Apple strikes again

After thinking about it for all of two weeks (which is a short time by my standards), I've bought an iPhone.  The main driver for this was the fact that I had previously no means of portable internet access, which is quite shocking in this day and age; I was in a rut of mobile-luddism.

My main problem is my immunity to hype.  There is a list of films several miles long I have point-blank refused to watch, just because they were agressivly hyped on first release.  Quite why I have this tendency I don't know, I just do.  Perhaps it's because most things which are hyped are genuinely shite, the mess of crappy mobile phones being the perfect example: "With the new Sony Nokiason Motorola MZ92144401 part Three, you can send a picture - for £1.50, and by music - as long as it's in the top 10, pay £5, and have it expire in a fortnight."

This anti-hype reaction had initially put me off the iPhone, when the first version was announced.  Until the recent realisation that having a simple and easy means of mobile internet/email access would actually be a good idea; even then I wasn't convinced, until I did a more detailed analysis and found that an iPhone was exactly what I needed.  Free data access, generous bundles, etc.; and the software on the phone works in exactly the same way that the software on the lesser phones don't!

Without fear of hyperbole I can say that the iPhone is the single most impressive electronic device ever made, ever; and, in all probability, is the pinnacle of all human achievement.  And, when you consider it was the first phone made by a company with no experience of telecommunication equipment, it's even more shocking that it's so much better than the crap produced by companies with twenty years experience.

People have been hyping phones as music devices for years, which has been partly justified, but they've failed in multiple ways: mandatory DRM, cumbersome upload/synchronisation methods, etc.  With the iPhone, it's a piece of piss (which you would expect with Apple's iPod experience); but they've applied this to everything else as well.

This doesn't stop people claiming that non-Apple hardware is somehow worthwhile, and actually better, based on false comparisons - people always used to say that 3G iPod's were crap (at the time when the 3G iPod was the latest one) because the competition had 2 hours extra battery life.  This was perfectly true, but that wasn't really the point; the iPods were better because they just were!

Same applies to the Mac.  Yes, you can get a PC with a better spec for less money, but it's not as good as a Mac, it just isn't.  And phones, yes the G1 is theoretically better in a number of ways; but in practice, it isn't, it just isn't.

The iPhone is the only phone since Alexander Graham Bell that has actually lived up to it's description.  Every feature it's described to have works; and works in an easy to use way. 

Ever since WAP made an appearance in 1999 or so, people have been describing phones as portable internet media appliances, but that's exactly what the iPhone is and every other phone isn't; exactly, 100%, that's what it is.  The exact same thing that every other phone has failed to be.

What's the reason for this discrepancy?

Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs gets plaudits, he gets critics, but the truth is that he is unique.  He's the only man in history that has rescued a company from the Dead Sea Effect.  He's leading a large multi-billion corporation and making it produce world-leading products that others can only lamely imitate.  Every other computer/phone/electronics company globally is just full of standard middle-managing box tickers, "Hmm, we need to play music... let's have a think... £2 for a DRM track that can't be transfered when the phone contract ends... done!"

Jobs is one of the very few people who can be genuinely described as a visionary.  How else could a - albeit well funded, well equipped - company with no prior experience of making mobile phones make a device which is superior to every other phone, by a country mile?

Whilst all the complacent companies are just cynically creating devices which are aimed at being just one notch higher than the previous version, Jobs (and his minions) actually question things, and come up with a design based on how things should be, not on incremental feature creep.  Sometimes this is contraversial, e.g. the iPhone's lack of video, but the failure of video-calling to enter the mainstream over the past six years just proves my point that incremental feature improvements does not a good product make.

There was an interesting article in the Financial Times that described this phenomenon, although I can't find any reference now.  The central tenet was that all the world's most successful, influential, profitable products have been the products of visions rather than analysis.  The example quoted in the article was the Boeing 747; specifically that Boeing built it based on a vision of air travel that didn't exist at the time.  While other aircraft makers were making incremental changes to the current offerings, someone at Boeing thought: "hmm, if we build a huge plane, that'll encourage more air travel, which will encourage more demand for huge planes; and, by virtue of being the first company with a huge plane, we can clean up and destroy the competition."  Which is exactly how it worked out, but they had no way of knowing that in advance.  No amount of market research would have led to the same conclusion.  As Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, I would have built a bigger horse."

The moral of this story is two fold:  Companies that don't have vision - and I mean that in a dictionary definition of the word, not management speak - are inevitably going to be superseded by companies that do; although there will also be companies which the wrong vision, which are more doomed.  And, Apple is almost certainly doomed too, based on the fact that Steve Jobs' eventual replacement will not be as visionary as Steve Jobs; and the world will be a poorer place when that happens.