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On the iPhone and Apple's Meteoric Rise To the Top
zacharye writes "Friday marks five years since the world first got its hands on a smartphone that would turn the industry on its head. In five short years, Apple went from the ground floor to being the most profitable company in the smartphone business by a staggering margin. Apple and Samsung — two companies that weren't even on the smartphone industry's map a few years ago — are now the only two major global vendors making money, and the split was estimated at 80/20 in Apple's favor last quarter. That's 80% of smartphone industry profits in less than five years with just five different smartphone models under its belt during that span."
"Better, faster, stronger," Apple could have easily lifted those Kanye West lyrics for their press release announcing the coming of the iPhone 3GS in 2009.
*facepalm* Sorry, I know its a minor detail, but Daft Punk originally wrote "Better, faster, harder, stronger", and Kanye sampled it (with permission) for his song. They have a cameo in his video, which is an awesome tribute to Akira for those that haven't seen it.
*watches Daft Hands and Daft Bodies on youtube*
"Steve Jobs and his team made a damn fine piece of technology"
Copied. they Copied it from the LG Prada.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
People forget this now, but the iPhone did not support apps when it launched. Jobs didn't want third-party code on the iPhone, and tried to assuage the demand with web-based APIs for accessing phone hardware. App support was only added over a year later with iOS 2, coinciding with the launch of the iPhone 3G, as Apple and Jobs conceded to the inevitable.
The summary says correctly that Apple makes 80% of the profits, not 80% of the phones. Samsung appears to be shipping the most phones, although the only numbers available are estimates of SHIPPED phones, not phones sold to consumers. For some reason, Samsung refuses to release any numbers at all.
It wouldn't be the first time that somebody in Apple went and did something behind Jobs' back anticipating a change of heart. The story of the Sony/Alps situation for the original Mac floppy drive is probably the most famous example.
Jobs loved the new Sony 3.5" floppy drive format, and decided seven months before the Mac was supposed to ship that he wanted to use it... and he wanted that to happen via an Apple/Alps developed-from-scratch clone. The team thought this was insane, so while grudgingly going through the motions with Alps, they secretly continued working on integrating the Sony drive. They kept all the meetings/negotiations/hardware secret from Jobs, to the extent that they would hide the Sony engineer visiting Cupertino in a closet whenever Jobs was nearby. This obviously greatly confused the Sony engineer, but he went along with it.
Later, when Alps told Apple that they needed eighteen months to get the thing ready, the team revealed to Jobs that they had gone behind his back and kept the Sony deal alive, and he ended up thanking them for their little rebellion.
I'm not saying that this is the same situation here, only that what Jobs was convinced was the right approach and what the Apple engineers working on the internal SDK were convinced was the right approach may not have aligned. It's pretty well documented from multiple sources internal to Apple that Jobs was obstinately refusing to consider third-party apps. He didn't want other people messing with his perfection, and he didn't think his team had the bandwidth to figure out how to make it work (in terms of reliability and integration) on top of their existing workload.