 2000, Sony stuff, Nokia stuff etc.

⬐ mercer

It was bad in many ways, but extremely good in (at that time) unexpected ways. I remember I held off from buying the first one when it came out because of the bad things (the camera, for one), but from the moment the iPhone was unveiled I knew I would buy one as soon as these things improved. I think many others thought the same thing.

⬐ blub

iPhone 1, the one without appstore and 3G destroyed everything? :) I would say a phone like e90 or P1i let you do much more than the iPhone allowed you to, it was barely smart in any way.

I don't understand why people like to rewrite history. At the behinning the fight wasn't at all decided.

⬐ nicholassmith

Same here, I've been using WinMo for quite a few revisions and prior to that I had two Treos. The iPhone was an excellent smartphone that was as usable, if not more, than the others for day to day use.

Always knew Balmer was a goof - however this one will go down in history. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

The best part is when he goes over the "checklist" of features their phones have.. it'll do email! - quality products are more about checklists of features, something Microsoft still does not get.

⬐ ceejayoz

Mocking it for the cost was especially silly considering the Motorola RAZR - a pretty but otherwise run-of-the-mill flip phone - launched at a higher price and sold like hotcakes.

⬐ leoc

I think it's pretty clear that Ballmer is fronting in that clip. The fact that he has a list of anti-iPhone talking points ready to run through doesn't suggest that he's unconcerned about the iPhone, rather the opposite.

Kind of reminded me of Steve Ballmer laughing at the iPhone when it first came out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

Millions and Millions and Millions...

Ballmer from half a decade ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

⬐ Touche

He was laughing at the $500 on-contract iPhone that quickly had its price lowered.

⬐ gnaffle

In other words, he was unable to anticipate that Apple would be able reduce the price of the iPhone, like they did with the iPod?

⬐ Touche

Apple miscalculated the optimal price initially and then changed it a few months later. No, obviously he couldn't anticipate that.

Microsoft squandered their lead in smartphones, you can blame them and Ballmer for that, but the particular video people love to continuously bring up has nothing to do with where MS made mistakes.

⬐ gnaffle

I would on the contrary take it as obvious that any CEO of a competing company would take the iPhone as a threat, and anticipate and plan for any possibility, just from having looked at history and seen where Apple went with for instance the iPod.

I think this video very clearly shows how Ballmer managed to not take the iPhone seriously, and that has everything to do with why Microsoft made mistakes and were slow to respond from 2007 onwards. The same thing happened with the iPad as well. From everyting he said, you could see that he regarded them as toys.

nit, but Ballmer did not dismiss the iPhone, he dismissed the $500 on contract iPhone. And he even said "it may sell very well". Here's the actual video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

I know it's become fun to pretend like Ballmer dismissed the iPhone but I have a hard time watching that video and seeing anything like that.

⬐ rocky1138

Remember when they held a public funeral for the iPhone?

⬐ skc

Not that it matters but, it wasn't public.

⬐ jes

Story here:

http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-iphone-funeral-2010...

⬐ ChuckMcM

That is a fair point. Microsoft's behavior however, with regard to "supporting" the iPhone as a new way to do business, was tepid at best.

⬐ levosmetalo

Why would Microsoft have to "support" the iPhone way back then? I'm pretty sure they would have supported it if they had ready iPhone competitor back in the days, but given that they didn't have it, the only logical thing to do about it is to ignore it and silently working on catch up, which is exactly what they did.

⬐ ChuckMcM

At the time Microsoft was the single largest supplier of IT software to enterprises. Part of the appeal of Blackberry phones was they integrated well with the systems used in the enterprise.

In that environment, if Microsoft starts supporting iPhone like they support Blackberry (Exchange integration, a sharepoint app, what have you) then it is a strong signal that Microsoft has looked at the iPhone, and what it represents, and has decided its going to be a 'big deal' in the Enterprise space going forward.

It's an imperfect signal to be sure, but often treated like an 'outside opinion.' Using an example from my own history, I was trying to get NetApp to build a filer on the Opteron hardware and the lead marketing guy wouldn't believe the AMD64 stuff was "real" until Dell started shipping a server using it. That was a tool he was using to validate (or invalidate) my argument that AMD64 was the future of the x86 architecture.

