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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
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
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.
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.
"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.
The two markets you mentioned (non CD based music players and personal computers) were both infant niche markets when Apple stepped in. I doubt they will fall on their faces but the cell market is a fairly mature industry. Time will tell. I for one will not be getting one asmy Motorola Q has 70% of the functionaity and I can't justify dropping $600+ to bridge the gap.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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!"
The thing that the article ignores is that Apple is not entering in the generic cell phone market, they are entering into the smartphone market (or the newly defined "feature phone" market). And as a owner of a Palm-based phone and someone who has used the WindowsMobile phones, I can tell you that that market is still in its infancy. The vendors have no idea how to make a good product right now, and the bar for entry into the market is can you do it at all, not how well. I really hope that Apple can change that and raise the bar so that it will be how good a product you can make.