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Competing with a Mac

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Re: Competing with a Mac

#101

Post by nnnnni »

crag wrote: post #86
pekk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, the old Windows phones were just fine. Did many of the things we now pretend that Apple invented. But they were for nerds. And huge phones sell reasonably well today. The functionality was really already there. The "disruption" was aesthetics, marketing and ease-of-use. And in the end, it's a phone, not a cultural revolution.

// The functionality was really already there. The "disruption" was aesthetics, marketing and ease-of-use. And the fact that the old windows phones crashed daily. Was riddled with bugs (some never got fixed) and from an accessibility point of view was a terrible piece of hardware. Good riddance. Apple made the smart phone easy to use, and gave it much needed elegance. Over night it turned the smart phone market into…

Before the iPhone, "most people" had regular flip or candybar phones that had very basic games at best and very little internet capabilities.

Now it seems like "most people" have a smartphone of one type or another. That's a huge change.

Re: Competing with a Mac

#102

Post by nnnnni »

ceejayoz wrote: post #98
Kronopath wrote: post #7

Finally, someone else who agrees that the iPhone was a disruptive product. It had all of the hallmarks of a disruptive product except for the low price. It appealed to a different set of values (i.e. usability and interface), ignored features that were seen as critical in the existing market of smartphone users (No third-party apps at launch? No copy/paste? No editing of Word documents ?!), and it blindsided the incu…

> It had all of the hallmarks of a disruptive product except for the low price. The essentially feature-free RAZR flip-phone was $600 without a contract and sold like hotcakes.

and a really ugly design with horrible keypad!

Re: Competing with a Mac

#103

Post by roberthahn »

Kronopath wrote: post #7

Finally, someone else who agrees that the iPhone was a disruptive product. It had all of the hallmarks of a disruptive product except for the low price. It appealed to a different set of values (i.e. usability and interface), ignored features that were seen as critical in the existing market of smartphone users (No third-party apps at launch? No copy/paste? No editing of Word documents ?!), and it blindsided the incu…

I also felt that the iPhone was a disruptive product. But it took this article to help me articulate the reasons why.

In all of Christensen's examples cited in “The Innovator’s Solution”, the incumbents tended to move upmarket at the time the disruption was introduced. In the case of the cellphone industry, the incumbents were moving downmarket.

This is important because it shows that a company wanting to disrupt an industry needs to position themselves at the opposite end of the prevailing market direction.

But simply zagging while the industry is zigging isn't enough - the disrupting company also needs to employ the appropriate strategy at the same time. Hence, if your disruption is targeted to the cheap end of the market, then Christensen's "good enough" strategy is absolutely the correct one. But, if your disruption is targeted to the high end of the market, as Apple's iPhone was, then you better be offering a degree of quality that no one dreamed of offering.

This kind of deflates Christensen's compelling rhetoric somewhat. Before Christensen's books, conventional marketing was that in order to succeed, you should see where the industry is headed, and track in the opposite direction. Position yourself against your competitors, not be like them.

Re: Competing with a Mac

#104

Post by innino »

smackfu wrote: post #100
innino wrote: post #52

Good article, good to see someone who appreciates how strong Apple's strategy really is, rather than just hating. A nice comment somewhere in this thread about CEOs of corps competing to get the best app - Apple managed to turn the iPhone into arguably the premier ego-arena on the planet. A characteristic which gives iOS an allure which should not be underestimated, unless you happen to enjoy being crushed like a bug…

If you weren't aware, Asymco is very pro-Apple. I would be shocked to see any hating from him.

Do you mean pro-Apple as in a fanboy who thinks everything Apple does is great, or pro-Apple as in he appreciates and respects their design chops and business acumen?

Re: Competing with a Mac

#105

Post by normloman »

Who cares whether something is disruptive or not? Does it make any difference at all? Are you trying to crack some formula to making disruptive products, because it ain't gonna work.

Re: Competing with a Mac

#106

Post by ekianjo »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #89
ekianjo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is probably the only thing Apple really introduced with the iPhone - a capable browser making it possible to use the internet just like you would on a regular computer, more or less (no flash). But apart from that, all other functions already existed, and while on Windows Phone you had tons of free applications and most people didn't really pay for software, Apple made it a habit to ad-support or sell apps…

The sheer performance of the iPhone blew away Windows Mobile. It was an order of magnitude more responsive than any mobile device before it. The scrolling, the swipe gestures, the pinch to zoom ... it was essentially the first time we had desktop grade performance in your pocket.

