Microsoft Passed On iPhone-Like Device In 1991

theodp writes "Microsoft apparently could have been a contender in the smartphone market, instead of what WP7 is today. Former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold says he tried to convince Microsoft to make an iPhone-like device more than two decades ago. 'The cost will not be very high,' Myhrvold wrote in 1991. 'It is pretty easy to imagine a $400 to $1,000 retail price.' So is Myhrvold bitter that cost-conscious and risk averse Microsoft opted not to pursue his vision? Nope. 'Hey, it was better than predicting the wrong thing,' Myhrvold explains."

Comments

Ouch too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has done sooooo bad those last two decades too, they clearly would have been a successful company if they pursued iphones.

Re:Ouch too bad

[hcs_$reboot]

Microsoft has done sooooo bad those last two decades

Right, everything Microsoft did before 1992 was wonderful...

Re:Ouch too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

whoosh!

Re:Ouch too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know. It's pretty specious to claim "I thought of that" 5 years after the device hit the market and became what it is. Had he mentioned this in July of 2007 I'd be more likely to believe it. It just seems a little too self congratulatory to me.

Re:Ouch too bad

[Myopic]

The underlying premise of this article is that Microsoft, given the opportunity, would have built a device like the iPhone. I think that is preposterous. I think it is obvious that Microsoft would have completely fucked up the implementation, leading to another laughable product.

Re:Ouch too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the 'risto' from Usbourne's Book of the Future, released in 1979...

http://www.murrayewing.co.uk/mewsings/2011/04/17/the-usborne-book-of-the-future/

I still have the book somewhere and they even had a section in on how such devices could communicate with satellites so you'd never get lost. So a design for a digital cell phone with GPS released in a kid's book about the same time as MS was telling the world how awesome its BASIC was.

Beat than Nathan!

Oh yeah, and the widescreen TV thing was bang on, too. Shame the bit about having the Olympics on the moon hasn't come to pass...

Re:Ouch too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be said that Microsoft was in the smartphone market long before Apple (eg. HTC Magician running Windows Mobile 2003). They were given the opportunity. They did indeed fuck it up.

Re:Ouch too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Would they? WP7 is actually pretty nice, the reason it's not doing well is because they were too late to market with it.

Re:Ouch too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't Microsoft simply buy Apple?

Re:Ouch too bad

[RoboJ1M]

The iPhone was not successful because Apple were first to market.
Anyway, Microsoft had been doing PDAs with all the same components in long before Apple did and they were all dreadful.

As much as I loath the Apple culture and all it's frothing zealots, they do do great software and hardware design.
Something that is totally lacking at Microsoft and somewhat lacking in the Linuxverse.

Re:Ouch too bad

[proslack]

Gene Roddenberry thought of that stuff in 1964.

Re:Ouch too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft and most of its calculating risk taking managers did not consider planned and predictable ROI as a risk. 80% of the management back in those first 15 years were pure managers and not technical walk around managers. 20% of the management pulled the weight in product and all other areas of Microsoft's first 20 years. The last 20 years of Microsoft is shameful. Ballmer is a figurehead, always was, and his real field sales directors were the brains.

I like Microsoft right where they are; nearly dead on the vine. I sold all my stock back in 2000 right when the dot com bomb, and the stock has been flat ever since. Microsoft will not come back to success unless it hires back its 20-something managers who left when they were in their early 30s, and now in their late 40s. The GMs of the Microsoft late 90s were old fogies who would block fast paced and smarter than them technical managers who had the support of the engineer groups and the way with all of business tactics and financial results. the GMs had no technical skills, just book smarts which does not fly well in a technology company.

Microsoft is dead for the business world anymore, unless you are a gamer.

I do like Microsoft Port25 progress.

MS was probably right

[gatkinso]

Idea was before its time. See the Apple Newton.

Re:MS was probably right

[JoeMerchant]

and mid-1990s Microsoft Pen computing tablets. Capacitive touch screens made all the difference.

Re:MS was probably right

[iamhassi]

Idea was before its time. See the Apple Newton.

The story is ridiculous. What network would the phone run on in 1991? 0.1G? There was no wifi, no Bluetooth, no 3G or even 2G. In 1991 the cellphones were giant bag phones that could only display a phone number. No text messaging, no email, no Internet.

Microsoft had been making touchscreen phones for 5 years before the iPhone came out. Started as PDAs running Windows CE, then windows mobile 5.

Microsoft had a good run but they just didn't keep up but dont feel bad, Palm was huge in 2005 and now they are gone and Blackberry is almost gone. This shows you anyone can run the cellphone game, you just have to have a good OS and apps people want.

Re:MS was probably right

[jellomizer]

I would agree. an iPhone like device would have sucked in 1991.
Lack of multi-touch displays would really have limited to very basic gestures, it would probably just be click interface.
Most people didn't have internet access in 1991. If they did there wasn't to many non-geeky thing to do on it.
Apps would need to sync with a PC over slow serial connections.
The apps would not be much more then a Calendar, a note book and an advanced clock.
For its price you will have a hard time convincing a person to use it over a wristwatch, and a day planner.

Think of a Palm Pilot but only bigger and slower and less memory.

At the time you had a PC. the Laptop will be a generation behind (286's when the 386 are popular), usable but noticeably slower and really expensive. A mobile device is actually 3 generations behind the PC, So your 486 PC may have a mobile device that does what an XT 8088 can do.

Today for the most part these gaps still exist expect for the laptop is only a 1/2 generation behind a PC. But say you have a Core i7 desktop your iPhone 4s would be about the same as a core duel processor. Today this isn't that big of a deal because we have seen a slowdown in software inovation that uses the newer processors. New Computers run the same stuff as old computers but just faster.

Re:MS was probably right

[flyingsquid]

This is just a desperate, insecure attempt by Myrvold to convince us that he's some kind of technology innovator. But if he had the idea for an iPhone like product back in 1991, before Apple did, then why the hell didn't he build an iPhone once the technology to do so became available? Instead, what Myrvold did do once he got rich as CTO of Microsoft is to create Intellectual Ventures, a company that generates billions of dollars of revenue by buying up patents and then shaking down other companies. In other words, he's a patent troll. He's trying to say, 'oh yeah, I could have done that. I'm innovative'. No you couldn't, and no you're not. All you are is just a patent troll, a parasite on the real innovators, and a total douche for trying to pretend otherwise.

Re:MS was probably right

[wvmarle]

The idea was really very much before it's time, so much I'm almost ready to call bs on it.

This proposed device from 1991 includes GPS location service. Sure GPS was under construction and worked somewhat, but it was not fully operational until 1994. A bit premature to think it can be put into a handheld consumer device before that.

It proposes to use a slot for removable media: I don't remember any removable media other than floppy disks from that time. It may have existed in a lab, but not so much out of that.

Did affordable, reliable touch screens exist already?

Rechargeable batteries that lasted longer than an hour?

They call for an online manual - great, when almost no-one even has a mobile phone, and mobile data barely exists, and coverage of mobile networks is patchy to boot. And the Internet as we know it didn't exist - the www had only just been invented.

Oh well the technology was definitely simply not ready for the device by then. That's one of the reasons it took a while between that chimera and the launch of the iPhone. And why MS rightully rejected putting money into the idea. Obviously so did all the other tech companies (if you seriously talk to MS about a project, then you'd certainly also talk to others as well).

Re:MS was probably right

[Dogtanian]

Idea was before its time. See the Apple Newton.

Honestly, given the level of detail in the article and the single, brief sketch shown, there's no indication that there was anything for MS to have "passed on" in the first place beyond a very basic concept. Nothing appears to have been implemented.

This is basic, first-draft future-concept sketch stuff. Reasonably insightful for the time, but not much more.

There's nothing here that would have been close to an iPhone if implemented with 1991-level technology (or even what they would have expected to have been available in the forseeable future at that point). 1991 was a long time ago. Remember how simple your old millennial call-and-text-and-Snake mobile phone was? It was *already* the better part of a decade after 1991 when those first truly mass-market phones came out, and they're still basic by modern standards. In 1991, GSM had just started, and mobile phones were still large and expensive (to buy and run) yuppie toys and tools for professionals, very crude and very expensive.

See that "slot for removable media"? Remember that even in the late 90s (several years later), flash media (e.g. those first-generation MP3 players' internal storage, SmartMedia careds, etc.) was typically in the range of 32 - 64 MB, i.e. circa a single MP3 album. Don't know how much could be stored on early-90s media, but the 1989 Atari Portfolio had "expansion cards available in sizes of 32, 64, and 128 KB initially, and later available in capacities up to 4 MB".

So you could probably have stored 1 song's worth if you forked out for a very expensive 4MB card, but there's no way a portable device would have been able to decode MP3 in real time anyway. (Mid-90s desktop PCs required most of their processing power to do that).

Others hit the nail on the head when they say that such a device would also require the infrastructure to be in place to be useful. I note that someone else mentions that "CDPD" existed for the (primarily North American) AMPS system back then, but was it ever supported and widespread enough in practice to have been usable? (WP suggests that it never took off) What would the cost have been of using the data necessary for this phone?

Notice that the title is "Visions for Consumer Computers"- this suggests that it's something they see for the future (i.e. a decade-plus hence, not within the next couple of years), and there's nothing technical or concrete here. As I said above, nothing wrong with that, but let's not inflate it to more than what it was nor make it out to be what it isn't- it's a first-level futuristic brainstorming sketch that in some ways is quite insightful, but it's not detailed, and it's not anything that would have been practical- or at least worthwhile trying to implement- circa 1991. And MS certainly didn't "pass" on the forerunner of the iPhone.... at least, not here.

Re:MS was probably right

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

The worst part is that the elements described in the article aren't anything Apple 'invented'. The iPhone was neat when it launched, but it bad plenty of predecessors, some even by Microsoft. There is no reason the iPhone even needs to be in this article unless there's a mass delusion that it was the first smartphone.

I think you're right.

Re:MS was probably right

[multicoregeneral]

I was going to mention the Apple Newton, but you beat me to it. I actually owned one. For it's time it was great, even if it didn't do exactly what I wanted it to. It was a business device. More so than the Palm Pilot of the time. It was great, if all you wanted to do was keep up with contacts and write emails, but what I wanted at the time was more of a general purpose computer that I could hold in my hand. The current generation does that, but at the time none of these devices had a consumer focus. Flash back eight years prior, and there's a slim chance in hell they would even try to sell it to consumers. That's where the iPhone was great. Forget the technicals, and what the device actually does for a second. What made the iPhone successful was that it was a color Palm Pilot with the features that your mom would want. It's a subtle difference, but an important one.

Re:MS was probably right

[Rob Y.]

In 1991, it wouldn't have been Internet based at all. Back then, Microsoft was chasing Compuserv, attempting to build their own proprietary Microsoft Network. They were still at it in 1995 when Netscape hit.

Re:MS was probably right

[teg]

Idea was before its time. See the Apple Newton.

The story is ridiculous. What network would the phone run on in 1991? 0.1G? There was no wifi, no Bluetooth, no 3G or even 2G. In 1991 the cellphones were giant bag phones that could only display a phone number. No text messaging, no email, no Internet.

Indeed. At the time, smart phones were not adjacent possible. They were not until a couple of years before the iPhone. Then Microsoft tried, along with onder vendors. Microsoft had Windows Mobile, Nokia had Symbian which had many of the same possibilities iPhone had. They just didn't work nearly as well, which was why the iPhone was such a milestone and influenced everything after. E.g. my Nokia N95 did all the iPhone did (except touch) and more, but it was painful to use and the features felt more like "check!" than aiding you in what you wanted to do.

Re:MS was probably right

[man_of_mr_e]

Dude,

Myhrvold hasn't worked for MS for 12 years.

Where do you get that this is MS trying to rewrite history? It's entirely Myhrvold, plumping up his feathers.

Re:MS was probably right

[Grishnakh]

The only problem with your analysis is that you seem to contend that they're successful, with their marketing, on foisting their crap products on the "dim-witted masses". I don't see this to be the case. Instead, they seem to mostly fail in this. See the Zune and Windows Phone 7 (and all the other WinCE/WinMo devices before that). Xbox was mostly a flop too, and has only become successful because they kept pouring money into it to build it into something workable. And how many people really want Windows on their PC? Most people just use it because "it's the standard" or because the applications they need only run on Windows, and even this is changing as more applications make Mac versions (but here again, Windows usually wins because it's cheaper).

Most MS marketing is laughably bad. Remember the commercial for Microsoft SongSmith (check it out on Youtube)? Or the ridiculous MSN butterfly campaign?

The place where MS marketing seems to work well is not with the "dim-witted masses", who seem to be much more interested in Apple's marketing, but with the dim-witted business community. Windows and Office (and maybe Xbox) are the only things that make money for MS from regular people, but all their other successful products are aimed squarely at businesses: Server 2008, SQL Server, Exchange, Sharepoint, etc.

Re:MS was probably right

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a mass delusion that the iPhone was the first smartphone, because it was the first smartphone to enter the public consciousness.

Re:MS was probably right

[Anonymous Coward]

GPS existed long before 1994. It was used heavily in the Gulf War in 1991.

Re:MS was probably right

[Anonymous Coward]

The technology in 1991 simply couldn't even come close to what a modern phone does in that form factor. It would have let to just another dead product in '91. Give me a break. It's okay to mentally masturbate about something, but not when logic leads you right away to the obvious conclusions that the technology simply wasn't there.

Re:MS was probably right

[wavedeform]

The Newton gets a lot of grief, but the last couple versions (2000, 2100) were pretty nice devices. The HW recognition had gotten pretty good, and the OS was really quite interesting.

Re:MS was probably right

[Rich0]

I think GPS existed for civilian use, although selective availability was in place, so its accuracy was very borderline for most purposes. Forget turn-by-turn navigation.

All that tech might have been possible, but it would be built into something the size of a briefcase (another popular item in that day). It would likely plug in to be used, like most cell phones of that era (maybe 12V in a car).

Any maps would have to be read off of CD-ROM, likely in a caddy like most drives of that era. The maps would be rendered on-screen in beautiful EGA, or maybe cutting-edge VGA at a whopping 320x200x8.

It would have been about as successful as the Newton, which itself would have been space-age tech at that time.

Re:MS was probably right

[jmactacular]

Well said. Innovation is more than an idea. It's the execution.

Re:MS was probably right

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Sorry, Blackberry has the iPhone beat. The Treo does, too. You're free to disagree but both those phones were not only popular in office settings, but many prominent characters on TV had them. The iPhone, however, had broader appeal.

Re:MS was probably right

[LynnwoodRooster]

Well damn. I guess in 1991 I couldn't have used Trimble commercial GPS systems for high-resolution SONAR research, and I guess the Motorola phones simply wouldn't last a few days on battery when we were out bobbing in the water. And I guess my 486DX2/50 NEC laptops with touchpanel add-on didn't run for a few hours when out on the water, just on battery power... I guess all your points are spot on! /s

Re:MS was probably right

[wvmarle]

Now look at the sizes of those parts (commercial GPS != available to the general public), and the weights and costs of it, and think how far away that was from shrinking to a hand-holdable size that retails for $400-1000. Your GPS was probably a multiple of that cost alone.

I'm thinking handheld, you're thinking luggable. Big difference.

Re:MS was probably right

[Miamicanes]

> In 1991 the cellphones were giant bag phones that could only display a phone number.

If you lived in Iowa, maybe. In places like New York, LA, and Miami, we had the Motorola MicroTAC ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_MicroTAC ).

> What network would the phone run on in 1991?

Circuit-switched voice, with 300, 1200, or 2400 baud modem. Slow, but semi-adequate for a BBS, CompuServe, or GEnie.

Re:MS was probably right

[LynnwoodRooster]

The Trimble was quite compact, not much bigger than a modern TomTom GPS unit. The cell phone? Classic brick. Laptop size of a modern laptop. Methinks your extreme hyperbole wasn't very effective or applicable...

Re:MS was probably right

[Anonymous Coward]

But if he had the idea for an iPhone like product back in 1991, before Apple did, then why the hell didn't he build an iPhone once the technology to do so became available? Instead, what Myrvold did do once he got rich as CTO of Microsoft is to create Intellectual Ventures, a company that generates billions of dollars of revenue by buying up patents and then shaking down other companies.

Answered your own question there, didn't you.

Re:MS was probably right

[GameboyRMH]

I don't get why people think capacitive touch is better. Here are the ways in which it is different from resistive:

Pros:
- Allows multi-touch gestures

Cons:
- Less accurate
- Requires a human finger or object of similar resistance, rather than just any object

Now does that seem better overall? Even the phone I have now has resistive touch, that's one of the reasons I bought it.

Re:MS was probably right

[GameboyRMH]

Lack of multi-touch displays would really have limited to very basic gestures, it would probably just be click interface.

OH GOD NO what would we do without multi-touch gestures! A fucking one-click interface like every other computing device on the planet!? THE HORROR!

Re:MS was probably right

[JoeMerchant]

I don't get why people think capacitive touch is better. Here are the ways in which it is different from resistive:

Pros:
- Allows multi-touch gestures

Cons:
- Less accurate
- Requires a human finger or object of similar resistance, rather than just any object

Now does that seem better overall? Even the phone I have now has resistive touch, that's one of the reasons I bought it.

You left out: Pro: Sexy, smooth, feels like a sapphire window on your device, instead of a soft plastic screen that's easily scratched.

Maybe that's not true of all capacitive vs resistive screens, but in practice, most resistive screens are soft and easily scratched, and most capacitive screens are delivered with Gorilla Glass on them.

Re:MS was probably right

[GameboyRMH]

It's true most are easily scratched, I didn't think of it because I always bought a screen protector film with the device which works great for scratchproofing and doesn't make the screen any harder to use. I get the thick, washable matte-finished ones like JAVOscreen.

Re:MS was probably right

[jellomizer]

The one click interface has limitations on small screens. Where on full size screens you can save 16 pixels along the border for a scroll bar. The screen is usually big enough to see all the time no need for different zooming. If you need to put in all the usability features you will have more buttons then space available.

Come on Slashdot was supporting Gestures interface when Its Linux based browsers supported it first. When Apple implemented it, it came uncool.

Re:MS was probably right

[Anonymous Coward]

And the MS Courier

Not quite an iPhone

[Elite Override]

It doesn't look all that much like an iPhone...although the feature set is similar. He was way ahead of his time though.

Re:Not quite an iPhone

[Anonymous Coward]

Way ahead of its time? This thing is a PDA, like the Psion, the Newton (1992), and the Palm (1997). Everybody was thinking about these things at the time. Only Palm managed to make it successful.

To get an iPhone, you need, you know, a Phone function - which this "vision" didn't have. And mobile internet - ditto (it did have email, tho). And music. And apps. And. And.

"predicted the emergence of the iPhone down to the smallest detail, describing a 'digital wallet'..."? Guess what the iPhone is not? A digital wallet!

What a joke...

Because They Already Made One?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't RTFA, but the summary is ridiculous: in what sense of 'like' were WM6 phones not 'like' an iPhone? In that they had proper support for handwriting recognition? In that they weren't marketed by Apple?

Re:Because They Already Made One?

[hxnwix]

I haven't RTFA, but the summary is ridiculous: in what sense of 'like' were WM6 phones not 'like' an iPhone? In that they had proper support for handwriting recognition? In that they weren't marketed by Apple?

Your standard issue WM6 phone had 48 to 64 megabytes of RAM, a shit slow processor, and anemic graphics so horrid it couldn't update a full screen of 2D without tearing horribly. The interface was rendered with GDI and had no support for fancy effects such as zoom transitions and sliding. The widget set was entirely stylus oriented. Pocket IE was a terrible, terrible browser and would take minutes to render a page that would show up on a first gen iPhone instantaneously.

In comparison to the first iPhone, all WM and Pocket PC devices were garbage. I worked for company writing WM apps. When I first tried an iPhone, I immediately realized it was time to update my resume. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft's share of the smartphone market dropped to essentially nothing, and my former employer fired my entire department.

Re:Because They Already Made One?

[Grishnakh]

Yep, the WinMo stuff was shit compared to the iPhone. A stylus? Seriously? What on earth were they thinking? I've got a WM device here I use for work (actually I never do; they gave it to me in case any big issues came up that they might need help with but I've never had to work with it), as apparently there's a lot of handheld industrial devices that use that crappy OS. I played around with it a little; it really sucks. Consumers don't want to use styli, they want a simple touch interface. MS simply tried to take their desktop UI and stick it directly on a 3" screen, and unsurprisingly, no one liked it.

Re:Because They Already Made One?

[jedwidz]

IMO, lack of support for stylus input has always been the main disadvantage of the iPhone and similar devices, compared to older smartphones and PDAs.

Resistive touchscreens are just fine for driving with your finger. The trick is to design the UI so that the buttons are big enough.

I found text input with Fitaly and a stylus to be vastly superior to the iPhone's on-screen keyboard, albeit with a steeper learning curve. But to be fair this is more due to crippled software rather than the choice of screen technology, and if it was officially supported I'd probably be just as happy with Swype or a Dvorak layout as I was with Fitaly.

Drawing apps are also much better with native stylus support. I've tried styluses made for the iPhone, but they're not much better than improvising with a sausage. At least you can eat the sausage if you get peckish.

Re:Because They Already Made One?

[Grishnakh]

Obviously, most people disagree with you, because touchscreen (non-stylus) devices are all the rage now, and stylus-based devices have been pushed for 10+ years now and never did very well. No one wants to mess with a stupid stylus just to make a phone call or use an app. Worse, what if the stupid stylus gets lost? Now your device is useless until you can find another one, or you have to carry around some other stick-like item in your pocket just to use your phone. Jobs obviously called this one correctly.

Furthermore, who draws pictures on their phone? No one cares about that.

Re:Because They Already Made One?

[jedwidz]

By that logic 99%+ of people love glossy wide-screen displays on notebooks, and hate matte 4x3. And also by that logic I disagree with myself, as I carry an iPhone but no longer use my stylus-based PDA.

In the meantime I've also regressed to using paper for note-taking, which generally involves a lot of text and also some scribbles. That's not progress.

Worse, what if the stupid stylus gets lost?

Use your finger. You shouldn't need a stylus for most applications. Like I said, it's a UI issue.

Furthermore, who draws pictures on their phone? No one cares about that.

The #1 paid iPhone app today is Draw Something. (Your region may vary.)

Penguin clock

[Lord Lode]

The drawing of the device shows a clock that looks like a penguin in the bottom left. Maybe it ran Linux? :D

Re:Penguin clock

[Lord Lode]

Linux existed in 1991. But Tux only in 1996. So what, I wasn't very serious in my post.

Re:Penguin clock

[Anonymous Coward]

There there, the medication will kick in shortly.

Re:Penguin clock

[amiga3D]

Dude, you forgot your pills.

Hindsight is 20/20

[acidradio]

OK so the idea may have existed in 1991 but was the technology to make it work "like" an iPhone as we know it there? NO! Without the wireless data (or really data at all!) it is useless. In fact nobody really even knew what the Internet was back in 1991. This is like having an idea for a helicopter but no motor to power it (a la Da Vinci). They may have had CDPD data back then but it was pretty slow. But without the Internet how could you really share with anyone? Was everyone supposed to use, oh, Compuserve?

Some may argue "yeah, well they could have at least bought the idea and held onto it until it was feasible." That's like if I bought the idea for a warp drive or transporter and held onto it until it becomes feasible. So many other things have to be invented or perfected before anything like that could work. I don't think I'm going to be around long enough for that to happen. And maybe Microsoft felt the same way in 1991 when presented with that iPhone-like idea.

Re:Hindsight is 20/20

[Nidi62]

OK so the idea may have existed in 1991 but was the technology to make it work "like" an iPhone as we know it there? NO! Without the wireless data (or really data at all!) it is useless. In fact nobody really even knew what the Internet was back in 1991. This is like having an idea for a helicopter but no motor to power it (a la Da Vinci). They may have had CDPD data back then but it was pretty slow. But without the Internet how could you really share with anyone? Was everyone supposed to use, oh, Compuserve?

If they had decided to make something like the iPhone, they would probably have also undertaken the research and development necessary to make a network for it to run on. Also, who's to say it wouldn't have taken the internet in a whole new direction? Had something like this been built back then, the internet may have turned into something like a bunch of semi-walled gardens that you could jump around to rather than a place where you can just roam around.

Re:Hindsight is 20/20

[gbjbaanb]

who says it would have needed the 3g mobile internet we take for granted today, way back then, you'd be looking at internal radio networks (mini LANs) and the devices would be used for email, simple text documents and some spreadsheet work.

Mind you, back in 2001 we had mobile internet phones, they weren't brilliant but they did what was needed via WAP.

Re:Hindsight is 20/20

[Dogtanian]

If they had decided to make something like the iPhone, they would probably have also undertaken the research and development necessary to make a network for it to run on.

MS was nowhere near as big as it is today in 1991, and they certainly wouldn't have had the resources to even *consider* doing anything like that on their own. And even if they had, it would have taken years for *anyone* to develop things to a stage where they would have been good enough to do an "iphone" like device justice, and years more to have the infrastructure actually built.

But remember that the first Internet-enabled mobile devices were created around the turn of the millennium (i.e. the better part of a *decade* after this mockup was created) and they were still very crude WAP-based things.

So it wouldn't- and couldn't- have happened in 1991, and even if MS had been very insightful about the future, it would have been silly for them to put all their resources into an "iPhone" in 1991. As I said elsewhere, this guy's concept appears to have not that much to it- it appears to be primarily a futuristic concept sketch rather than anything workable at the time. Credit to him for that, but no more. He didn't- and couldn't have- invented the iPhone in 1991.

Re:Hindsight is 20/20

[blackraven14250]

Seriously, Microsoft hadn't even released 95 by this point, and this guy is talking about them hedging risks by not going after a mockup iPhone that early?

Re:Hindsight is 20/20

[Dogtanian]

Seriously, Microsoft hadn't even released 95 by this point, and this guy is talking about them hedging risks by not going after a mockup iPhone that early?

It's worse than that- they hadn't even released Windows *3.1* at that point, and Windows 3.0 had only just come out the previous year!

Re:Hindsight is 20/20

[Patch86]

I don't even really get it. Aside from the similarity in shape (a rectangle), what he's basically described is a smartphone. Not an iPhone specifically; it could be any smartphone.

There were plenty of smartphones (and/or PDAs) before iPhone- not least Palms and BlackBerrys. What made the iPhone so popular was its "soft qualities": how shiny and user friendly it was, the touch screen and the clear picture, etc. There's no way Microsoft would have been managing that in the early 90's- so why would we assume it would do any better than all the other palmtop computers that have come and gone?

Re:Hindsight is 20/20

[blackraven14250]

I realize, but I picked 95 because that was the start of their real explosive growth.

Re:Hindsight is 20/20

[Dogtanian]

I realize, but I picked 95 because that was the start of their real explosive growth.

True to some extent, but it cuts MS some slack- 1991 was four full years before even *that* landmark! I mentioned 3.0 and 3.1 because they were also significant releases- the first truly successful versions of Windows, the ones which established it, and thus most people's first experience of it (assuming they were old enough to be using PCs back then!)

If someone was old enough to remember using 3.1, and was then reminded that it wasn't even out at the time of this supposed iPhone killer, then it *really* puts into perspective how long ago all this was- and how much of a stretch the story is when one remembers what computers were like back then! (^_^)

Not that interesting...

[nine-times]

It doesn't seem that interesting to me that someone had the idea. Once you have computers and computerized contacts, calendars, media, etc., it's not *that* clever to say, "Oh, it would be cool if we could put all this into a handheld device.". Further, there were lots of working versions of this before the iPhone. You can see precursors in Windows phones, Blackberries, Palm devices, and even Apple' own Newton device.

The real issue is the implementation. You need the technology to be able to make the thing. You need fast enough processors, long-lasting batteries, nice LCD screens, and small storage devices that can hold a lot of data. In 1991, the technology to make an iPhone didn't exist yet. And then beyond that, once you have all the technology, you need someone to put it all together into a design that people find useful, and that was the only innovation of the iPhone. Apple didn't originate the idea and they weren't the first people to have access to the technology, they were just the most successful in creating a design that people liked.

Re:Not that interesting...

[flyingsquid]

To solve a problem, you need to do three things: (1) come up with a solution, and (2) implement it. But we sometimes forget that there's another step there. This could be step (0), identifying which problem to solve in the first place.

It's like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Getting the answer is actually fairly trivial, but figuring out the right question to be asking in the first place is really hard.

Jobs and Apple became very, very good at solving the problems of product design and interface, and actually building the things. But one of the things that really set Jobs apart as a CEO was his remarkable ability to understand which problems to solve. I remember watching the Apple keynote talk where he introduced the iPhone, and thinking, "yeah, whatever. A phone where I touch the screen instead of physical buttons? I like tactile feedback. This is just a gimmick" He'd managed to solve this problem and build the device, and it never occurred to me that it would be something that would appeal to anybody other than the fanatics who need the newest, shiniest, slimmest offering from Apple. Microsoft had been playing with touch technology for years but never thought to put it in a portable device. It took years for RIM to recognize that the iPhone posed a threat to Blackberry. It wasn't obvious to anybody that something like the iPhone was what people wanted- not to consumers, and not to the highly paid CEOs who are paid millions of dollars because, supposedly, they are able to understand this kind of thing. Even after he'd built it and told everyone it would change everything, it wasn't obvious. Jobs knew otherwise, and he understood it enough to make developing the iPhone and iOS Apple's top priority over Mac and OS X.

Re:Not that interesting...

[nine-times]

I don't disagree. I was just lumping "identifying which problem to solve in the first place" with the other two steps. Part of it is having the right idea. The rest is in the implementation-- making sure that you're solving the right problem, and that you're solving it in the right way.

My general point was that we tend to think that the idea is everything. "I've had a million dollar idea!" or "I had the idea for the iPhone years before the iPhone was released!" Ideas are important and all, but to some degree, they're a dime a dozen. The ideas might be very clever or very obvious, but the devil is in the details, and success if often about the execution.

I've had many friends come to me and say, "Hey, I have an idea for an iPhone app," or "I have an idea for an idea to compete with Facebook." I'm keep trying to explain to people, "Yeah, it's great that you have an idea. Everyone has ideas. Do you know how to make it happen? Do you know how to make it work?"

It was about execution, not about the concept

[f97tosc]

Sony-Ericsson actually DID release iPhone-like devices (e.g. P800,P900) before Apple. They did not sell very well, at least not compared to iPhone. They just weren't as slick. And Microsoft isn't exactly known for releasing very slick products either - so even if they had released it it is far from obvious that they had been successful.

Re:It was about execution, not about the concept

[Hentes]

The problem was that those Ericsson phones were more like techdemos than polished products.

Re:It was about execution, not about the concept

[Dot.Com.CEO]

I strongly disagree. I had a P800 and a P910 later on. They were BY FAR the best phones I've ever owned, considering the expectations of technology at the time. They had working email on a huge screen, an amazing input system (and I'm talking Graffiti here, it was truly amazing and I really miss it), they looked great and the battery lasted for ages. Why Ericsson gave up on UIQ I'll never know, but I'm sure it was the wrong decision. Whatever alternative plan they had, it didn't work out. Going a bit off topic here but, in my opinion, Nokia's Symbian S60 was also a great OS for people wanting connectivity on the go. Thing is, people didn't know they wanted to be connected until iPhones and, to a much lesser extent, Blackberries. I have great love for e-series Nokias of 3-5 years ago, and I'm sad to see them disappear. Build quality, form factor, yes even software, were excellent for what they were supposed to be.

Re:It was about execution, not about the concept

[Hentes]

I had a P990, so maybe expectations were lower at the time of P800. I didn't say that it wasn't advanced for its time, I said it was unpolished. Like, for example, some functions were only available when you opened the keyboard, others only when you closed it, even though it only overlapped about 1/10 of the screen. JME was slow, and there were almost no native apps because Ericsson decided to make their own version of Symbian incompatible with the original one. Handwriting was also an example of a clever technology that almost worked, but the touchscreens of that time simply weren't accurate enough for that. On top of that, it didn't follow any standards, had its own charger, memory card etc. It was good hardware made slow, laggish and uncostumisable and counterintuitive by crappy design.

Re:It was about execution, not about the concept

[Dot.Com.CEO]

Yes, the P990 was really not good enough. I remember being disappointed by it, and ultimately not buying it. The P800 though was simply amazing for the time.

Way back then

[rossdee]

Way back then cellphones were big, ugly analog devices, with poor coverage, and very expensive to use compared to today.
Ifyou try to introduce some concept before the infrastructure is ready it fails.

