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Why the iPhone Keynote Was A Mistake
jcatcw writes "Mike Elgan at Computerworld lists six reasons why it was a mistake to make the iPhone keynote at Macworld. He argues that extremely high expectations can only lead to disappointment for consumers and investors. The focus on the phone during the keynote also took away from the Apple TV announcement, put iPod sales at risk, gave competitors a head start, and (perhaps worst of all) ruined the company's talks with Cisco over the iPhone name. From the article: 'The iPhone, despite its many media-oriented virtues and its sweet design, will do far less than most existing smart phones. The problem Apple now faces because of Jobs' premature detail-oriented announcement is that of dashed expectations. When customers expect more and don't get it, they become dissatisfied.'"
The worst thing is the amount of time there is for your significant other to hear about the new iPhone and hide the credit cards before release day.
Beep beep.
The author really isn't trying to make that argument. He's just saying the announcement this early in the game was a bad idea.
Right at the start of the presentation, Jobs says something like "When's it going to be available? We're shipping them in June -- we're announcing it today because we have to go get FCC approval... We thought it'd be better to introduce this today rather than let the FCC introduce this".
Judging from all the rumours about the Zune the future iPods that have been helped along by FCC documents, I think they made the right call.
I hadn't thought of the iPhone cannibalizing iPod sales. Seems as if they are forcing thier customers to pick on or the other: a lot of features (iPhone) or a lot of storage space (iPod). Perhaps if they offered a much larger capacity iPhone, they wouldn't have that problem. Of course, it'd be $1,000 or something...
Clearly I forgot to equip my +5 Codpiece of Karma.
"He argues that extremely high expectations can only lead to disappointment for consumers and investors."
In that case they shouldn't ever announce any cool products ever again. Seriously, what kind of logic is that? Apple makes cool things so people put unrealistic expectations on them. People do the same thing with Google, but Google still releases new services. The new stuff might not match the hype but Google and Apple can't change how much people obsess about them.
The trouble is that Apple apparently had no choice, because it needs FCC approval which would have made the device public anyway.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The seemingly obvious explanation is that Steve Jobs needed a better negotiating position for something. So he announces it, gets a major media circus, half a billion eager buyers, Wall Street ready to punish anybody who doesn't jump on this product launch, and then goes back to his negotiating partner with a much stronger position.
It could be the 3G network - Cringely's written a bit about Cingular insisting on selling its own music store items over 3G, which is why Apple is on EDGE only. Maybe the iPhone trademark... he made a point of boasting about patents (read: patent suit). Maybe something else - I haven't finished watching the whole keynote yet.
Unappreciated gem from the Keynote - Jobs made the audience a point of showing them pictures of penguins on the iPhone. I don't think anything Jobs does these days is uncalculated. Oh, and Mach/xnu is slow...just sayin'.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
just mention right away that the ipod does far less than pretty much every high end MP3 player you can buy. How many happy ipod users are there? I think as long as the iphone does what it advertises and does it with style and ease (like the ipod), it will be a great success.
i dont think apple is really going after the IT crowd with this, they are the only ones who will complain because it doesnt have feature X, rather than focusing on how well it performs the things it can do.
From the moment the iPod was announced it seems that a commentary on Apple isn't complete without some suggestion that the iPod is in terrible danger. Eventually, maybe it'll get supplanted by some other cool little gizmo, but for now it ain't in danger guys. If he's referring to the idea that people will stop buying iPods waiting for the iPhone, I doubt that would be all that big of a sales hit....the iPhone will, for a while at least, be more far more expensive than an iPod, for far less capacity. I won't be trading in my 30GB iPod any time soon.....unless it's for an 80GB.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
I agree, Steve Jobs probably did what was best under the circumstances (especially with FCC approval in mind!).
I think the article's author forgot the old saw: There's no such thing as bad publicity! This is especially true for Apple, the perennial underdog, and a new entrant into the computerized cellular telephone market.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
I was talking to someone pre-iPhone announcement about what cell phones should be.
One of the key features I wanted. make something that doesn't do all of those things I don't want but does the things I do want well. Phones have been developing crazy unusable features like mad for years.
Do less but do what you do well.
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
> As for Microsoft Outlook... who uses it these days anyway? I sure as hell don't.
... but no one goes there any more, it's too crowded.
It's like this club that was cool once
Go somewhere random
Dear god, you guys are actually making me defend Apple. And Cingular.
Wow.
Guys, there are only two GSM carriers in the states -- Cingular and T-Mobile. You might have heard of T-Mobile, they have this rather popular device called the Sidekick that only works (really works, anyway) on their network.