I don't really agree with you here. It's not because the interface is made for speed and gestures that you had "desktop performance" in your pocket. It's just a different approach. The first iPhone could not really do any multitask at all (if I remember correctly) so trying to compare a mono-task system versus what the Windows Mobile devices could do at the time is frivolous.

Re: Competing with a Mac

#107

Post by gmac »

smackfu wrote: post #99
gmac wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple had to give a price drop merely two months after it went on sale. I speak as someone whose first iPhone was a 3G, but I think it's possible that the price drop was part of the plan all along. It was be a smart price segmentation move: get everyone who's unbearably keen to pay a whole lot, then move on to people who are bit less unbearably keen at a slightly lower price.

That wouldn't explain the store credit they gave to the people who paid the original price.

(facepalm) Good point.

Re: Competing with a Mac

#108

Post by invalidOrTaken »

josh2600 wrote: post #49
invalidOrTaken wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not seem in line with the understanding of the word used in The Innovator's Dilemma , the book that popularized the word in a business sense. Guyzero's response above matches much more closely to it.

Normally, I'd agree, but in the case of the iPhone, the disruption was more profound than simple off-the-shelf components. I can go into detail, but the standard ideas for Disruption tend to be technical in nature whereas the iPhone was a profound multi-faceted assault on the world. There are so many elements of this attack, it's hard to know where to begin, but it was certainly more than just a newfound set of compo…

I had to laugh when I read this. How can I not upvote something so good-natured, especially when it's a response to blunt HN criticism like I delivered?

Re: Competing with a Mac

#109

Post by invalidOrTaken »

eulerphi wrote: post #69
guyzero wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I'd consider a fairly major book written by a harvard professor to be a bit more than a "hipster-startup-hack-bias re-definition." In the study of technology management, the term "disruptive innovation" has become a term of art that encapsulates a complex set of concepts into a single term. It's no more a "re-definition" that using the term "material impact" in regards to corporate finance.

Harvard professor or not, he simply coined a term to refer to a new technology deprecating an old one, so much that it becomes the new market that companies compete in. Yes, the iPhone did that. Where's the debate -- it's a fact that everything became 'touch' since then. The term 'disruptive' just cheapens the discussion and brings it to a baseline level of 'startup culture' drudgery. The term is used so often around…

While I agree that the term is overused, in its genesis of popularity, it referred to a real (and previously unnamed) phenomenon: wben an un-(or less-)profitable market eats a more-profitable one, such that players in the grown-up market are misled by listening to their customers.

If you built a hovercraft, it would destroy the car market, and everyone would expect that. But Blackberry did not expect the iPhone to kill them---there were all sorts of business-y feautures it lacked. "Blackberries are fine!" said RIM's customers.

And that is worth naming, I think. We have a whole jargon around the startup ideal of constant, low-level iteration, when that is precisely what screwed Blackberry.

Re: Competing with a Mac

#110

Post by josh2600 »

artsrc wrote: post #82
josh2600 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some thoughts. 1) The ecosystem did not spring into life with the iPhone; a lot of vendors were unsure initially but there was obviously tremendous benefit to Apple due to the iPod industry. 2) Danger would not have been able to launch the iPhone for a multitude of reasons. Even as a part of Microsoft, they couldn't have done it. I could go really in-depth here, but Microsoft is really bad at Art and Politics, which…

Your Pre-iPhone world was different to mine. * Everything was free phone at the low end and $199 at the top end One of my friends bought a Palm Phone. * Apps were pre-loaded onto phones This may be true. * Carriers drove handset manufacturers choice of OS Maybe handset manufacturers, Palm, Blackberry, Nokia had their own OS. * No one ever waited for a phone This may be true. * Manufacturers did not care about UI/UX I…

How much was the palm? $199 on contract? It certainly wasn't $499...

Those companies had their own OS but their content, schema and layouts were dictated by carriers. Only phones that were sold outside of carrier shops enjoyed true independence and those were few and far between.

People praised the Nokia UI, but where could you buy a high end Nokia phone when they were locked out of US carriers?

Spec sheets sold. Things like battery life were more important than OS. I think we're in agreement here.

I just think we had a different viewpoint on the industry. I sold thousands - tens of thousands of phones in the mid 2000's so I'm really familiar with the market at that time, but the view from my position is not a consumer viewpoint.

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