A home computer of that time probably had 2 megs of memory and a 40 meg hard drive (Amiga 600)

No way

[amiga3D]

Microsoft wasn't even able to make a decent desktop OS at that point. I was using an Amiga back in 91 and laughing at all the IBM'ers. You should have seen them when they'd come over and see a multitasking operating system in action. MS was struggling trying to tear IBM's monopoly away from them and they had their hands full with that. It wasn't until win95 that they really started to dominate, before that only businesses loved them. As far as I can remember Multimedia only existed on the Amiga or some really expensive hardware like Silicon Graphics. MP3 players didn't even show upere until late in the 90's. Imagine a mobile intel 386 chip in a phone. Really I think Apple hit it about the right time with the right type of OS which is of course why they suceeded so well. Even then all the geniuses in the media were disparaging it.....as it sold millions. Jobs only looked like a genius because of his lame competition. As they say, in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

Re:No way

[Anonymous Coward]

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is locked up for being insane.

Re:No way

[jones_supa]

Imagine a mobile intel 386 chip in a phone.

As a sidenote and a bit of trivia, according to Wikipedia the 950 and 957 BlackBerries had a 386 chip. :)

Yeah, of course. But how about services?

[Fri13]

What was MS versions for iTunes, iPhoto, iMovies, OS X at that time?

iPhone success isn't just it has big multi-touch display and just one physical button (- volume and power) what to use.

It was that Apple had released iTunes, gathered, Music, Movies and others there and allow easy automatic syncing to 4-8GB flash memory what first iPhone had.
It was full blown browser and email.

Apple knew that to get successful phone, you need to have services ready for its users. Not way round like Microsoft usually does that product is "ready" but services lacks few years behind.

for once MS was right

[Anonymous Coward]

no one wants a MS phone!

No kidding

[Sycraft-fu]

In 1991 2G aka digital cell technology had just launched. So most cell service was still AMPS and anyone who tried data over that knew it was a painful, painful, experience, not to shit battery life of analogue phones. Plus computers were still very slow. The 486 was the king of the heap and man, even that was slow. It took forever to do normal tasks. I remember having my computer print something and wandering off to the kitchen to get a snack while I waited for it to deal with all the work of rasterizing and sending the document to the printer. Of course since mobile technology will always be less powerful you'd be luck to have 286 class hardware at that time. Finally the Internet, which is what makes people really like smartphones, was something that only people at research and government institutions knew about, it was not a big public thing.

For smart phones to work we needed three things to happen:

1) Data networks to get fast enough to make surfing reasonable. This pretty much means 3G. It was doable on 2G networks, I suppose, but pretty bad. It needed to be fast enough that a person's attention span wasn't exceeded by the load time.

2) Computers to get fast enough that even a slow computer is reasonable. Since a mobile computer will be many times less powerful than a full sized one, that means full sized ones first had to outgrow the era of always being slow. Wasn't until pretty recently that happened. We just needed chips to get shrunk enough that a reasonable amount of power could go in a tiny package.

3) Something to do with them, a network to get on. BBSes weren't going to cut it. We needed the Internet, and more we needed it to actually be useful.

None of that really happened until early 2000s. A smartphone before then would have been a flop because nobody other than a few geeks would have found it anything other than an unwieldy, expensive, useless gadget.

Technology has to progress to certain points before ideas are feasible. A good example of where it hasn't would be flying cars. Idea has been around forever, prototypes have been built, nothing has happened. Why? Because the technology isn't there. It isn't an idea problem, it is a tech problem. We'd need some major new propulsion/levitation tech before that sort of thing would be feasible.

Really, smartphones happened when they were ready, and the iPhone is not notable for that in any way. It was simply the device that made it cool for regular people. Blackberries had been popular with professionals and the government (especially the US government, they love them some Blackberries) for a few years.

Hell for that matter MS had smartphones, they just weren't very good.

Re:No kidding

[grumling]

And most online data was text. You can send pages of text in a few seconds, even over a 9600 Baud link. 128Kbps was considered very fast back then. Heck, even today mostly text based transfers like Twitter updates or WAP web pages are fairly quick on 2G.

Even AOL cached icons and other graphics on the user's PC. Every few weeks they'd send down an update that had any new graphics.

Re:No kidding

[rthille]

That 486 being slow was probably more about system architecture and software. My NeXT machine at the time with a 68030 could rasterize and print Postscript as fast as the printer engine would spew pages.

Re:No kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

And possibly just a slow printer (or slow computer-printer communications).

Re:No kidding

[the_B0fh]

Seriously? Not everything is all singing, all dancing. Look at how big bejeweled is on the iPhone vs on the palm pilot. Bejeweled worked fine on the old palm pilots as well as they do on the iphone.

In the 1970s, a UNIX server supporting multiple servers were *SLOW* by 1990s standards. But it worked well. Even across a 56k line.

Re:No kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

MS DID in fact have smart phones, as did palm and a slew of others. None made it as easy to use as the iPhone (except the prada phone, but we won't get into that war. MS was more firmly entrenched in PDA's though - the iPAQ comes to mind from HP - great little device if you could stomach windows mobile. I couldn't, so it ended up collecting dust as a nifty toy that I found occasionally useful.

Re:No kidding

[jonnythan]

The original iPhone was not 3G. By the way.

Re:No kidding

[dbIII]

4) The Japanese had to have it for over a decade and find the pitfalls before a company in Europe would take it up, and then three to five years after that Apple gave it a try.
That's not as damning as it sounds. Millions of train and bus commuters in Japan provided a market for emerging smartphones that would have trouble selling in large numbers in the USA.

Re:No kidding

[jez9999]

The 486 was the king of the heap and man, even that was slow. It took forever to do normal tasks. I remember having my computer print something and wandering off to the kitchen to get a snack while I waited for it to deal with all the work of rasterizing and sending the document to the printer.

That must be because you weren't using W-w-w-Windows, Windows, Windows 386, and your thoughts weren't coming together real quick.

Re:No kidding

[gl4ss]

it would not have been a flop at the price point of 400. if it had been accompanied by earlier data networks rollouts then it would have been really, really sweet deal. however I got a suspicion that price point was overly optimistic(a psion with online capabilities that would have had feasible usage pricing would have been really, really, really popular, not just for geeks which would have provided a big market too).

gsm networks had 9600 bps data links, while slow the speed wasn't the main problem, paying by the minute - now that was a problem, the same problem plagued wap introduction later and made it useless and by the time gprs hit the scene(2001) as by then serving simple html was much more sensible than serving the silly wap non-spec. the thing which made smartphone use cases really was by amount of data pricing(or just plain unlimited). but even 100mbytes per month for 20 bucks was pretty good at one point, you could do a LOT of IM(irc) and news feed reading with that - compared to not having anything it was really, really great.

nokia communicator was launched in 1996 and did most of the stuff in this ms proposal. it was pretty nice and a wanted device - however the only way you could afford to really do telnet or simple web browsing(think lynx) with it was if you got nokia to pay your phone bills. there were a bunch of other carryable weak-ass pc's around during that time too. however as said the stuff was just insanely expensive for regular people or even regular geeks.

Re:No kidding

[0123456]

Weird. I always hated having to use the NeXT machines in the office because they were so damn slow.

Re:No kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

All of those things could have been done with existing technologies, since they only need text. The things you couldn't do are the ones you (or the article) didn't mention, the ones which really made smartphones popular; video, music and graphical games.

Re:No kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, but it used EDGE (Enhanced data rates for GSM Evolution), which was not around in 1991. And even the predecessor, GPRS was not implemented until later in the 90ies, I think.

Re:No kidding

[petsounds]

Yeah, that was mostly because NeXTSTEP used Display Postscript as its display rendering engine. So it didn't have to do much translation work to send a Postscript of your file to the printer. A 68030-based Macintosh was certainly not as fast.

Re:No kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

It didn't have any apps, didn't support real email, didn't have the ability to customize anything. it was a phone with a fancy browser and really nifty UI for scrolling through contacts and call history.

2g is probably fine for that.

Re:No kidding

[sonamchauhan]

"Technology has to progress to certain points before ideas are feasible."

Or they could have used DTMF tones @ 40-60 bps (or automated SMS messages) to transfer data point-to-point between mobile handsets

E.g.:
"Here's the meeting appointment for next Tuesday" ...
"Got it .. I'll use Windows for Workgroups to invite the rest of the team"

  Or...
"Here ... I'm sending Tom's contact details over" ...
"Got it ... I'll add to my addressbook... done!"

Re:No kidding

[drinkypoo]

Of course, if you don't use Postscript like a boss then you send a lot of redundant information to the printer, and it takes more work to evaluate postscript than PCL, so Postscript alone can slow down your print job...

Re:No kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

For smart phones to work we needed three things to happen:

1) Data networks to get fast enough to make surfing reasonable. This pretty much means 3G. It was doable on 2G networks, I suppose, but pretty bad. It needed to be fast enough that a person's attention span wasn't exceeded by the load time.

The original iPhone was not 3G. It seems to have done ok.

Re:No kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

A 68030 is more like a 386. A 486 is very comparable to a 68040 (the 68040 is faster clock for clock), up until the DX2 era. With clock doubling the 486 became (a lot) faster, and only the 68060 was able to keep up, but that came out two years after the 486DX2.

Re:No kidding

[rthille]

The NeXT system rasterized PostScript on the main CPU and sent the rasterized data over a high-speed serial link. So, by your logic, wouldn't printing on my NeXT have been _slower_ than his 486?

Re:No kidding

[rthille]

It probably didn't have enough RAM and was swapping to death.

Re:No kidding

[drinkypoo]

No, the point was that the NeXT did use Postscript like the proverbial boss, but for everyone else it was a hindrance rather than an advantage to have a postscript printer. (Some Mac apps seem to have been pretty damned good at it too, but that's no shock.)

Re:No kidding

[rthille]

Ah, right. And, my comment should have probably been attached to the comment you were replying to :-)

You forgot two important things:

[aussersterne]

You need a critical mass of the public on a global network, and you need a suitable UI. The latter is really Apple's innovation with the iPhone/iTouch/iPad. By the mid-to-late '90 we had wireless devices with touchscreens that fit into pockets, but they were all heavily textual (even though they had icons and graphics) in the way that they operated and they were also all reliant on a desktop metaphor of some kind. Apple's Newton, if you look at the UI, was the closest thing we had to a truly mobile UI, and while it was way ahead of its time and even has some things I'd kill to have back on an iPhone today, it was also still all about office metaphors: sheets of paper, sliding drawers, envelopes and trash cans, and so on.

Even those that want to make fun of Newton basically have to admit that in terms of practical usability when walking (i.e. in motion, outdoors) down the street, there's a world of difference in usability between a connected Palm or Windows PocketPC device from the pre-iPhone era and an iDevice. That's Apple's big contribution, what Microsoft did absolutely incorrectly. After all, the basically *had* an iPhone (so did Palm) by the early '00s. There's no technical reason that Windows phones couldn't have been made similar to iDevices in their usability, especially with high end models having faster processors and more memory capability; it's just about UI/UX design. Apple does it. Microsoft did it once a long time ago (partially) and has ignored it since, until Metro—which is much less about some radical improvement in Microsoft-running device hardware as it is about the first real UI/UX design Microsoft has attempted in years, directly in response to iPhone.

Not an 'iPhone'.