So RIM, seeing Microsoft's response, might use that to "confirm" an internal opinion that the iPhone (and perhaps smart phones in general) wasn't a serious threat.

I of course have no way of knowing one way or the other, but I've seen it happen that way, and the hypothesis fits the actions as we know them today. I presume they could have started/done the BB10 "anytime" but only started once they had collectively internalized the threat to their market. So by that reasoning I speculate they didn't believe it to be a threat until much later.

⬐ asveikau

Microsoft's phone team did react promptly. Probably not many people remember that they were originally planning to ship a "Windows Mobile 7" product which was an evolution of WM6. They axed that and started over, and the result was Windows Phone 7.

They messed up a lot of things both before and after that point (sometime in 2009 I think?), but there was a definite change in course in reaction to where the market was going.

$500 for a phone????

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

⬐ None

None

A quick reminder of Ballmer being visionary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

Great article! Looking at a lot of successful companies (apple, tesla, spacex, amazon, etc.), it seems like the founders believed that such a thing should exist so strongly that they made the rest of the world follow them.

When iPhone launched (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U)

I'm loving this Bitcoin ramp up over the past few weeks. Namecheap should be applauded for their general endorsement of "what's good for the internet". Of course it's in their best interest, but you don't see GoDaddy doing the same.

I think back to the "So, that's the end of Bitcoin"[1] article by Forbes and chuckle to myself. Hopefully one day we can look back at that article in the same way we look back at Ballmer laughing at the iPhone [2]

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/06/20/so-thats-...

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

⬐ None

None

⬐ invalidOrTaken

Second that on Namecheap apparently being on the side of the internet. Weren't they a vocal opponent of SOPA?

⬐ michaelkscott

Chiming in here to say that I moved all my domains from GoDaddy to Namecheap, too. Fantastic service so far.

⬐ geekam

Yes they were. Made me move all my domains to namecheap.

⬐ Achshar

As far as I remember, they gave a discount to people moving from godaddy and even provided a tool to assist them move. Of course it was in their best interest.

⬐ ashamedlion

Yep

http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/22/we-say-no-to-...

http://www.namecheap.com/moveyourdomainday.aspx

http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2012/01/18/blackout/

This immediatly reminded of about Ballmer's reaction to the first iPhone [1] : he started laughing explaining it's too expensive, doesn't have a physical keyboard.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

⬐ SquareWheel

Though to be fair, you can't expect a competitor to gush about how great it is.

"Overthrown" does not mean "disappear", it means "no longer king."

IBM was once the king of computing. It was overthrown by Microsoft. Microsoft was then king, but it is no longer, though those living in the past will point to its continue dominance of the PC, a dominance that is both declining and becoming more irrelevant. Google was crowned the king of the web, with users spending most of their time on google.com, but now they spend far more time on Facebook.

> The Roman and British empires lasted hundreds of years.

We're talking technology, not geopolitical power. The former operates on a vastly accelerated time scale, aka "Internet time". I recommend you read the Innovator's Dilemma, or at least the cliff notes on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation. There's a nice list of things many of which weren't expected to be overthrown so quickly.

I'm wondering if you might actually be a celeb: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U.

> It is losing money, sure, but short term losses are not important when you're talking about entering a market as large as the mobile phone market after the existing players are firmly entrenched.

I think the point on mobile is that Microsoft itself was a well-entrenched player in mobile, and they laughed[1] while allowing that position to get completely eroded by less experienced competitors.

It's true that after that happened, they've seemed to build a pretty good project in Windows Phone 7. But I don't think it's really accurate to start the scorekeeping so recently.

[1]:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

edit: formatting

⬐ Drbble

On business, The only score worth keeping is present/future. Past isn't really relevant, except for how it is prologue.

I couldn't help but be reminded of this video from Steve Ballmer talking about the iPhone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

IMO it is a bad idea to /not worry/ about apple hedging into your vertical.

⬐ g9a5

As Brian Ford pointed out, this is far more reminiscent of Palm's bravado before iPhone in 2007:

http://brianford.newsvine.com/_news/2012/02/13/10398704-sams...

> Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector.

> “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

But, really, what does anyone expect incumbents to say? They know that they can't compete with Apple on the ecosystem. They know that they can compete with Apple on the quality of the picture, because that's the part that they will likely be supplying to Apple anyway. It's clever to try to shape the direction of the discourse away from the stuff Apple will be trying to compete on and back to what Samsung try to compete on.

⬐ Duff

Two things differ from pre-iPhone Palm.

Apple has an established track record of not getting what people want from a TV. Ala carte TV shows and a crippled set-top box is not very inspiring.

Palm wasn't exactly a superstar before the iPhone's launch. I had a Treo... the only thing that could be said about it was that the crappy web browser was better than BlackBerry's crappier one.

⬐ g9a5

> Apple has an established track record of not getting what people want from a TV. Ala carte TV shows and a crippled set-top box is not very inspiring.

Disagree. TV is not a TV set. You may as well argue that the Macintosh TV from 1994 is indicative that Apple doesn't "get" television.

Apple TV is a hardware extension of iTunes. It is not a profound re-imagining of the TV, which is what we are expecting the Apple TV to be.

And I'd suggest that TV has been pretty popular.

"Apple sold more than 3 million units of the device last year, marking seemingly strong demand among customers for the small box that plugs into high-definition TVs to stream music, movies and photos from computers, mobile devices and various websites."

"Cook didn't say what that "something" was, but did add that "for those people that have TV right now, the customer 'sat' (satisfaction rating) is off the chart…""

> Palm wasn't exactly a superstar before the iPhone's launch.

Palm's marketshare in Q1 2005 was 17.9%. Back then when there were several goliaths (Nokia, RIM, Sony-Ericsson) that's a huge fucking deal.

Samsung's marketshare of the TV business in 2010 (only data I could find)? 17.2%

Believe me. This is a very apposite comparison. I'm bookmarking this thread to revisit in 5 years.

⬐ alexbell

> But, really, what does anyone expect incumbents to say?

Exactly. It's not like a Samsung rep is going to get up on stage and talk about how one of their competitors entering another of their core businesses is bad for Samsung. You have to sound confident, and in the case of TV they probably ARE much more confident regarding competition with Apple. Whether that confidence is warranted remains to be seen.

⬐ silvestrov

Yep.

“They don’t have the best scaling engine in the world and they don’t have world renowned picture quality that has been awarded more than anyone else.”

A lot of those concerns go away when the source is digital.

Apple has created the splendid CoreGraphics package and that getting the best scaling on the market might be the easiest part of iTV for Apple.

Try do a blind-test: play the same video using VLC using 100% and 110% window size. How many people can see the artifacts from the 10% scaling?

⬐ MBCook

Don't forget the problem of consumers even knowing they are watching HD content. People still buy HD TVs, hook up SD content, and think they're watching HD since it looks better than their old TV.

As long as it looks good, I think consumers will be happy. Having a scaling engine that turns 1080p content into 1184p content better than the competition is not something I think will change a lot of buyers minds. If you're at 99% optimal and Apple is at 96.5%, almost no one will care.

Having a simple remote, easy access to content, or a responsive user interface will win people over a lot faster than the technical quality of your scaling. Think of all those "important" things the first iPhone didn't have (memory cards, user replaceable batteries, keyboard, 3G, etc). Look at all the things the iPhone still doesn't have. The average customer has pretty obviously made their choice that those limitations were acceptable.

⬐ hessenwolf

Just watch the download rates on pirated cams and you see how little 'many' people care about the screen resolution.

Yes, the problem is Ballmer. He is extremely shortsighted. Witness his scoffing at the iPhone when it was introduced [1]. Then watch his claim that the iPad is just another PC form factor [2]. He also laughed about the Macbook Air [3]. Of course, now there is a push for ultrabooks from Intel.

I saw a Microsoft commercial not too long ago and the lost shot showed a PC and it was a Samsung laptop that looked just like a Macbook Pro. It's a good thing that Metro is not just a copy of iOS. The sooner they fire Ballmer the better.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWkRgNTJZuM

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYcxvEfUikg