
RIM thought iPhone was impossible in 2007 - evo_9
http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/12/27/rim.thought.apple.was.lying.on.iphone.in.2007/
======
ugh
So much for the frequent claim that Apple is all marketing and no new
technology, I guess.

Analysis like that tend to focus on single technologies like capacitive
touchscreens or e-ink displays. Pretty much all the different single
technologies many recent Apple products brought together existed in some way,
shape or form before in consumer products. Single technologies don't make a
product. Oh, and the UI matters. Having the same exact hardware with a better
UI really does matter.

~~~
bayleo
RIM wasn't the first one to be schooled by Apple in the "UI matters" lesson.
Did anyone else own one of those Archos 20gig Jukebox players in 2000?

~~~
tzs
I had an Archos 15 gig when the iPod came out. Although it is now long gone
and I have an iPod 40 gig from a few generations ago, a nano from the tall
thin era, am on my second iPhone and have an iPad, I'll say this for Archos:

It still totally takes any Apple music playing device completely to school
when it comes to classical music.

iPods are really wrapped up in the idea that you have artists, who produce
albums, which contain songs, and if you don't want to organize your collection
around those three dimensions, screw you.

In classical, we want six dimensions, not three: composer, orchestra,
conductor, soloists, composition, and movement or piece within the
composition.

Yes, iPod lets you list by composer. However, that just brings up a list of
songs (tracks). However, most (all?) iPods have arbitrary and small limits on
how long a title can be and still allow you to see everything in it. For
instance, on my Vivaldi list, I see 3 different "Concerto für Laute,
Violi...". If I'm lucky, maybe I can remember that the one I'm looking for is
relatively short, so the 2:06 one is the one I want, not the 3:30 or the 5:03.

Let's compare to my old Archos. With the Archos, one option was to simply put
a directory hierarchy on the device, and then access it via a simple file
browser interface. If you hit "play" in a directory without a particular track
selected, it would play everything in that directory, in alphabetical order.

So, I'd rip each CD into its own directory, with each track file starting with
its track number (padded with a leading 0 if less than two digits). I could
then organize these directories in a tree any way I wanted. For my rock, folk,
and pop, I could use artist/album. For classical I could do
composer/conductor/orchestra/composition for those that did not feature a
soloist. For those with a soloist, I could toss in a directory in there to
organize by soloist.

With the Archos, I _never_ had to fish around to find what I wanted to find.
With iPod I've sometimes spent several minutes trying to find something I
_know_ is there.

BTW, I used the same organization on my desktop machine, and made sure to use
a music player that would handle drag-and-drop reasonably--drop a track on it
and it plays it, drop a directory on it and it plays all tracks in
alphabetical order. Then all I needed was a file browser on the desktop and
music playback was dealt with there, too.

People have made classical work reasonably with iTunes on the desktop, by
repurposing some of the fields. But that doesn't stop the suckage on iPods.

~~~
schrototo
Actually, what you describe doesn't make the Archos brilliant, rather it seems
to me as if it is so simple, that the burden of organization shifts to the
user. Which of course worked out great in your case, and would probably for
most people here, but, in my mind, a _really_ good device would take care of
organization all by itself, in a way that just works.

I too would love to see the iPod improve in areas other than "just" organizing
contemporary music. (Besides classical music, audiobook support for example is
almost ridiculously bad, and even podcast support is lacking in major ways.)

~~~
omaranto
I don't have an Archos (and actually have never seen one) so I don't know but
it's possible it doesn't _force_ you to organize your music yourself: the post
you replied to says _one option_ was to dump a directory hierarchy.

~~~
tzs
Right. They also bundled player software for the PC that would organize things
for you by metadata, and generate playlists to sync to the player that
reflected that organization.

You didn't have to organize your music into directories and manage it yourself
unless you wanted to.

------
aresant
Tough to compete with Apple after they began duplicating their success in UI
design to hardware, manufacturing, elegant chip design with a pointed purpose,
etc.

Apple's most underestimated strength is their continued march towards vertical
integration - buying make the right processor company (PA Semi) and a team of
150 processor gurus to minimize power use, developing a proprietary
manufacturing process to make seamless aluminum notebooks, etc, etc etc.

A good read from 2008 about Apple's strategy . . .
[http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/24/mitra-apple-pasemi-tech-
ent...](http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/24/mitra-apple-pasemi-tech-enter-
cx_sm_0425mitra.html)

~~~
mikeryan
A fun flip side is that you have companies like Vizio who are making a killing
in commoditized electronics who outsource virtually everything and still have
less then 200 employees (About 1/3 are support).