[Junta]

Basically, it was a smartphone. It might've been the first if they pursued it, but then again, the Simon being first didn't buy it much in the long run:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon

Having a smartphone on the market in the early 90s didn't really matter. Internet in early 90s didn't matter one bit to the mass market. The first browser wouldn't even exist for two more years. Until the relatively late 90s, most people didn't even bother with the internet. Without a large market demanding internet (and appropriate cellular resources to actually service that demand), there is no possibility of an 'iPhone'. This is no more an 'iPhone' than numerous smartphones that cropped up before the iPhone (and enjoyed moderate success too). What the iPhone specifically brought in its initial successful incarnation were two things. One, a web browser/interface that could reasonably render and navigate 'desktop' websites instead of being limited to crippled mobile sites that few sites bothered with at all or put something useless up. Two, the marketing momentum of their brand value from the iPod success.

Patent troll alert

[Anonymous Coward]

Nathan Myhrvold is the most prominent of all patent trolls.

Drawings like this where pretty common all through the 80s.

Drawings are easy, products are harder

[Sponge Bath]

That's a nice drawing in the article, here is another take on a possible smart phone.

It was before its time

[Hentes]

Hardware was not ready for such a product in 1991. However, Microsoft did have a similar chance in 2007. There were smartphones before the iPhone, the big novelty of Apple's product was the multitouch capacitive screen, which MS invented for Surface. They just didn't think about shrinking it down for use with a phone.

That's the thing that people often don't get

[aussersterne]

about iPhone/Android (but especially iPhone). As a thought experiment, take an iPhone 4S and stick Linux+GNOME 3 on it. Could totally be done in theory. Would render the device crap. Who would want/use it that way? It would be pointless, just a hack-because-I-can device, even if it had a full working carrier-connected TCP/IP stack. Same thing with getting, say, Windows Phone 6 onto it, even though it would be blindingly fast and have tons of capacity.

iOS is what makes the iPhone, more than anything else. You could take the iPhone, replace the capacitive touchscreen with a resistive one and pair it up with a horrific plastic stylus of the Palm sort, cut the processor speed in half and the memory capacity by an order of magnitude, and you'd still have a great device that was competitive in the marketplace for many users and that would have run circles around WinCE and Palm in 2006.

The fact that Apple also went for capacitive, pen-free, fast processor, and decent chunk of memory was more about the user experience than it was about hardware specs and expanded "capabilities," and it's that fabulous user experience got die-hard Palm people like me into AT&T stores when the iPhone launched going "Holy shit, this is like visiting the future!"

Re:That's the thing that people often don't get

[clang_jangle]

As a thought experiment, take an iPhone 4S and stick Linux+GNOME 3 on it. Could totally be done in theory. Would render the device crap.

Straw man much? You could say the exact same thing about replacing iOS with OS X. Ever tried to use a Mac with no mouse? It's nearly impossible... OTOH, replace iOS on an iPhone with cyanogenmod and what would you get? :D Okay, I'll admit it's a matter of personal preference, but your post reads like it was written by a giggling and squealing schoolgirl. Yeah, Jobs did a better job dumbing-down the interface for non-nerds. Personally, I was just fine with my PalmOS and Blackberry devices long before the iFad started. I even knew some people who were thrilled to death with their iPaq running winCE or whatever (though I've always lacked the patience for using Redmond's stuff for more than a few minutes at a time) . Not everyone needs teh shiney sparkley to get useful things done. :)

Re:That's the thing that people often don't get

[aussersterne]

Hardly, but your typical Apple hate has made you think that it is. I didn't mention Mac OS X. Obviously Mac OS X would be horrible on a mobile device—but nobody ever tried it. There *were* mobile devices, however, with Linux desktops running on them. I know, I had one—a Sharp Zaurus. There were mobile devices with Windows desktops running on them.

There was never an iPhone with either Linux or Windows or Palm running on them. My point was to make the argument that it's not the iPhone hardware that makes iPhone special, but rather the software. My way of illustrating that point was to imagine the iPhone with Linux on it. But you can just as easily imagine it with Windows CE or Palm OS. You could also imagine it with Mac OS X, but that would be in the realm of the hypothetical and subject to discussion, while we know that Linux, Windows CE, and Palm OS on mobile devices all sucked rocks.

You can argue that they were great productivity devices, but to suggest that you could actually get more real work done on one of them than on an iPhone is completely wrongheaded. And Android is in the same neighborhood as iPhone—so yes, Android on an iPhone would be light years ahead of any of those other systems on an iPhone. But let's not forget that iPhone created the market and the model that Android has followed, and that the story itself is about iPhone, so bringing in Android and Mac OS X are really more about you making digressions.

I was talking about iPhone in comparison to previous smart mobile device platforms, period.

Re:That's the thing that people often don't get

[clang_jangle]

Hardly, but your typical Apple hate has made you think that it is.

FYI, I actually had an iPhone 3GS for about 3 months. Couldn't stand it. Yes, it looked great, but with the sole exception of surfing the web I found it quite inferior to my Blackberry. And web surfing on a handheld is not my idea of a good time anyway. Within a week I was back to my old Blackberry for all my mobile needs. Obviously, YYMMV. Those who are all about the browser, facebook, and so on probably prefer the iPhone. Not me. Why is it you fanbois can never understand that not everyone wants the same things you do?

Re:That's the thing that people often don't get

[aussersterne]

Not a fanboy and never made the claim that everyone wants the same things I do. But if you want to seriously dispute that the iPhone singlehandedly revolutionized the mobile device market, I don't think I need to say anything in response; the argument speaks for itself.

Re:That's the thing that people often don't get

[clang_jangle]

Not a fanboy and never made the claim that everyone wants the same things I do. But if you want to seriously dispute that the iPhone singlehandedly revolutionized the mobile device market, I don't think I need to say anything in response; the argument speaks for itself.

Yes, the iPhone was the device that got all the tech semi-literates and illiterates to use web-enabled mobile devices. Thats the revolution of which you speak. However, many of us were already there well before the iPhone brought it to a level even the pre-verbal could use. And BTW: painfully obvious fanboi is painfully obvious.

Something to celebrate

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, let's celebrate Microsoft's failure to innovate!

Me Too!

[rbannon]

Count me in on this one too. In fact you can count on everyone to have an idea that later came true, but they failed to implement it. The failure to capitalize on our ideas is as old as time itself, and everyone here is a prime example of this. I have countless stories of trying to get something to work (I was trying to implement a Dropbox like service in the 80s) and then seeing it fizzle out---the sad truth is that harebrained ideas are just that, and this guy had no clue on how to implement and Microsoft was right in dismissing his idea. Yes, my Dropbox idea in the 80s was harebrained too!

Blame avoidance

[Anonymous Coward]

MSFT: 'Hey, it was better than predicting the wrong thing,' Myhrvold explains."

AAPL: Think Different. Be insanely great.

Totally different philosophy and outcome.

JJ

Re:Blame avoidance

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, not to mention different times which means that there were different technologies and different markets. If the differences were really just some frigging motto, why didn't we have the iPhone in 97-98? Could it just be that the technology of the time would have been cumbersome and the market too weak?

It astounds me that, to this day, we still have to beat that dead horse because certain Slashtards can't get their heads out of their asses.

Not ready then

[kabdib]

I was at a start-up doing a wireless data platform for the Newton and Windows-based computers, circa 1994. Things were not ready for data even then; data was expensive, the modems were very bulky, and everything was extremely slow.

We got /some/ mileage out of a very space efficient data protocol layered on TCP (which actually doesn't need much tweaking to be a pretty reasonable protocol for wireless networks). But I'd say we were about five years too early, which is a killer for a startup with limited funding.

2003 a finnish start-up made an iPhone-like phone

[colordev]

it was an internet ready touchscreen phone build and revieved by the press. Too bad that start-up was trying to reach success in finland where all people were mentally fixated into only buying Nokia phones. And so that MyOrigo company with it's MyDevice phone soon found it's way into bankruptcy.

Full screen apps

[hey]

Notice that the apps are not full screen. Too desktop-ish.

It would have sucked

[hawguy]

The technology just wasn't there to create an very usable iPhone like device in 1991. The first Palme (the Palm 1000) was released in 1996 (at $299 each). The data-enabled Palm VII didn't come out until 1999 (at a cost of $599 + $15/month and data was super slow)

The Newton was released in 1993 and it while it was innovative for the time, was large and clunky and few would say that it was "iPhone like".

And none of these devices had a phone built-in which would have made them bigger and more expensive. In 1991 my portable cell phone came in a small bag to make it portable (between cars, it's not something I'd take to the movies).

Re:It would have sucked

[Locutus]

And can you imagine who _small_ it would have been having to run DOS/Windows? Even back then, they knew the "hammer" they had and that everything would be pounded into looking like a nail or be eliminated from the market. "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure" by Jerry Kaplan tells the story of his company GO Inc and their fateful trip with Microsoft at the time of this supposed Microsoft iPhone like device.

LoB

We have flying cars.

[Fred Ferrigno]

They're just called helicopters. Helicopters do everything flying cars were supposed to do, they're just too expensive for the average person. Regardless of any new technology, the extra energy needed to overcome the force of gravity means that such craft will still be expensive relative to cars or trains.

Re:We have flying cars.

[Grishnakh]

They're also much too difficult for the average person to fly, since they're fundamentally unstable.

Re:We have flying cars.

[TheLink]

Actually even if you use helis that are more stable (coaxial + gyros+ fly by wire etc) they'd be too difficult for the average person to fly _safely_.

Go look at the driving skills of the average driver. Many can't stay on their own lane or park properly!

So who in their right mind expects hundreds of them to fly together safely through cities with skyscrapers, and land successfully? You'd need technology that makes flying cars about as safe as lifts. Otherwise your city will soon be like a war zone.

You need AIs in charge of the car. Basically the redundant AIs would be like a non-suicidal horse that the driver controls. Try to ride a horse into a wall and the you'd find the horse rather unwilling to do so.

Re:We have flying cars.

[Grishnakh]

My wife's a helicopter pilot, so I know a little about this. Just handling the machine is hard enough. While the coaxial+fly-by-wire stuff is obviously much easier to fly, I've never seen that actually put into operation for human-size craft, only R/C toys. All the ones that humans fly are not fly-by-wire, to my knowledge; they require someone on the controls at all times to keep them from crashing; the pilot has to make constant corrections every time there's a gust of wind or thermal updraft or whatever.

However, this is only one small part of the difficulty of being a pilot. The other is navigation. Navigating an aircraft (helicopter or fixed-wing) is not easy, especially if you can't see (which is why there's VFR and IFR flying: VFR for when you can see, IFR for when you can't and have to fly by instrument). You have to plot out a course beforehand, taking into account airspace, navigation hazards, etc. You have to make sure you're flying higher than the terrain (not a problem with commercial jets usually, but it is with smaller craft that fly much lower), and you have to make sure you're where you're supposed to be. You can't just fly through Class B airspace (over any major city) without following the correct rules and procedures and being at the right altitude, following tower instructions, etc. For IFR flying, you have to follow established routes. It's all quite complicated, and takes pilots a while to learn. It takes a reasonably-intelligent person at least a year or two to learn all this stuff (maybe less, depends on how much time they can dedicate to it); there's no way an average moron on the street could figure this stuff out and pass an FAA exam. Even after all this, licensed pilots (esp. the private ones) screw up all the time.

Sure, if you made an aircraft fairly easy-to-fly with some heavy computer assistance (the way $100M military planes have computer assistance to make them stable in flight, like the B2), and took away ALL air traffic, an average moron might be able to pilot a plane around decently. But add in all the rules, and all the extra traffic, they'd be crashing into each other constantly. It's already fairly crowded up there, and that's with just commercial traffic and a very small number of private pilots (relative to population); imagine adding millions of regular people; it'd be a mess.

Re:We have flying cars.

[GigG]

Well they don't everything a "flying car" would do. Like ever being a car.

Re:We have flying cars.

[Anonymous Coward]

Another short sighted post. -If- there is a sufficient energy source made available then gravity becomes only a nuisance. We have plenty of ways of overcoming gravity for a bit, but they all require tremendous amounts of energy.

so for a flying car we only need two things:

* a very very very cheap source of concentrated energy
* intelligent traffic systems (AI or some other form of automation) that is also cheap

Until these are available welfare queens will not be able to live their dream of receiving welfare while talking on their government paid for cell phones, heading with a carload of broodlings for the local mcdonalds. Simple as that.

Re:We have flying cars.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sikorsky X2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_X2

Re:We have flying cars.

[Anonymous Coward]

You disregard human differences in this regard, some people are far more talented at flying helicopters than your average citizen. Until it's as easy to drive as a car with computer programmed routes, people will not be flying any cars whatsoever. adding another dimension would only confuse them and give them exponentially more ways to kill each other. No this isn't going to happen until it's basically automated so much that you don't have to say much more than "Siri, take me to the post office to pick up my welfare check and put on spongebob for the broodlings"

Re:We have flying cars.

[Grishnakh]

Absolutely wrong.

For one thing, go to any helicopter school and ask if everyone finishes. They don't. There's lots of people who wash out, because they simply can't handle it. Either they're too slow, and they run out of money trying to learn because they burn too many hours flying around in circles trying to learn to handle the machine, or they simply give up. Some manage to get a private license (by the skin of their teeth), but aren't able to go any further because they just can't develop the flying skill: the skill you need for the commercial license (and then the CFI license after that) are even greater than what's passable for the private license.

Some people are simply better at hands-on things than other people. Only a moron would deny this simple fact. Some people just can't develop the feel for flying. And yes, there are people who are naturally good at flying helicopters, just like there's people who are naturally good at playing piano, or riding a bicycle, or writing software, or learning multivariable calculus, or being social and charismatic. All of these skills are learned, but some people pick them up much faster than others, while others never can pick them up to a passable level.

Re:We have flying cars.

[Grishnakh]

That's nice, but it's an experimental prototype and was retired last year. With the sluggish pace of technology advancement in the aviation industry these days, I wouldn't expect to see that technology on a typical 4-seat small helicopter any time soon.

However, if you want something similar that you can build at home fairly cheaply, try looking into gyrocopters: they have pusher props too, and get much better fuel efficiency than helicopters. If fitted with a pre-rotator for the main rotor, they can achieve impressively short take-offs, less than 200 feet for a two-seater. The only disadvantages of a gyrocopter (/gyroplane/autogyro) are 1) they can't hover and 2) they aren't truly VTOL (but again, they come close; 200ft max takeoff usually, and much shorter landings than that). For a recreational flyer, they're a better alternative and it's too bad there aren't more of them on the market. Helicopters are indispensable for certain tasks, but for most uses, a gyrocopter would be much more fuel-efficient and also safer (as they're always in autorotation, so you don't have to worry about reacting so quickly if you have an engine failure).

Re:We have flying cars.

[Fred Ferrigno]

For one thing, go to any helicopter school and ask if everyone finishes.

Go to any school that teaches anything and ask if everyone finishes. As you point out yourself, the major factor is running out of money.

What I said is that if helicopters were as cheap as cars, millions more people would learn to fly. Nothing you've said contradicts that. Flying helicopters is hard, no doubt, but it's not so hard that there aren't still millions of people left in the world who could learn to fly but haven't yet.

Some people are simply better at hands-on things than other people.

Yes, because some people devote their time and effort to doing "hands-on things" and consequently become better at it over time. When you see someone who is good at something, the lazy man's clutch is to say, "They can do that because they're naturally talented. I'd never be good at it, so why bother trying?" The truth is that the talented person started out just as untalented, then spent years or decades perfecting the talent.

Re:We have flying cars.

[Grishnakh]

Again, you don't know what you're talking about. You've never flown one yourself, you've never been to a school, you've never known anyone who did. Maybe instead of making up shit, you should listen to people who have more experience than you do. The fact is, a lot of people don't make it. They don't develop the skills.

Lots of people don't become good artists either. They don't have the manual dexterity. Are you going to try to convince me that everyone can become a Michaelangelo? Bullshit.

And who has 20 years to develop the skills that someone else can pick up in 3 months?

There's even people who aren't able to get a driver's license (as easy as that is in the USA) because they can't develop the skills. They're just too stupid. Or in other countries, where the tests are much more stringent (e.g. Germany, where you have to pay $5k to hire an instructor to learn to drive), lots and lots of people don't make it.

Re:We have flying cars.

[Anonymous Coward]

Allow me to disagree.

I am one of those people who are naturally good at things involving coordination and timing, but I've known many people (maybe half?) who JUST ARENT.

I've had friends invite me to come participate in their *insert physical activity*. One was sword fighting, for example. He'd been practising for a year or so, weekly and could not improve his rank in their tournaments no matter how much more he trained and I beat him in the first few hours.

I'ts not a "woohoo I'm awesome" post, because I got my ass handed to me by many other people there. But those were people who had natural talent AND training.

The point is that half of people will hit a ceiling that is barely above the entry-level for someone who is naturally talented at the activity. It is said that 80% of fighter pilots washed out of the U-2 spyplane training program. Even 80% of fighter pilots who have spend 10,000 hours training couldn't fly the U2 because at operational altitude, even at maximum speed it flies on a knife edge of a stall and requires a DAMN skilled pilot to keep it in the air.

It might be a crutch for someone to say "I won't try because I'm not talented", but there is also a lot of truth in pointing out that some people, after 1000 hours of training will be barely better (if any) than others after 10 hours. That's just how it works.

Re:We have flying cars.

[Tablizer]

in their right mind expects hundreds of them to fly together safely through cities with skyscrapers, and land successfully? You'd need technology that makes flying cars about as safe as lifts. Otherwise your city will soon be like a war zone.

Computer control. The precision needed is too much for the average Joe.

NASA's Puffin concept craft can land gently when one of two propellers/engine fails. Under computer control it could find the safest landing area in case of emergency.
     

Re:We have flying cars.

[mcrbids]

As one of those very small numbers of private pilots out there, this has occurred to me many times. Flying a plane is not like driving a car. They aren't even slightly related.

If you have a problem in a car, you slow down or stop. Anybody can do this. But if you have a problem in your plane, and you slow down or stop, you stall and immediately go into free-fall. Generally, you can recover from a stall quite easily, but if done near the ground, you die.

I'm convinced we'd have to get rid of the verbal radio system now in use for ATC in order to scale flying up much at all. Fly over any really busy airspace like LAX and you have frequencies so jammed with traffic that it's 100% talking, no meaningful silence at all. How could you even imagine 10x the traffic, let alone the 100x or so it would take to make flying a commodity?

In my humble opinion, the only way to make private flying a commodity is through extensive use of computer technology. Some type of swarm-based algorithm over radio based on proximity. With a combination of self-announce technology coupled with radar-backed verification, such a system could be highly reliable.

Re:We have flying cars.

[TheLink]

LOL, and you'll be faster than Usain Bolt if you only practice harder and longer?

Fact is some things are harder than others. If you have to spend decades trying, you'll find you'd have got older and slower, and you'll have to accept that you'd never be good enough. If your fingers aren't even half as fast enough after 5 years of practising you're never going to be a great concert pianist (or a great tetris player: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHTO5PxCr98 ).

The day helicopters or other flying vehicles have AIs in control of them and humans use the AIs like a rider riding a horse, then maybe everyone can fly them. But until then it'll be a stupid idea to have tens of thousands of people flying through cities - they just aren't good enough to do that safely. Put thousands of average drivers in helicopters/flying-cars and your city will be like a war-zone, devastated buildings and craters everywhere (unless someone invents very effective shields).

Look at the drivers on the road, many can't stay in their lanes, or even park properly. Good luck getting them to land a helicopter running low on fuel, on a landing pad 20 storeys up, in gusty conditions. With current technology screwing up in the air is still a lot worse than screwing up on the ground.

One day flying vehicles might be ready for humans. But meanwhile most humans aren't good enough for current helicopters.

Nathan Myrvhold

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy is a serious self-promoter. Makes Eric Raymond look like an amateur.

Microsoft blew it.

[Karmashock]

Windows mobile was really pretty great for when it came out. It had decent integration with office, a more extensive library of programs then any competing system, and a similar structure to windows in many respects. It even had a registry.

But MS blew it. They didn't take the platform seriously and they left it to rot on the vine.

That said, lets not forget that what is really making apple so strong here is itunes. And that isn't MS's mistake so much as it is the content providers. Apple is eating the publishing industry and nibbling on MS, motorola, and a few other companies. But indifferent to apple's successes, MS screwed up on windows mobile.

Re:Microsoft blew it.

[TemporalBeing]

Windows mobile was really pretty great for when it came out. It had decent integration with office, a more extensive library of programs then any competing system, and a similar structure to windows in many respects. It even had a registry.

But MS blew it. They didn't take the platform seriously and they left it to rot on the vine.

That said, lets not forget that what is really making apple so strong here is itunes. And that isn't MS's mistake so much as it is the content providers. Apple is eating the publishing industry and nibbling on MS, motorola, and a few other companies. But indifferent to apple's successes, MS screwed up on windows mobile.

Well, it wasn't simply that Microsoft blew it - it was that they didn't want mobile to take off. They released WinCE to combat mobile - yes, they did an okay job in the initial delivery, but it was always about pushing the Windows Desktop design onto the devices - despite the fact that the Windows Desktop just would not fundamentally work on those device. They did enough to keep mobile from taking off until Apple and Google/OHA came around and released their respective platforms and completely decimated any ability of Microsoft (in part due to the Antitrust finding) to keep mobile under wraps any longer.

If Microsoft did not try to destroy mobile the way they did, then things like iPhone/iPod and Android would probably have been around 10 years or more earlier than they did. However, Microsoft chose to try to use its Windows Desktop monopoly to protect itself, and pushed WinCE to destroy the mobile environment. Malicious? You bet.

Just one of many ways that Microsoft held the markets back (destroying innovation) to try to further its own interests.

Re:Microsoft blew it.

[Karmashock]

All of that is true but it isn't for lack of processing power... at least now. THe average smart phone is faster then most of the windows desktops over the last 20 years.

If MS got real about stripping the OS down to brass tacks... JUST what was needed and nothing more to retain compatability. And then throw in a custom interface and possibly some limited system services that are seen as required...

I appreciate that phones go into sleep mode at the snap of the fingers and come out again. Clearly it would have to be tweaked. But I think at the very ABSOLUTE LEAST a windows mobile phone should be able to emulate a windows environment with decent performance.

We have quad core phones now... I'm not expecting anything amazing... WIndows 3.1 level graphics would be fine at least for a demo. THe point is to get the cross compatibility. And once you have a non-linux phone running desktop applications it will be a game changer.

Re:Microsoft blew it.

[TemporalBeing]

But I think at the very ABSOLUTE LEAST a windows mobile phone should be able to emulate a windows environment with decent performance.

We have quad core phones now... I'm not expecting anything amazing... WIndows 3.1 level graphics would be fine at least for a demo. THe point is to get the cross compatibility. And once you have a non-linux phone running desktop applications it will be a game changer.

The point is that the Windows Environment is not suitable for the mobile platform. Windows Desktop as an environment just doesn't fit mobile or how mobile works. Android and iOS in the current generation, and Palm, RIM, and Symbian in the previous generation were all successful because they embraced mobile for what it is - they embraced how mobile functions, and how users use mobile - things that very contrary to the Windows Environment, even the design of Windows at its heart.

Now the interesting twist with Windows 8 is that Microsoft is trying to do the exact opposite of what it has done historicallly - instead of pushing desktop to mobile, they're trying to push their (failed) mobile platform to the desktop; however, this will really only cost them even more of their desktop market share - yes, it's going to be a big flop - the biggest they ever made, and if they can't recover from it with Win9, it'll cost them the company. But expect Win9 to be more like Win7 than Win8 due to how big a flop Win8 will be - they'll be trying to recover their desktop status with Win9 while continuing to lose out on mobile.

Of course, it's interesting that the one company that they paid off to push WP7, is now burning through its cash (under the leadership of a Ex-Microsoft Executive), and months away from being in good stating for bonds it sells to having them relegated to junk bond status. They'll probably only survive that by ousting the Ex-Microsoft leadership, and going wholesale to Android; but they'll have lost significant market share that they won't likely be able to recover in the process. (Don't expect Microsoft's biggest shareholder who is stationed there to adopt any other platform under his watch either.)

Re:Microsoft blew it.

[Karmashock]

While I think you make a lot of good points. I don't think your comments are that constructive on the matter. I don't say that to be critical. Merely, that rather then dismissing the whole attempt, you should say what they specifically did wrong and how to fix it.

The notion that the interface doesn't work on for mobile is irrelevant. The interface isn't the OS. The interface is a skin thrown over the OS. Take explorer out of windows and OS still works. I think it would be possible to strip out the GUI from desktop windows and fit it with a Mobile GUI. it would be a big deal especially in the corporate world if they could push their software directly on to a mobile without having to recode it. Companies are not writing apple Apps for their internal use. They might waste their time with that for customers but for internal use... they'll sooner push everything to a web/cloud service. And that only works when the internet is up which if you're in a mobile environment is spotty. Even in New York... get on a subway...

Either apple or MS or some palatable version of Linux needs to hit the phone. We need these devices to have a grown up OS for grown up programs.

Re:Microsoft blew it.

[TemporalBeing]

While I think you make a lot of good points. I don't think your comments are that constructive on the matter. I don't say that to be critical. Merely, that rather then dismissing the whole attempt, you should say what they specifically did wrong and how to fix it.

I've been more pointing to the history of Microsoft with mobile than anything else. WinPhone7/Win8 is their first real departure from that history. And really, the only reason they are in the position they now find themselves in is due to that history - shunning mobile in preference for the Desktop, and trying to force the Desktop environment into mobile. That is all.

The notion that the interface doesn't work on for mobile is irrelevant. The interface isn't the OS. The interface is a skin thrown over the OS. Take explorer out of windows and OS still works. I think it would be possible to strip out the GUI from desktop windows and fit it with a Mobile GUI. it would be a big deal especially in the corporate world if they could push their software directly on to a mobile without having to recode it.

But that's the point. Microsoft's history has been until WinPhone7 trying to put the Desktop interface on mobile devices. This is broken from the view that the desktop environment does not really do well for touch style interface, requires too much screen realestate to support, and just plain doesn't scale for the various form factors.

WinPhone7's (and Win8's) Metro interface is the first move from that. However, it too is not what users are looking for. It's a step in the right direction for them in that they are finally realizing that the Desktop environment doesn't fit. But it'll be a while before they really get it right. It did differentiate them; but that differentiation hasn't helped them either.

About the only thing MS did right with WinPhone's app-store was allowing FOSS applications to by-pass the rest of the store restrictions if their license was OSI approved - but they only did that because they are so far behind and desprately need developers on the platform (which is still not happening).

Companies are not writing apple Apps for their internal use. They might waste their time with that for customers but for internal use... they'll sooner push everything to a web/cloud service. And that only works when the internet is up which if you're in a mobile environment is spotty. Even in New York... get on a subway...

Either apple or MS or some palatable version of Linux needs to hit the phone. We need these devices to have a grown up OS for grown up programs.

I will grant you that it is unlikely that corporate IT are unlikely to deliver apps for iOS. However, I would be surprised if they were not in some form doing so for Android as it is relatively easy to add a new app-store to Android (it's a configuration option) so they could easily do so for their own internal app-store on devices they provide to employees.

Now, I wouldn't expect SMBs to be doing this; but the Large and Enterprise IT departments to be doing so - companies like Northrop Grumman, IBM, Oracle, HP, or even gov't entities (e.g. DISA, DoD).

Way before 1991

[fiziko]

Look at the tablet and portable phone technology from any incarnation of Star Trek or other popular sci-fi. The concept has been around for decades. The technological infrastructure to support a device that appeals to the general public didn't exist until very recently. Look at the wireless data speeds and network demands of today's smart phones: there's no practical way to have gotten them on the market sooner.

Handheld PC-clones of the 90's

[shoppa]

In fact there were many companies making battery powered, wireless connected, handheld PC-clones in the 90's.

Where I saw them, they most commonly were used on local wireless networks in industrial/warehouse/trucking settings but I also know they were being used in some retail and manufacturing settings. The wireless local area networks back in the early 90's were in reality not much more than radio channels with analog modems.

They had small text displays and ran MS-DOS applications that were hardcoded to the proprietary wireless network. Certainly nothing like a real network stack.

Part of the difficulty is that AFAIK they were never usable as phones and barely usable as data network devices in the wide-area sense. The "data network" concept with cellphone networks in the early 90's was exquisitely awkward in the US, with the most common access method being to have an analog modem hooked up to the cellphone network (which was all analog in the early 90's and just beginning to move to digital in the late 90's) and you called your ISP's phone number. That was really super sucky.

Certainly Windows CE had some concepts that were more high-minded than the custom-built MS-DOS applications, but in most ways it was even more sucky to the end user (who just wanted to run the same application over and over again, scanning barcodes, taking inventory, etc.) I think it's not even ironic that even Apple is having a hard time making inroads into these single-purpose applications with their multi-purpose iPhone/iPad platforms; the specialized platforms being used in this area for the past 20 years are not sold on computing buzzwords or brand cachet but on pure utility.

lets assume it is true

[ILongForDarkness]

Roll back to 1992. How fast were data connnections for mobile devices at the time? How many people had cell phones? 7M according to: http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/BogusiaGrzywac.shtml versus 327M now. The market wasn't that big, the data would suck, lets be realistic touch screens would not be very good back then as would the resolution (heck computers were probably running 1024X768 so what would a cell phone sized screen be?).

I love how whenever someone comes out with something that pushes the edge of what is economically feasible someone pipes up and says "but I had a screen in my lab 10 years ago that was this good" or whatever. Yeah you had a single screen, with a team of grad students to operate it at a cost of 10's of thousands likely.

Another one that happens is people say "yeah but we'd get a large amount of volume and the costs will go down fast". How fast? How many of the 7M people with phones already would be willing to drop their old phone and drop another 1k or so on a phone? In the mean time you bleed red ink in hopes that something good will happen ... later ... somehow. Heck MS revenue was only 2.7B for 1992, they now do ~70B. It would have cost them a large portion of their revenue (not even counting whatever their actual profit is on the revenue) to develop the phone and a large number of people. Instead they locked down a virtual monopoly of desktop OS space which at the time was a much, much larger market. Good choice IMHO.

Many similar devices existed

[billcarson]

Around 2000, I had one of these.
Technically speaking, it could do the same as a modern smartphone can do nowadays, but these things didn't catch on until there was faster mobile internet access.

Hmmm...

[drobety]

It looks rectangular with round corners, and a flat black screen...

Re:Hmmm...

[olau]

Hah, infrared sensor for wireless access.

So?

[xyourfacekillerx]

It's not like the idea alone wasn't pitched around to a thousand companies since 1980. And then after TNG came out, and it was technically feasible to produce such a device, and everyone thought about how to make one, it's not like a WORKING idea didn't emerge which was pitched around to a thousand companies since 1991.

So I'm not sure the point of the post. Is it MS fucked up somehnow? Is this some attempt to bash MS? Cos MS always fucks up, according to Slashdot, right? That's why I get minus points, called a troll and flamebait, when I say something pro-MS around Slashdot? (Or when I complain about being mislabelled a trolll and flamebait.) I mean just cos MS passed up on it doesn't mean a thing about MS since a t housand other companies also passed up on it. MS didn't fuck up, they just didn't have the benefit of the retrospective determinism we have now looking back to then - the truth is such a device had no business existing in 1991 and would have been a bad BUSINESS move. MS was struggling just to push its core competency (OS and dev tools) at the time, remember? They didn't have the power to buy up patents in unproven markets with technologies that were hardly worth the effort at the time?

So really, what is the point of this post? Cos really all I get walking from it is "MS Sucks somehow, reason 0xFF49"

Retail price 400-1000?

[geogob]

'It is pretty easy to imagine a $400 to $1,000 retail price.' says the quote. Why do I find that absurd? He could simply have said "I have no clue how much it might have cost". That would have been a bit more honest, I think. Lets think about it for a second. Not only is this bracket very large, it also enclose most of the iPhone configuration sold on the market today. Looking back at the price of other similar devices at that time, I think 400$ is a laughable underestimation. Moreover if you had hopped to achieve a form factor similar than today's smart phone. I would have said more over 1000$, probably closer to 2000$.

I also have a hard timing finding how this could have fitted in with the product lines and philosophy of Microsoft at the beginning of the '90.

Re:Retail price 400-1000?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Cost != retail price.

Re:Retail price 400-1000?

[geogob]

As the quote said, '...retail price.'. But thanks for pointing that out and enlighting us.

1991: HP95 Palmtop PC

[neurocutie]

In 1991, HP introduced the HP95 palmtop PC, a small pocketable computer running DOS. Within a few years they would also release the HP100 and HP200lx. These units were quite popular and did much of what smartphones do today, except of course the phone part. They could do email, spreadsheets, WP, etc, and wince they ran DOS, could do just about anything available, include running Windows 2/3, Word, even web browsers, Usenet clients, Telnet, FTP, etc. They were an important forerunner to the PDAs, Psions (Symbian), Palms, etc which in turn gave rise to the first real smartphones. They also themselves mutated from DOS palmtops to run MS WinCE, which were the forerunners of Windows Mobile PDAs and smartphones.

