

Ask YC:  How long will you see IPhone hype? - khurrams

Hi
We are an IPhone application service company that also submitted business model for YC. We see, a lot of hype around IPhone applications currently, and i wanted to inquire how long will we see the IPhone hype. Any clues ?
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noodle
6 months to a year. that will probably be long enough for the industry to
properly catch up, as well as long enough for the shine to fade, turning the
special and new into the standard and expected.

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mechanical_fish
The iPod product line turns seven years old tomorrow. Its share of unit sales
is 70%. Its share of dollars in the MP3 player segment is 84%. The industry
doesn't appear to have "caught up" yet.

Mac OS X turned seven in March, although perhaps it didn't really start taking
over the world until 10.2 or 10.3, in the 2002-2003 timeframe. The "shine" has
not faded. Market share is growing. Microsoft tried to "catch up" in the
shininess battle with Vista, but they swung and missed. The Linux desktop has
a core audience but is conspicuously lacking in "shine" and has so far posed
little threat to the Mac's market.

So my best guess is that the iPhone platform has at least five years of life
in it, maybe more. Maybe much more -- based on what we've seen with Apple's
other products, iPhone has a very good chance of being a _dominant_ platform
in its niche for five years or more. It even has a finite chance of becoming
the basis of a Microsoft-like multi-decade monopoly.

You can, of course, argue that the _hype_ around the phone will never last
that long, just as the hype around Macs and iPods is now over: The "special
and new" has become the "standard and expected". That sounds about right. But
there's a lot of money to be made in being the dominant vendor of a boring
industry standard. Just ask Microsoft.

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noodle
i was purely referring to the hype, not to the platform itself. i'm sure the
platform itself will be around for quite a while.

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jcapote
It's already dying down as far as I can tell...

