

Steve Jobs single-handedly restructured the mobile industry - prosa
http://cdixon.org/2010/06/06/steve-jobs-single-handedly-restructured-the-mobile-industry/

======
cheald
Apple did a lot to start to bring the US up to speed with the rest of the
world in terms of mobile technology, yes, and it certainly deserves praise for
the success that the iPhone has been, but what Apple provided was a usable
platform. "Smartphones" before then had been slow, ugly, generally not that
sexy, and it's hard to excite people about your mobile software when they
aren't even excited about their hardware. The iPhone did do a lot to help
bring mobile software to the average consumer, but the notion that it did it
in a vacuum is silly. There were lots of technologies that paved the way for
the iPhone to be a success before it. Apple did not singlehandedly invent the
concept of the smartphone, nor was it the first to introduce usable mobile
computing platforms to consumers. RIM was doing that long before Apple ever
had a thought of entering the mobile game.

The author simultaneously praises Apple for the single-handed
creation/salvation of an entire industry, and then turns around and says
"Android's only great because it's stood on the shoulders of giants". Boy,
that's a convenient bit of selective application of history.

> Yes, Apple has rejected some apps for seemingly arbtrary or selfish reasons
> and imposed aggressive controls on developers. But the iPhone also paved the
> way for Android and a new wave of handset development. The people griping
> about Apple’s "closed system" are generally people who are new to the
> industry and didn’t realize how bad it was before.

Now this is just silly. The people that gripe about Apple's "closed system"
are people who know how bad it was, and are frustrated that Apple is repeating
many of the "closed system" problems that made mobile software so terrible in
the first place. The iPhone is a marvelous device, but it's completely
disingenuous to praise the iPhone for bringing accessibility to a "closed
market" and then in the same breath to hand-wave its own closed nature away.
It's better than the previous iterations; that doesn't make its iteration
"best". The people who are frustrated with the closed nature of the platform
are people who have tasted how good an accessible platform can be, and who are
frustrated at the roadblocks that Apple has placed in their way.

I love the iPhone - it's a marvelous piece of hardware, and I absolutely
acknowledge that it thoroughly changed the landscape of mobile consumer
computing in the US, but I own an Android phone because Apple's policies make
me hesitate to buy into a platform that is locked down and guarded by one
man's whims, or to financially support a company that is so xenophobic and who
actively and aggressively stifles competition. I own an Android phone not
because I forget how bad older-school mobile software was (to write,
distribute, obtain, run, the whole pipeline), but because I remember clearly
how bad the old system was, and to have a phone in my hand that I can do just
nearly anything I want with is a very welcome relief and advancement from the
mobile platforms of yore.

~~~
ovi256

      Apple did not singlehandedly invent the concept of the smartphone
    

Neither did the Wright brothers invent the concept of a plane, but they will
be forever remembered as its inventors because they build the first plane that
flew. So will be Apple, for building the first smartphone that _really_ took
off in the market. The concept was not new, and there were dozens of attempts
before, but none that _flew_.

~~~
nhooey
The iPhone was not the first smartphone that _really_ took off, Blackberry
was. They were dominating before Apple arrived.

I would guess that most of the confusion around this point is that Apple's
rate of adoption was high given that it came so late into the game, satisfying
a part of the market that wasn't before. Apple also has the most marketing,
and adoption in the _consumer_ market specifically.

There are tons of businesses that deploy blackberries to a substantial portion
of their staff, this is not true with iPhone and is unlikely to change.

One can probably find the numbers if they look, I've only got anecdotal
experience for now.

------
wvenable
> In the US, before the iPhone, the carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile)
> had an ironclad grip on the rest of the value chain – particularly, handset
> makers and app makers.

This is like one of those myths where if you say it enough time, people start
to believe it. There were tons of smartphones available before the iPhone that
let you install any software that you wanted. My first smartphone was the Sony
Ericsson P800 and it was released in 2002! I had to change carriers to use to,
too.

The original iPhone was a great device with a wonderful interface, but it
wasn't the invention of the smartphone. It did, however, sell the mainstream
consumer market on smartphones. (The business market was long sold on the
Blackberry).

The author isn't completely wrong -- the explosive growth of smartphones (and
not just iPhones) has completely changed the equation. Before, everyone _was_
trying to get on the carriers dumb phones but even if they succeeded it would
mostly be a waste of time -- the phones were just too dumb and nobody cared
about the crappy experience they provided.

There is way too much credit to Apple and Steve Jobs here.

~~~
dieterrams
You might be able to install any software you want, but the on-phone app
stores and what they carry have been controlled by the carriers. That's the
primary distribution channel, and the one largely responsible for providing
app makers with the financial incentive to make apps.

~~~
wvenable
Before the iPhone, smartphones didn't have on-phone app stores. You
downloaded/purchased your applications off the web just like you do on your
desktop. There was a good market for software for smartphones with lots of
developers and distributors. The article would have us believe that none of
that existed before Steve Jobs but that's just not true.

Dumb phones had carrier stores (and their firmware heavily customized).
However, nobody I know has ever bought app for their regular 'dumb' mobile
phone. Even the apps that were for free (like music players) were so horrible
that they usually went unused.

~~~
dieterrams
Really? Granted, I never paid much attention to smart phones before the
iPhone, but I find it hard to believe that none of them had on-phone app
stores.

At any rate, games on dumb phones were definitely making money (I remember
reading plenty of articles about how mobile phone gaming was getting huge pre-
iPhone), and if you wanted to sell your dumb phone game, you had to go through
the carriers.

~~~
wvenable
> but I find it hard to believe that none of them had on-phone app stores.

They didn't. Carriers didn't really do too much to smartphones -- there was
some customization (theme, background picture, etc) but that was it. Software
is (and was) sold just as it is on the desktop.

> if you wanted to sell your dumb phone game, you had to go through the
> carriers.

There were tons of high quality games available for smartphones (including
from big firms like EA) years before the iPhone was released. There was no on-
phone store and you didn't have to go through the carrier.

The iPhone popularized the smartphone, changing the equation from the dumb
phone to the smartphone. But if Apple didn't do it, someone else would have --
Android was in development (and already purchased by Google) years before the
iPhone was released, for example.

~~~
vlad
You are incorrect. Carrier-provided app stores existed.

Here's a forum post from 2005 asking about the Sprint Store native app on the
Treo 650, released a year earlier. As an owner of the phone, I had seen it and
used it myself.

<http://www.sprintusers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63071>

~~~
wvenable
That's right, I do remember the Sprint store -- but then I wasn't on sprint
and it was still completely optional. I'm not sure it was ever much of a
success.

~~~
vlad
Thanks for your response. Yes, but starting two posts by writing that there
were absolutely no on-phone app stores, was misleading.

------
Hovertruck
I doubt I'm smart enough to work for Apple, but I doubt I'd ever want to. Why?

Everything the company does is something done "single-handedly" by Steve Jobs.
Steve may be the driving force of the company and have great insight into what
people want/need/etc. But he has a great team to actually implement what he
wants, and Apple as a company are the ones who restructured an industry.

~~~
dieterrams
This isn't Steve Jobs' doing. I don't know how far back it goes, but whenever
Jobs does these presentations, he lets the people in charge of various
projects present them. So Scott Forstall presents new platform features. The
guy who redesigned iMovie presented that. Same for the iWork suite on the
iPad. Jonathan Ives also gets plenty of credit for being Apple's resident
industrial design genius. They're even more prominent in the videos Apple puts
out, and Jobs isn't even in those.

Now all the people who work under these guys aren't getting the spotlight, but
this is the norm pretty much everywhere.

I know that Jef Raskin is frequently cited as the real father of the
Macintosh, and Jobs probably failed to give him his due. That was a much
younger Steve Jobs, though.

~~~
Hovertruck
Well to be fair, I never blamed it on Steve himself. And while it's normal for
the lower level guys to not get recognition, usually it's while the company is
being recognized ("Microsoft releases...", "Nokia develops new..."), whereas
with Apple it's usually attributed to Jobs himself.

~~~
dieterrams
I think that's because whenever Apple releases a major new product, it's Jobs
who personally announces it in a high-profile presentation. And because Jobs
is well known as the CEO of Apple, the press prefers to simply state that Jobs
announced or introduced the product. Partly because it's more factually
accurate, and partly because Jobs is less abstract an entity than Apple while
just as familiar, which is always preferred in writing for large audiences.

Other companies, in contrast, don't have well known CEOs and/or their CEOs
don't bother to personally do the announcing. It seems like most tech products
get announced with a press release. Maybe there's a press kit if they want to
get fancy.

