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Dvorak to Apple - Stop The iPhone
eldavojohn writes "John Dvorak is advising Apple to cease all efforts on the iPhone, citing the mobile handset business as a 'buzz saw waiting to chop up newbies.' With Apple's image as a 'hot company that can do no wrong' on the line, Dvorak warns that the extremely fad-prone marketplace for cell phones will quickly turn the 'hot' iPhone passe'. Unless the company has several new models in the pipeline to release after the original offering, he says, they're likely to fail. 'If it's smart it will call the iPhone a "reference design" and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else's marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures.'"
1) Say something braindead and contrarian about Apple
2) Get it posted on slashdot to flame contreversy
3) Get eyeballs on published work
4) Profit
Dvorak must need to bump up his pages hits to have money to go on vacation
There isn't currently much network architecture in the US for 3G services. I don't think Apple is opposed to selling a 3G phone when the architecture is in place.
And I thought the iPhone was gonna be a flop... but now that John Dvorak says so, I *must* be wrong.
The man is a giant windbag of nerd conspiracy theories and technical misunderstanding. Why do the slashdot eds. slurp up all of his moonshot predictions?
My bicyles
Namely nine out of every ten Apple devotees who love their Macs and have loved them for years.
Oh, and probably 3 out of ten iPod owners who think it would be cool to have their iPod and phone all in one.
And then there are the people who just have to have latest gadget.
Let's see, that adds up to...Dvorak being wrong again and again and again.
I'm not a Mac devotee, but even I can see that the iPhone has "cool" written all over it. People love having the hot new thing. The Razr is one example in the phone industry. The Prius is another in the auto industry. Hell, I even want an iPhone and I'm still using a cell-phone about the size of a brick. I think it was invented in 1983. I already own an iPod, but I want the iPhone too.
Remember, Dvorak prefers incendiary commentary over researched ideas.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Who else would post a Dvorak troll to the front page? What a waste.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
Unless Slashot is adopting the Dvorak page-hit-generation-model by posting intentionally inflammatory references to intentionally inflammatory articles.
Obviously every other comment is calling Dvorak an idiot. But I'd like to point out what specifically makes him wrong in this case. Apple has the rare ability to define a market. The mp3 player market, while small, existed before Apple's entry. Now many people call it "the iPod market". Apple basically defined the personal computer and helped spawn the market.
Apple has the brand recognition and design abilities to redefine the mobile phone market. Dvorak's assumption is that nothing every changes. But he forgets that Apple often seems to know what people want before they even know they want it.
Developers: We can use your help.
3G hasn't met with much success outside of Asia yet - I can understand Apple not adding it to the American phone in June, but it's too ealry to tell what they will do with the European release later. For me, GPS and WiFi is more important anyway.
Apple has never been afraid to enter a competitive market... in fact I think they purposely identify markets where innovation seems to have slowed and bring a product that shows the competition where they failed.
I am confident that the iPhone will be a success. Apple has been VERY good at seeing it's niche and developing the ideal product to fill that void. Once they have filled the niche, they are even better at attracting users who don't NEED the product by showing them a clean, functional, and enjoyable user experience that isn't offered by the competitors.
I am slowly becoming an Apple fanboy, and I hate to admit that. But when I compare their competitors products, I can rarely find a single one that so thoroughly meets it's customers expectations. Sure there are better music players than the iPod, better computers than the Mac, better STB's than the AppleTV, better media management apps than iTunes, and so on... but find one company that produces these products in such a way that they work as well together.
My family has recently become a Mac family, and I will get and iPhone for my wife and I because my experiences with other smart phones have all been mediocre at best, and I imagine that the iPhone will "just work" with my Mac. I could make anything work, given enough time, but the griping my wife will do when it doesn't "just work" isn't worth the cost savings. So I'll happily over pay for the iPhone.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Wow, that's powerful advice. Apple is going to jump on this, and fast. I'm pressing refresh on Slashdot so I can be the first to read the next TFA linking to the Apple press release. I can see it now: Despite much work on our iPhone during the past five years, including Mac OS re-engineering and hardware design efforts, and despite notable interest on the part of the public, and despite our investments in marketing the product, and in licensing the iPhone's innovative multi-touch interface, and despite and our legally binding exclusive contract with AT&T Wireless, not to mention our legal agreements with Cisco, and despite ... oh why go on? Suffice to say we're canning it.
