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'The Unwillingness To Foresee The Future' (stratechery.com)
An anonymous reader shares a few excerpts from Ben Thompson's analysis: Back in 2006, when the iPhone was a mere rumor, Palm CEO Ed Colligan was asked if he was worried: "We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone," he said. "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in." What if Steve Jobs' company did bring an iPod phone to market? Well, it would probably use WiFi technology and could be distributed through the Apple stores and not the carriers like Verizon or Cingular, Colligan theorized." I was reminded of this quote after Amazon announced an agreement to buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion; after all, it was only two years ago that Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey predicted that groceries would be Amazon's Waterloo. And while Colligan's prediction was far worse -- Apple simply left Palm in the dust, unable to compete -- it is Mackey who has to call Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, the Napoleon of this little morality play, boss. The similarities go deeper, though: both Colligan and Mackey made the same analytical mistakes: they mis-understood their opponents' goals, strategies, and tactics.
It's not really fair to compare anything to a Steve Jobs product. He had the ability to create products with fewer compromises. He started from the idea, "this is what a customer would like to buy," rather than, "this is what our company makes." Even Apple can't make a Steve Jobs product anymore.
In that sense, Bezos did a similar thing when he sent his team back to the drawing board to make one-click purchasing actually work, and Amazon does really well in reducing barriers to purchasing because that's what gets customers to buy. The question is, can Amazon be the place where a sizeable chunk of people buy groceries? Sure, if it's more convenient for a large enough number of people, like scan a UPC off the back of a cereal box, and it shows up at the end of the day today at my house, ready for breakfast tomorrow. People say that's impossible. A Steve Jobs *knows* if it's possible, and if it is then won't stop pushing until his company makes it happen.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
I had to exit at this quote:
Apple’s goal was not to build a phone but to build an even more personal computer; their strategy was not to add on functionality to a phone but to reduce the phone to an app; and their tactics were not to duplicate the carriers but to leverage their connection with customers to gain concessions from them.
I disagree here, this is hindsight and speculative, and the provided link is from 2013. The initial iPhone did not come with a market (the 'iTunes App Store') and AFAIK we don't know for sure if it had been planned from the beginning to pan out the way it did.
I am not trying to play down the success of the iPhone and how it has changed the world. Yes, it was incredibly successful, yes it all panned out nicely. I am just questioning if it was all planned to come out exactly this way from the beginning, or maybe there were some decisions made after initial success and someone came up with even better ideas. Steve Jobs touched junk liberally.
Big Success in the tech market is usually 75% luck. 20% Hard work, and 5% skill.
Palm had a good product at the time, people seem to accept the risks it took using graffiti interface vs. full handwriting recognition (Like apple did on the Newton). It had the features and was priced and had a brand name that was recognizable. Nearly any of these things could had backfired, and Palm wouldn't never had gotten where it got.
However these guys though the numbers were reversed, and they got Palm where it was because they thought they had all these skills. However when they had to go to other work, they really failed, because they were trying to get lucky again. While they were in a more standard market where if you are not lucky you better have more hard work and skill not to win big, but to keep things going.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Most of these people take risks. The nature of risks is they can fail. the iPhone could had failed. Enough people may not have liked the onscreen keyboard. Initially not using G3 for data may had been too slow for their usage. The original iPhone, didn't have 3rd party apps, or the response lag on the touch interface was a bit too laggy for them. A number of design tradeoffs could had just as easily caused the iPhone to fail like the Newton.
The thing is we can't predict the future, or judge the reaction of something new before hand.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That's the point. It's not about the kernel. User's don't see kernels at all, don't care about them. Blackberry certainly learned that lesson. All they spent on QNX and the customers yawned.
The point of having them build on Linux was that rather than investing in kernel development, they could move all of that money to things that mattered to the user experience.
I think around the time I got to HP they had just done a Billion dollar investment in new development of HP/UX. IBM in contrast de-emphasized AIX in favor of Linux, understanding the economics better than HP did. Not that this was HP's only problem.
Bruce Perens.