------
jamesbritt
Wasn't this already happening with the Blackberry? If you needed a Blackberry
for business, then you picked the carrier who let you use one.

~~~
danudey
Are there carriers in the US that didn't offer blackberries? All the carriers
in Canada did, and have for years before the iPhone announcement.

------
clark-kent
Before the iPhone, smartphones i used were not locked down. They were open
like the desktop. You could download and install anything you want on them.
But very often some app will drain your battery or crash your phone. Apple had
to lock down their phone to improve user experience. Pre-iPhone you install
apps at your own risk. That was my experience with Windows Mobile.

------
blhack
I'm sorry, the iPhone is a neat phone, but it is far from revolutionary.

Hello...palm pilots? I had a palm m100, then m105, then m500, then zire 71 in
the early 2000s and there were thousands and thousands of apps for them.
Installing them meant connecting it to my PC and transfering them (love that
twee del DEE......TWEE del do sound it would make).

Putting a cell phone into a PDA was an obvious move. Apple didn't invent it,
they were just the first to gain mainstream popularity.

------
watty
Generalizations suck, I don't think the main reason for the iPhone success was
because they had a "closed system".

"The people griping about Apple’s “closed system” are generally people who are
new to the industry and didn’t realize how bad it was before."

~~~
megablast
Not only can you not read, but completely missed the point.

Apples system is closed compared to Android, but it is open compared to what
came before, for most phones. The carriers would lock down handsets so they
couldn't use bluetooth, couldn't download ringtones except from the carrier,
couldn't plug into your computer. They would not start selling a phone unless
it conformed to what they wanted it to do.

~~~
CountSessine
I'll be voted down for this on HN, but unforunately Android is reversing a lot
of this progress. Buy the average Android handset and it has all sorts of
stupid carrier modifications that no end-user would ever have requested. It's
like the crap-ware that PCs have installed with them straight from the
factory, except that you have to do a lot more work to get rid of it.

The iPhone is free of this because Apple's success let them give AT&T the
finger when it came to carrier modifications. As the iPhone loses ground to
Android in the market, expect the pressure on Apple to mount. Would Apple ever
have an AT&T splash screen on the iPhone? They sure wouldn't want to, but if
that's the only way to keep the iPhone on the market, it'll happen. Who knows
how much further it'll go...

------
TotlolRon
_Steve Jobs single-handedly restructured the mobile industry_ as thousands of
Apple employees watched in awe wondering what have they been doing all this
time.

~~~
NathanKP
Right, Steve Jobs may have come up with an idea, but to make it work thousands
of other employees had to design circuit boards, write code, and do the hard
part.

Even as a fan of Mac products I think Steve Jobs gets too much credit. The
idea is the easy part, making it work is the part that should be respected.
Even with respect to the ideas themselves I wonder how much of the iPhone, the
app store, and other innovations were envisioned by Steve Jobs personally, and
how much of it was thought up by other smart engineers and technicians working
for Apple?

For example the iconic Apple power adapter is credited to Steve Jobs, yet
there are 12 names on the patent.
([http://www.google.com/patents?id=C-IOAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...](http://www.google.com/patents?id=C-IOAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4&source=gbs_overview_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false))
So I have to wonder which engineers came up with which aspects.

~~~
houseabsolute
> do the hard part

Relatively speaking: any moron can design a circuit board. What I mean is
that, given a set of inputs and desired outputs, there are probably tens of
thousands of engineers around the world who could design the iPod's circuit
board. Given a set of design principles and a vision, there are probably
hundreds or even thousands of designers around the world who could have come
up with something similar to the iPhone. But how many people can

\- see that vision and

\- gather together the right minds and organize them in such a way that they
implement it?

Most events have compound causes, but Steve Jobs was probably the biggest
member of the cause for the iPhone event.

~~~
sliverstorm
Nobody said he didn't deserve a lot of credit. It's the 'single-handedly' they
are objecting to.

~~~
houseabsolute
In that case, I'd say it qualifies as arguing over semantics since "CEO does
X" is an oft-used stand-in for "CEO leads company to do X."

~~~
ojbyrne
Semantics perhaps, but the phrasing was particularly off-putting in this
article. I know it was the first thing I noticed. I don't think I'd want to
work for Chris Dixon.

~~~
houseabsolute
I am impressed by your making that determination from a single article. That
kind of decisiveness can be useful. Or maybe you have other data.

~~~
ojbyrne
His posts appear regularly here, and I was being polite.