"Just pack it full of features" is a very easy and lazy way to define products. Add too much detail and you gunk up the UI. It is way harder and more important to figure out what to leave out to make it easier to use and "cleaner" for the target user base. There are huge numbers of features that could have been added to ipod, but some of its appeal comes from relative simplicity.
iPhone does not need huge numbers of features to be successful. So long as it does the functions that the target audience expects, it should do well.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Don't try, because you'll probably fail. If everyone thought like that, we wouldn't be where we are today.
He did say one truth which is that the cell phone business is a buzz saw. It is unknown at this time whether "Apple cool" will be enough. There are a lot of players in the market already, and some very good players that know the market. Apple managed to beat the odds with the iPod, whether or not it will with the iPhone remains a big maybe. The other truth he touched on is that people who follow "cool" are notoriously fickle.
Except for the fact that the hard drive capacity is a lot less than the standard iPods.
Yes it looks sleek. I can justify merging two devices and making something just as functional as the two of them already. But, can I justify $600 for a phone and smaller drive iPod? Seeing how I can get the basic cell phone for free, and a larger iPod for $300...
The iPhone is a nice solution, but I don't know how many people are willing to pay for it.
I really want to say after watching the PS3 crash and burn at $600, I'm afraid of the same happening here, but I have a little more faith in Apple pulling this off.
Insert Sig Here
I won't even try to argue that Apple *doesn't* have a percentage of customers who will "buy anything they build". Of course they do. But show me ONE successful company who doesn't! As both a Mac and a PC user myself, I find this accusation really tiresome. I know people who will only buy Ford cars and trucks, refusing to even look at what else is out there. I know people who have all Maytag branded appliances, again, just because of their belief that the company can "do no wrong" compared to the competition.
I think, in reality, *most* people you see who own multiple Apple products do so because they were impressed with the first one, and saw the benefits of owning hardware that inter-operates well. (The "bonjour" sharing capabilities of OS X on a LAN can't be fully realized if you only own one OS X based Mac, for example.)
And in fact, Mac fans seem to be quite preoccupied with building and arguing over lists of the "top 10" or "top 20" worst Apple products of all time. Even the biggest Mac zealots will usually admit that Apple's Performa 6x00 line in the 90's was garbage, for example.
I bring this up every time someone posts some Dvorak drivel, that said...
Why does Slashdot actually post an article that is classified to the "wave-off-wave-off" department? We all know people are going to think Dvorak is ridiculous flame bate, and we all know most of us aren't going to bother reading his garbage. What's the point of rewarding Dvorak with web traffic from Slashdot?
Dvorak's predictions about the tech industry, and especially Apple, are about as accurate as Dick Cheney's predictions about the war in Iraq.
Write a Dvorak filter, put a post-it note on your monitor, do something. By linking to his work you're indirectly paying him to be a tool.
Christ, if you're going to post John Dvorak articles, you might as well start posting V1AgRA spam that you get in your email.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
You utterly miss the point.
Apple's core competency is human-machine interaction. The thing they do better than anybody else is user interface. Apple sees an opportunity to improve the user experience for phones, and is betting they can leverage their expertise to improve a pretty lousy situation.
Are they right? Don't know. But it's NOT similar to Oracle starting to sell concrete.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I really truly hope that they succeed in changing this totally moronic paradigm. Because of this we in the US have phones that are years behind our competitors and a completely ass backward system where your provider pretty much owns your phone.
I would be tremendously happier actually paying for my phone as long as I wasn't locked into a two year service agreement and got a quality phone that I could use to its full potential.
But, the margins are very slim, the phone is kinda big and fragile in comparison to a flip-phone (big screen, like the PSP.. with a very shiny surface) and expensive as all hell.
The thing is that was overlooked is that thin margins are exactly what make the phone industry vulnerable. They have all been competing on no margin forever squeezing device functionality to come cheap as possible.
Now here comes Apple, who knows margins very well - and prefers large ones thank you very much. So they reject the whole exiting phone model, and build a really nice phone that does cost more but also gives Apple great margins.