Lame? You bet.
who knows how to run Apple better than Steve Jobs.
Just about any Fortune 1000 firm in the US, for starters. Why?
For me, it's not that Jobs didn't focus on the iPhone. It's the fact that he DIDN'T focus on Macintosh. This is a fundamentally bigger point than hyping the device, or building expectations too high. This is more or less a copy of post I made on another site, but I think it's worth repeating.
The launch of Vista is literally days away. What does this mean?
1. Average Joe is going to start thinking about whether he needs to upgrade.
2. If he decides to upgrade to Vista, he may consider buying new hardware.
Apple should be adding a third point to this:
3. Since he's upgrading, and considering a new hardware purchase, why not tempt him to look at some of the alternatives out there?
The Vista upgrade release is a fundamental, time-lined opportunity for Apple to win converts. With Bootcamp they can even offer that upgrade with the comfort of knowing that you can still run Windows if you need to. Macintosh should have been absolutely FRONT AND CENTER of the keynote.
If a consumer upgrades buys new non-Mac hardware, that's it. Apple has lost them for *at least* another couple of years until they decide to go through the process again.
Jobs missed a golden opportunity at this keynote. Given the momentum and the increased buzz around Apple, their slowly increasing market share, more developers on board, Bootcamp etc. he could have finally presented Apple as a serious and viable alternative to Microsoft. For everyone. But instead he decided to go with a f**king phone, which doesn't even launch until the summer in the US, end of the year in Europe and 2008 in Asia.
The author really isn't trying to make that argument. He's just saying the announcement this early in the game was a bad idea.
Something Apple has been held to task for here before - the company is notoriously secretive and known for not sharing future product details, much to the displeasure of IT professionals. Yet now, preannouncing is a mistake.
Poor Apple. Can't have it both ways, and gets criticized no matter whether they announce ahead of time or on the day something ships.
I don't know what weird parallel universe you inhabit where grad students are worshiped... but as a grad student, I desperately want to go there.
I think the FCC argument is dubious, to be honest.
Apple needed to have their device approved by the FCC, who'd have made some details of the device public. However, Apple could have had a third party (for example, their manufacturer - Apple doesn't generally make their own products) enter the product, and from the point of view of people watching the FCC lists, all they'd have seen would have been a stylish touchscreen camera phone with EDGE and 802.11, coming from Hon Hai, a company not immediately associated with Apple. Even if people put the pieces together and assumed Apple was involved, the FCC would have published no details of the software, which arguably is the most important aspect of the iPhone concept, and the part Apple needed to keep secret.
Here's what I think. I think Steve Jobs got very excited about a product, far more so than he normally does, and felt MacWorld was the opportunity to reveal it. It's that simple. I think Jobs, in common with much of the media, has overblown the importance of the Apple communicator. It's an original machine, but then original phones come out every year. It's not innovative, in that it will not introduce a technology to a mass audience (the definition of innovative, which is not a synonym for inventive), it's too expensive for that, but it may end up influencing many devices to come. But ultimately, it's a very large phone that, nonetheless, has many nice features but none that the majority of people will see as worth the price tag and Cingular handcuffs, and it'll be relegated to the designer product niche.
Meanwhile someone will popularize the genuine advantages. They'll not produce a product that's as desirable, but it'll be "good enough" and much cheaper and more accessable, just as Microsoft/Commodore/Atari and Palm did to Macintosh and Newton respectively.
But I'm getting off the subject. The point is that Jobs became convinced that this was an important product. That's why it was presented at MacWorld. Not because of the FCC, not because of a lack of other products, but Jobs being overwhelmed with excitement.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
'The iPhone, despite its many media-oriented virtues and its sweet design, will do far less than most existing smart phones.'
That's a smug way of saying "I don't get it.".
The "many media-oriented virtues" blow every other smartphone out of the water on that front. Plenty of phones will play music, videos, photos -- but they universally do a poor job of it, either because the feature was just tacked on to be a bullet point on a feature list, or because it's designed as a cash cow for the wireless provider (Verizon's V Cast, etc.). Maybe they come with only 64MB of storage, or don't let you load your own content over Bluetooth, or only support tiny 3GPP video, or don't support playlists at all, or have that fuck-you 2.5mm headphone jack--I've seen all of these faults. The iPhone, on the other hand, does everything that the world's best-selling media player does, and more. Brushing all of that aside in a sentence is probably the dumbest thing I've read in weeks.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
This has to be the least impact and most important cellphone news of the past year, and no one seems to be able to remember it. New rules got passed last december. It was covered here and on most of the major tech sites. The telcos can't as in "NO", restrict the use of any phone as along as it is frequency capable. You can unlock them, they are now portable if you so choose. Apple saying it is cingular only is mass consumer FUD now. That might be their contract they have with AT&T, but it isn't the law for individuals. Tell your friend he shouldn't have to switch if the iPhone hardware is compatable. Scroll to section five, clear as day, cellphones are now portable, legally, they can't stop you
http://www.copyright.gov/1201/index.html
"5. Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network."
I have posted this a few times now on cellphone theads, hopefully it will stick this time
With that said, I would encourage anyone to support open moko and the neo1973 instead of the iPhone,it is pretty close to half the price, totally open, no restrictions of note, free as in speech.
Support hardware vendors who support open source (and it is a sharp looking phone, and there will be a ton of apps for it, unlike apple's big FU to consumers and devs)
> The iPhone, despite its many media-oriented virtues and its sweet design, will do far less than most existing smart phones
...
... you will be schooled in its quality if you haven't been already. So you don't have to run a Java app to play MineSweeper ... you can play it off the Web. You don't have to run some proprietary software to download ring tones ... you just download them from the Web. Lots of the stuff that is on smart phones today is completely negated if you add the real Web.
... you're supposed to run it out of your pocket. Same for everything Google, ultimately. The reason so much of Google's stuff is in beta is that Google sees the whole Internet as being in beta. The iPhone probably represents some significant point in Google's business plans ... they've been waiting for it. The iPhone is the real "Pocket Web" in the same way that the iPod was the first real "Pocket Music".
...
Two words: "Pocket-W3" and "iPod-connector".
First, "Pocket-W3"
The iPhone does a lot more than any other smart phone because the iPhone has the actual World Wide Web in it. When you point it at amazon.com or any other site on the Web, there are no compromises. WebKit is world class desktop browsing, not smart phone class browsing. Your iPhone has complete (COMPLETE!) support for HTML 4.01, CSS 2.1, JavaScript 1.8, DOM Level 1, PNG 1.0, JPEG 1.0 and also there will probably be some MPEG-4 in there, as much as has been created yet (MPEG-4 is the standardization of QuickTime). It has the best typography you will see on a screen anywhere other than Mac OS X. (Typography is kind of an old science to completely forgo just because of digital, wouldn't you say? Shouldn't the Web have typography? Shit.) Also this is the third major version of WebKit (Panther, Tiger, Leopard) and it is open source
The reason the Google CEO was there joking about merging with Apple is that this is the device that Google wants people to have to correspond to their massive "cloud" servers. You aren't supposed to run Google Maps on a PC
Second, "iPod-connector"
The iPhone does a lot more than any other smart phone because it has an iPod dock connector which enables you to use something like 3000+ accessories just by plugging them in, or easily synchronize with iTunes to get music or movies or other data. There is no software to install, or drivers to install. You just plug stuff in and it works. iTunes manages the device in the same way as with iPods and other devices.
There will probably be over 100 iPhone-specific accessories by the June. They're designing and building them right now, wherever fine iPod accessories are made. If some kind of "missing" thing is identified, there will be a number of solutions that you can plug on in no time.
Finally, do not underestimate the value of the thing actually being oriented towards making calls as its number one app. The contacts list, the ability to conference with a single button push, even the ringer turning down music playback when you have a call, are all reasons why people will buy this just to use as a phone and everything else really will be extra. Although being able to go to the actual Web while on a call is a great calling-feature in its own right.
The trouble, such as it was, was that nothing was ready to announce, which is to say, ship.
Remeber, Apple doesn't get to schedule Macworld around their product readiness, it's on the calendar a year ahead of time. If a product isn't ready, I'd rather them take the extra time to make it ready than to rush it out on a specific target date like so many other companies -- notorious for making shit products -- that I could name.
The functionality argument could always be made for the iPod as well. The iPod lacked features that could long be found in competing MP3 jukeboxes, and yet it was a commercial success. In fact, some of its comparative deficiencies are the same that were listed here for the iPhone. Yet consumers didn't reject it for the things it couldn't do. I think a big part of Apple's target market are people who want to have the cool gadget like an MP3 player or a smart phone, but who don't already have so much experience with them so as to expect specific features. I mean, who's the bigger market, people who already own Blackberrys, or people who have regular phones and are sick of not remembering how to set up a 3-way call, or which unlabeled button turns on speakerphone?