Not this again

[Anonymous Coward]

MS had smartphones years before the iPhone. Not one year, not two years, windows CE which was for portable 'iPhone like devices' came out in 1996. 11 years before the first iPhone.

MS sucks at marketing. They could have had the exact same device as the iPhone 4s in 1996 for free without a contract and somehow figured how to make it run at 4g speeds and give it all the apps the iPhone currently has (magic I know) and still not sold more than a few thousand.

MS more interested in crushing GO Inc

[Locutus]

Read the book "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure" by Jerry Kaplan and tell me that Microsoft had any real interest in developing hand held devices and was not in the game to crush the those creating the market? Pen for Windows or whatever they called it was mocked up and presold and marketed to destroy GO Inc. After they succeeded there it floundered. Just as Windows CE was created to keep Palm from growing into a desktop threat and then floundered, like how MS IE was created to destroy Netscape Navigator and then floundered.

So it is no surprise they would not attempt to create anything like Myhrvold might have envisioned because it wasn't needed to crush GO Inc. They were not concerned with Apple and its Newton(another GO Inc product spin-off) when it came about shortly after the GO Inc and Microsoft partnership.

I also don't believe Microsoft would have been willing to create the required OS platform for such a device to be successful. Again, read the book as it explains how even back then, it was all about Windows and pushing EVERYTHING and EVERYONE to that OS/env platform.

LoB

Bullsh*t

[multi io]

Wait, so Myhrvold conceived an "iPhone-like device" by imagining some kind of gadget that had a clock, contacts, calendar and email? By that standard, Palm Inc. not only conceived, but actually designed and built an "iPhone-like device", called it "Palm Pilot" and sold it by the millions. Hooray.

Old News

[Anonymous Coward]

MC Uses Time Machines Irresponsibly already gave Bill Gates his iPhone in 1973

http://youtu.be/GJ5M6qViacQ?hd=1&t=1m48s

Step one...

[Cute Fuzzy Bunny]

...have a billion dollar fortune 50 company be in existence for 30+ years.

Step 2: Dig up any one of the hundreds of thousands of people who worked there who had an idea once that someone in the company shot down, bonus points if its a CxO level character and full bonus if its someone that lots of people have heard of.

Step 3: Profit? Does anyone think that a smartphone like product in the days before cell networks were fleshed out, could carry data at more than an actual snails pace and a nascent internet would be of interest to anyone at all for any reason? Yeah, me neither. People dont buy smartphones because they spontaneously polish your knob at random intervals, they buy them to access apps, data and content. And none of that existed in 1991 and probably wouldnt havent flown in 2001 either.

So microsoft was smart to tell Nathan 'no' when they did and they'd have been smart to do it ten years later. The infrastructure simply wasnt there. The iphone succeeded because they offered a full content solution bundled with it (itunes, app store) and we had a well developed internet infrastructure for it to fit into.

Cart, horse.

Microsoft would have been even smarter to not try and foist a windows based offering when they did do a phone. I dont really want windows on my PC, and I sure as hell dont need it on a phone. We already have two working phone operating systems. Lets put our time and money behind those instead of creating more 3rd and 4th options that'll never succeed. Ask RIMM, Nokia and HP about it, they've experienced the joys. Oh wait, dont ask Nokia, they were stupid once in this regard and chose to fix their stupidity by choosing the #3 option. Sell any of their stock that you're holding while its still worth something.

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

All of these companies are stupid for not building my spaceship idea. meh.

Different world back in 1990

[gorfie]

I'm sorry, but the technology was very different back in 1990. I remember a world with gray-scale gameboys and $2000 386 machines with 40MB hard drives boasting a screen resolution of 640x480. Phones were mounted to cars or carried around in bags.

Imagine a hand-held touch-screen device using technology from 1990. It would be bulky and heavy. It would run very hot. It would have terrible graphics capabilities and you wouldn't have a popular market place for developers to share their work.

It would have failed miserably.

The PDA to PMP transition

[tepples]

To get an iPhone, you need, you know, a Phone function - which this "vision" didn't have.

But did this "vision" include a Pod touch (i.e. PDA/PMP) function? Had Microsoft provided some sort of migration path between Pocket PC and Zune, Zune might not have failed as hard as it did.

yea ok

[Osgeld]

they could have bought a vuege idea and a picture, the reality of it though is in 1991, that thing in the sketch is about as big as JUST the battery of my celphone, chips were thich enough to measure with a ruler, and LCD's were still garbage and still expensive. So what they passed on vaporware, its not like having a phone like that helped the ones who actually developed something similar (IBM)

WP7 is a JOKE

[Anonymous Coward]

No Bluetooth, no lite db storage, no side loading etc

NO USE TO EMBEDDED or IN THE FIELD data capture applications.

MSFT no longer want INDUSTRY to use Windows Mobiles, they want them to use ANDROID.

Android win, Microsoft lose.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

[Anonymous Coward]

Myhrvold made his millions anyway.

Thank goodness for Steve Jobs, who actually wanted to make a difference.

In 1991 GPS was military only

[Anonymous Coward]

So you are right. This is mostly BS.

Woulda

[Stan92057]

Woulda,Coulda,Shoulda but didnt. Life goes on.....

Myhrvold predicted the iPhone - WHA !!!!

[dgharmon]

`In 1991, Myhrvold predicted the emergence of the iPhone down to the smallest detail' link

I'm quite frankly amazed as to why at the time, he didn't patent the innovation ?

And no one would have wanted an iPhone in

[nedlohs]

1991. Well OK not "no one" but certainly not a large market. At that time there was no mp3, there was no WWW, heck most people didn't have email.

And of course the device shown in the drawing is almost the opposite of an iphone. Overlapping windows. No touch. It's not an iphone it's a PDA - which already existed at that time. The Psion Series 3 was being sold in 1991 - not just having vague drawings of a rectangular box being drawn. Apple was already working on the Newton.

pre-inventing the iPhone :)

[dgharmon]

While they were about pre-inventing the iPhone couldn't Microsoft have figured out how to render colored animated shapes on my screen without exposing my bank account details to some anonymous eastern European hacker.

Doing it right is another matter

[ssladam]

I'm so sick of these examples from tech companies having a chance at some game-changing technology years earlier. "Sony had a draft for the iPod in the 80's".... "IBM had a tablet computer in the 80's, but couldn't sell them".... and on and on. At some point people will realize that it doesn't matter about being FIRST. It matters if you do it RIGHT. People forget that the iPod wasn't the first MP3 player. The market was flooded with 100 different crap brands. What solidified the iPad was the fact that it was a good, easy to use device.

It's easy to have a good idea. But if you really want to change the world you need to have a product that's high quality, low barriers to entry, free from any major defect, and delivers what the customer wants without punishing them with any draconian features. And *that* is why it's so hard to deliver good tech. "Hey guys, I've got an idea for a music player!" is easy. But hitting all those requirements... that's the hard part.

windows DID pursue smart phones.....

[davydagger]

windows phone was the only option for what is now known as "smart phones", back when Windows CE tablets became PDA alternatives in the late 90s. Then PDAs like the palm, and CE started getting cell modems built in. They where all terrible, and similar but more primative types of hardware we see today in all smart phones.

Few remember old windows phones fondly.

Then we get to tablets. the only diffrence between large tablets and small tablets is the size of the screen and casing.

Just remember Compaq had its iPaq(running windows) long before apple thought of the iPad(or iPhone)

What about Psion?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am the owner of a Psion 3a which I bought in 1991. By coincidence, I just replaced the batteries in it today, for giggles. Looking at this picture, it almost seems like Nathan was looking at a Psion when he copied, I mean independently dreamed up and then drew up this picture. If you look at at the apps/icons in his sketch and then compare that to what was implemented/available on the Psion around that time, it's pretty amazing how close the comparison is.

(Seriously! check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3)

Given Myhrvold's role/responsibilities at Microsoft, I would think that he would almost be embarrassed for not having produced more than this? Maybe all the juicy details and prototypes from his efforts are buried away in the nooks and crannies of MS's campus? Or maybe they just got lost in Bill Gate's sock drawer?

Mike Wallace, we miss you! (This, sincerely.)
         

They didn't have Steve Jobs

[Tony Isaac]

Nobody knew they needed an iPhone until Steve Jobs told them they needed it. Can you imagine Bill Gates telling everyone they need to get this new whiz-bang phone that can play music and games and run all kinds of "apps" (that need to first be approved by Microsoft staff)? Yeah right! In 1991, even the Blackberry hadn't been invented yet!

Microsoft could have made the hardware, but it would have been about as successful as the Zune.

Flying Car

[Tablizer]

Technology has to progress to certain points before ideas are feasible. A good example of where it hasn't would be flying cars. Idea has been around forever, prototypes have been built, nothing has happened. Why? Because the technology isn't there. It isn't an idea problem, it is a tech problem. We'd need some major new propulsion/levitation tech before that sort of thing would be feasible.

Ideas like NASA's electric vertical-takeoff Puffin could make personal commute flying machines feasible. What's missing is the infrastructure, such as designated landing spaces and computer-control towers/centers to avoid collisions and help with emergency landings.

It doesn't require anti-gravity breakthroughs or anything like that, just some city planning and seed funding. It's within reach.

not actually a phone

[pbjones]

Did I miss something? it doesn't mention phone as a feature in the diagram, so it's just a PDA or handheld Computer, an idea that wasn't really unique at the time.

I invented the iPhone proof on slashdot in 2005 !

[backslashdot]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163341&cid=13644457

Do NOT read this as "Microsoft could have..."

[HnT]

Do NOT read this as "Microsoft could have made the iPhone and not just let Apple do it"! Because they definitely tried dabbling in that market quite some time (years) with their Windows Mobile and CE and Pocket PCs in the very late 90s/turn of the millenium and with the HP/Compaq iPaq they even had a "nice" touch-device and it still sucked pretty hard. They were trying way too hard to give you a portable Windows with Start menu and everything and they failed to realize this doesn't work on a small device like that.

So Apple's claim to fame and success with the iPhone isn't so much a technological "paradigm-shift" as it shows how important trying at the right time is (and Apple tried before as well, and failed) and they sure tried at a time when a lot of technologies were "ready". And it shows they understood how to make a small "paradigm shift" happen in the way we want to use those devices - they actually came up with something that works on a portable device and weren't trying to just plug you a smaller MacOSX.

Removable Media?

[Anonymous Coward]

The picture shows a "Slot For Removable Media".

How is this at all like an iPhone?

It's more a consumer toy at this point.

[Karmashock]

... I think this touches on the issue to some extent:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4EbCkotKPU

Companies need control if they're going to rely on it. They can't have it not work.

As to really big companies possibly coming up with their own Roms for certain phone models... sure. But they don't need android for that. Those companies would probably be even happier to just make it from scratch and not bother with foreign code that wasn't designed for application.

  The only way the mobiles are interacting with the corporate system right now is through webpages which will work with just about anything. The companies are comfortable with that. But that application is also fairly limited. It requires internet access like a PC requires electricity. Pull the internet and it's dead.

Whatever, it's not like Apple is making their money by winning over the business community. They're making it in the consumer market. It's a toy. A really great toy.

But the desktop is so much more then that. Until the mobile platform opens up such that it can become anything... it won't be competing.