So now people start buying them, and because margins are good Apple is able to come out with more models and make improvements. The iPod is not a fad phone because it represents something different in the mobile market, an attempt to build a nice phone without worries about margins squeezing them to death. Even if a phone is expensive you only pay for it once, and if it works well then the cost is worth it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Dvorak hating a product is a sure sign of a winner.
Dvorak has been wrong more times than I have had hot meals!
The iPhone may not be optimal at this point, but I think Apple doesn't see it as *just* a phone. I think they see it as a platform they are willing to grow.
As a product, ehhhh. Who are they selling to? Certainly not Joe Consumer
No, they sell it to Joe Consumer With Some Money Around To Spend. While not the 90% of the population, there ARE millions of those.
who has $499 to throw away on a 4GB iPod, even if it also happens to be a cellphone and web browser?
Well, how about people that already buy several $300 and $400 crappy cellphones that are NOT 4G ipods and web browsers? While you may don't, many do. For example I bought a $600 Sony cellphone 1,5 year ago. While it did allowed third party apps, I never bothered with any, except Gmail.
Or, to answer your question again:
who has $499 to throw away on a 4GB iPod, even if it also happens to be a cellphone and web browser?
How about people like those that 5 years ago bought the original 1G ipod for similar price, without color screen, video, cellphone and web browser?
Duh!
My electric tooth brush is water proof and does not have a power socket It couples magnetically the a charger with a coil of wire. This is how all cell phones should work.
As a product, ehhhh. Who are they selling to? Certainly not Joe Consumer -- who has $499 to throw away on a 4GB iPod, even if it also happens to be a cellphone and web browser?
Please, I know someone who just bought his son an iPod for Christmas: $299 (CAD). Now he's buying him the bigger model plus a speaker set, because he's getting a good deal on it: $599 (CAD). And this is a guy that's owed me $1000 for over a year now.
I think you underestimate how much people like their accessories, and how poorly they manage their money. All sensible spenders are people, but not all people are sensible spenders.
Of course, I think the iPhone could very well be a good buy, but I own two cells and a Nokia 770 (and I still have my Sony clie, and a Newton I got off ebay); overall, the iPhone would have saved me money without compromising what I do with my gadgets.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Yeah, but my point was that using Microsoft to represent 98% of the pc market in this quote:
"In the final quarter of 2007, Apple earned $7.1 billion in revenue, compared to Microsoft's $12.5 billion in total revenue. Yes, that's right, Apple brought in more than half as much money as Microsoft, despite Windows owning 98% of the PC market."
is completely stupid. Microsoft doesn't build PCs themselves, so they are not generating the huge low income revenues that come with them. Just using HP and Dell, the comparison becomes $7.1 billion vs $150 billion. So lots of people are spending money on Apple stuff, but waaaaaaay more people are spending money on other PCs(and yes, Dell and HP have lots of non computer revenue, but I feel I made my point).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Why do Linksys routers sell so well? Because people change the open source Linux firmware and add all kinds of nifty things to use them as web servers, robotics controllers, home automation, etc.
No offense, but this just shows how out of touch you (and a lot of other people posting here) actually are. I know dozens of people with Linksys routers in their homes -- All of them are just checking their email.
Better give back your MBA when you get it. :-P
:-/
The problem is that the stuff you're learning is just risk management. It doesn't tell you if there is a payoff at the end of the tunnel or not. Generally speaking, high risk can mean high reward. And that's what Apple is trying for. They're attempting to attack an underrepresented portion of the cell phone market by leveraging their existing brand value. If Apple is successful, they could end up in a Blue Ocean situation similar to the one that Nintendo recently achieved. Which would give them complete control over the new segment of the cell phone market, and also help erect high barriers of entry against competitors. (Apple has gained a reputation of being the only one who can do technology X "right", where technology X is whatever popular product they are producing at the moment. e.g. iPods, Macs, iTunes, etc.)
Please, for the love of all things holy. Do us all a favor and don't become one of those risk-adverse executives. That's what has produced mediocrity from so many companies for so many years. (Often resulting in their ultimate demise.) Part of being an executive is taking the risk. Risk management is about finding ways of stacking the cards in your favor, not avoiding the risk all together.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade