it's not about infinite monkeys and sheer law of the large numbers, it's
simply about progress.
Japan had smartphones in 1999.
Nokia had already made a few mildly successful attempts, they were very good on the tech side, they lacked the marketing strategy.
There's not much to re-discover, we all know how things went.
Nokia had 50% of the global market, but only 10% in the whole North America.
Americans have always preferred homemade products and iPhone is an US product.
Before that they preferred BlackBerry, which was North American.
Sometimes for Americans if something does not exists there, it does not exist period.
I, personally, was doing a-ok with non-smart phones and a different device to do the computing stuff and I strongly believe computing in general is in a worse place than in 2007.
Besides, people are still working for Elon Musk at Twitter, who is clearly a very bad boss, and the ones who are not anymore, are complaining for being fired and very few left on their own, literally no more than a dozen, which shows that people mostly do their job because they are paid to do it, not because they like the people paying them. They care about the salary, which is not worng.
I don't believe many people love Zuckerberg, yet Facebook/Meta has more than 80,000 employees working there and making the things Meta does possible.
Not because of strong leaders but because it's their job and they are paid (often times well, sometimes very well, sometimes awesomely well) to do it. Full stop. There's no need to romanticize the worker/employee relationship.
It's actually pretty bad for worker when people start believing that the you need leaders and the need to be strong (which usually means arrogant pricks, not emotionally and psychologically mature).
We are going to work, not to war.
The iPhone idea in Jobs mind was an iPod that could make phone calls, to sell more music to people. Then after many iterations with people who actually know what they are doing, it became the money machine it is, by incorporating the app store and the ads/apps selling business, which is the only true technical innovation iPhone brought to the table.
The consequences of those choices were easily imaginable, but were discarded because: making money over everything else.
So we now have kids depressed by the constant external pressure of having to fit in a model that is completely made up by rich people pretending that an infinity pool from the rooftop of a 5 star hotel in Singapore is the normal way to live and that promote beauty standards that are unnatural and unreachable.
If I had the power to chose, I would have chosen the infinite monkeys over Jobs and Musk every day of my life.
Please bear in mind that it's not just Jobs and Musk, it's not personal, the same is true for every so called strong leader a definition that their PR office attached to them and made it stick. A façade thoroughly crafted by people expert in rebranding other people. For money of course, not because they actually like their clients. On the contrary, they probably hate them. When these people are free to roam they act like Bezos going to space with a cowboy hat, while forcing Amazon's employees to pee in bottles, because that's who they really are.
Have you noticed the new likable, nerdy do-gooder Bill Gates public image?
And why is Bill Gates bad and Steve Jobs good? They did the same amount of unspeakable things, they broke the same laws, they evaded the same corporate taxes, they killed competition the same way, they sued individuals just because they could and had an infinite amount of money at their disposal.
At least Bill Gates is trying to defeat malaria, isn't he?