<http://www.vizio.com/about>

~~~
sireat
Had not really noticed Vizio before, seems like an amazing story.

10million revenue per employee is a huge number (as a comparison Apple, Google
had 1 million per employee in 2009, which is already considered on the high
side)

Just doing some casual research: One of the founders had two other monitor
startups (MAG and Princeton Digital) under his belt, so that sort of explains
some of the success. Still, it seems like an amazing achievement to get into
the big retail channels so quickly.

How do they manage to create so much value, while keeping track of all the
outsourcing? Surely, there must be times when things go wrong, really wrong
with the outsourcing.

~~~
poundy
Revenue per employee makes no sense. What makes sense is profit per employee.
Vizio outsources stuff and pays loads to other companies, their profits have a
lower ration that 10 million per employee

Edit: AmTran sometimes swallows shipping costs and pushes component suppliers
to ensure Vizio's products are high quality and on time. AmTran now gets about
80% of its revenue from Vizio. In turn, Vizio sources as many as 85% of its
TVs from AmTran, according to research firm DisplaySearch.

------
nailer
The title is misleading. RIM thought the iPhone 2G was insanely power hungry
and must have terrible battery life.

As an owner of iPhone 2G I attest that was completely true. This is the first
phone I'd ever owned that lasted less than two days.

(Apple themselves even cited battery life as the reason they couldn't do 3G,
and the iPhone 3G, when it did come out, was thicker than the iPhone 2G)

What RIM probably didn't counter is that customers were willing to trade 24
hour charging cycles for an awesome user experience.

~~~
nlawalker
I have never understood why some people find 24-hour charging cycles to be
such a problem. Humans have a 24-hour charging cycle too, and while charging
they are unable to use phones, so I don't see why it's such a trouble to
charge the phone at the same time.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Battery use isn't linear. If 24-hour charging cycles are required for the
_average case_ what that means is that you're limiting use for a lot of normal
cases. Use the phone a bit more than average or have a long period of poor
reception, and then you've exhausted the battery. Which is precisely the case
today, it's trivially easy for anyone to exhaust the battery on a modern
smartphone in much less than a day.

In contrast, a phone that requires charging every week, for example, you'll
tend to keep at a higher total charge and will survive periods of heavier
usage better.

That's not dismissing the fact that most people are willing to accept the
tradeoffs of modern smartphone battery life, but make no mistake the necessity
of daily recharging for average use is a problem.

~~~
jolan
> it's trivially easy for anyone to exhaust the battery on a modern smartphone
> in much less than a day

Watch a 90 minute youtube video over 3G and you're pretty much there. (On my
iPhone 3G at least)

~~~
malyk
How common is that case?

I'm probably on the opposite extreme (never have watched a movie or tv show on
my iphone nor any youtube video longer than about 3 minutes), but I'd be
shocked if long video watching was a common case.

~~~
potatolicious
Battery life on _any_ iPhone sucks the big one. Hell, it sucks on _any_
smartphone I've ever seen. Big, power-hungry touchscreen phones are simply not
in a place where we can afford to use them all day.

I sit down and play Mirror's Edge for 10 minutes and out goes 10% of my
battery. Holy crap.

But even taking gaming out of it, even moderate browser usage over 3G burns
through that battery like kindling. I _have to_ charge the iPhone at work if I
plan on going out in the evening. Even with judicious limitations on usage
(and isn't that defeating the point of a smartphone?), if I leave with a phone
at 9am, go somewhere after work, there is a good chance I won't have enough
juice to call for a cab at midnight.

I don't have a problem with a 24-hour charging cycle, my problem is that
current smartphones - iPhones and all - have trouble lasting that full 24-hour
period unless you severely handicap your own use of the device.

------
wallflower
"Imagine their surprise [at RIM] when they disassembled an iPhone for the
first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board
strapped to it."

Step 9 iFixit teardown of original iPhone:

[http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-1st-Generation-
Teardow...](http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-1st-Generation-
Teardown/599/1)

Witness the size of the magical iPad battery in Step 22:

<http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-Teardown/2183/3>

------
aditya
I suppose this speaks to Apple's need for secrecy too, stealth and secrecy
mostly seem overrated but if you're going to disrupt a huge market, they can
be pretty powerful in making entrenched competitors believe that certain
things are impossible.

This happens all the time, established competitors become complacent and lose
the intense focus that made them successful in the first place.

Apple and Netflix are two companies that are admirable in this sense. And
perhaps it is because they're (supposedly) ruthless about hiring and firing.

------
cubicle67
Anyone able to locate the original source for this claim? The link in the
article ends up at shacknews with a 'bad id' message and I've been unable to
locate the source on that site

Interestingly all the sites I've looked at trying to find the source, and
there's been a few, all link back to this article in electronista (except
sites like apple.findtechnews.net which rip off the entire story, pic and all
and then remove the source link)

I guess I'm looking for a blog post or even a forum post/comment, but so far
I've drawn a blank.

~~~
breakall
I got that too. Did a search for user "Kentor" on the site and was able to get
a list of his comments on shacknews, and there is a ghost of a comment from
Dec 25 that says "you guys could have avoided this conversation..." and has
the same comment id as the link from electronista. Looks like it was deleted,
along with several other comments that appear to be on the same topic.
[http://www.shacknews.com/search.x?type=comments&terms=&#...</a>

~~~
cubicle67
Thanks. Most I can get is _You guys could have avoided this entire
conversation by just defining what Apple created as something more than a
smartphone. ..._ from google. can't get anymore from google cache, but
probably because I've not used it before so I don't know what I'm doing

To clarify - there's now been several thousand words written across dozens
(probably more) of sites and numerous comments all based upon a single deleted
comment (id=24854573) by user Kentor on Shacknews.com

Whilst I think the (supposed) claim plausible, I do have a bit of a problem
with the way we can take a single quote and turn it into news, which tends to
become treated as fact down the track; "Everyone knows RIM thought the iPhone
was impossible in 2007"

~~~
cubicle67
managed to locate the full original quote

 _You guys could have avoided this entire conversation by just defining what
Apple created as something more than a smartphone. What we call a smartphone
today is a rather different than what was meant when the term was first
coined.

The first smartphone was pretty much the Nokia Communicator back in the late
90s. It had data connectivity and some limited ability to run applications,
and that pretty much what a smartphone was at the time. Today we take it to
mean handheld wireless computer that happens to have a phone, but back then if
you send a few packets you were a smartphone.

I was hired by RIM in 1999 just before they began work on their first phone
and spent a good number years writing RIM proprietary protocol stacks that
layered on top of the then new GPRS. Coming from a two-way pager background,
RIM decided that phones should have two-way push synchronization of pretty
much everything that Exchange provided along with a limited WML browser. The
general thought was that phones would never have sufficient power density or
radios sufficient bandwidth to allow anything more. That was incredibly
predictably wrong, but it's how things went down.

Along with RIM was Ericsson, Palm, Motorola, and Qualcomm. Motorola came from
a similar background as RIM and went on to build very similar devices. Both
Nokia and Ericsson had come from phones and had decided feature phones should
have far more sophisticated PDA functions. Palm started with PDAs then moved
to the phones, but adamantly dismissed ideas like wireless synchronization for
years making their first attempts at smart phone far more like early Nokia
Communicators than early Blackberrys. Oddly enough, though Nokia made the
first smartphone, which was followed by two more with RIM and arguably Palm in
20002, it was Ericsson that popularly coined the term in the mid 2000s.

So the point is that all these companies were fighting over what amounts to
overgrown PDAs with phones and wireless stacks strapped on. Everyone assumed
power density was no where even close to what was needed for general
computing, that a full featured browser and heavy duty Internet services were
impossible due to bandwidth and latency. Take a look at how our Java expert
groups named standards, how people at the time talked about what features
smart phones should have, and its clear that no one thought an iPhone was
possible. Even Danger, which eventually went on to work on to create Windows
Phone 7 and Android, was just working on a better Blackberry.

The iPhone did many amazing things, but what stands out in my mind was how it
proved that these assumptions were flat-out wrong beyond any reasonable doubt.
Apple pretty gave everyone the finger and said, "Fuck you guys we can build
your distant impossible future today."

I left RIM back in 2006 just months before the IPhone launched and I remember
talking to friends from RIM and Microsoft about what their teams thought about
it at the time. Everyone was utterly shocked. RIM was even in denial the day
after the iPhone was announced with all hands meets claiming all manner of
weird things about iPhone: it couldn't do what they were demonstrating without
an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life, etc.
Imagine their surprise when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and
found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it. It
was ridiculous, it was brilliant.

I really don't think you're giving Apple enough credit here. They did
something amazing that many very prominent people in the industry thought was
either impossible or at least a decade away, and they did it in a disgustingly
short time frame._

------
elvirs
Thats why even years later they tried to replicate iPhone and failed (see
Blackberry Storm)

~~~
jedsmith
Torch still isn't there.

------
ankimal
Thank God for the spirit of innovation and the never say die attitude.

------
Stormbringer
One of the things that people consistently seem to forget is that the iPhone
isn't just hardware. The iPhone is an aggregation of things that collectively
make up either an ecosystem or something akin to it. And in most cases, the
pieces of that ecosystem had been built up over a considerable time before the
iPhone was a twinkle in Jobs' eyes.

For RIM to duplicate the iPhone would require them to give up on a lot of long
held beliefs (e.g. physical keyboard), to ignore most of the tech pundits (the
pundits themselves don't like to remind us that they were busy ridiculing the
very concept of a one-button phone right up to and in some cases even after it
started selling like hot-cakes), to focus on the consumer instead of the
business user and last but by no means least to madly start implementing and
iterating on their own consumer eco-system.

Now the iTunes store is by no means perfect, but if you don't have a drop in
replacement for it, what are you going to replace that part of the eco-system
with? I think a lot of people grossly underestimate the time and effort it
takes to create a system like the iTunes store, and never mind even all the
iterations in features... how about the task of sitting down with every single
recording industry association in every country that your product will be
sold? How about doing the same thing for movies and then telcos? You'd have to
be a masochist of the first degree.

On that note, one of the enormously revolutionary things that Apple did was to
break the choke-hold that telcos had over the handset manufacturers. On an
iPhone, you always have access to the App store and iTunes stores... on a
Blackberry it is up to the telco whether you get App World at all.

In any case, RIM should play to _their own_ strengths, not Apples. RIM groks
business the same way Apple groks consumers. (But of course business users are
_also_ consumers, while this 'should' give Apple a big advantage breaking into
the corporate market, they _consistently_ fail to capitalise on it. I think
the difference is they have to fight for the corporate space, whereas in the
consumer space everyone else is falling over themselves competing to make the
cheapest (read as: least profitable, also in the sense of 'nasty'), ugliest
and hardest to use devices).

RIM has their own eco-system in the corporate space, mainly revolving around
the BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server)... but what does that do? It encrypts
your email and pushes it to you (via Canada). But is that really such a big
deal now?

They have a plethora of device models, with differentiation based on presence
or absence of things like GPS, trackballs and cameras, and also how wide you
want your keyboard to be. I'm not convinced that having so many options is
helpful, but they seem to have a hard time deprecating the old ones.

Lately they have been making inroads with the teenage market in the UK because
they have a cheap alternative to SMS (one advantage of running your own server
infrastructure I guess). But I wonder how many of those teens also carry
iPods?

It is easy to look at a Blackberry and say something like "oh, this is why
they're failing, their camera is bad and the browser is worse". But that is
overly simplistic. When comparing the iPhone to other smartphones, the iPhone
has two killer features: ecosystem and ease of use. You may put out a phone
that physically has all the features of an iPhone, but you get an extra 10%
megapixels... and the world is not going to beat a path to your door.

~~~
Maktab
Anecdotally, RIM has been making significant inroads amongst the smartphone-
buying youth in South Africa by heavily advertising BBN and offering
discounted models. Whether this will prove sticky enough in the end and
whether it's applicable elsewhere are open questions, but every single one of
the sub-25 year olds I know who had the choice of getting a premium phone
opted for a Blackberry instead of an iPhone or Android device, and they did it
purely because of BBN.

~~~
Stormbringer
I agree. As an outsider it seems odd to think that their best two markets are
CEOs and teens. Kind of like the game "which one of these is not like the
other". I think the common link is that both of these groups have a heavy
emphasis on what I'll call "high availability communicating".

I can offer some more anecdotal evidence about the outrageous prices of SMS
driving market behaviour... I was in NZ for a while when Vodafone (?) had a
free text to other Vodafones in the weekend deal. _Nobody_ I knew had a
Telecom (the main competitor) phone unless they actually worked for Telecom.

So we might say "okay, just specialise in texting"... but I think the other
trend driving smartphones is convergence. I went looking to buy an iPhone the
other day, but they are all sold out in my area. So instead, I bought an iPod
Touch and am using a beat up old Nokia - but it annoys me that I need to carry
two devices.

What the iPhone bought to the table (or rather, massively accelerated - since
apps were available before but not in great demand) is convergence of things
that we never would have actually carried around before - like a compass,
barometer (weather forecast), pocket games etc.

Another example that comes to mind: when in London I used to carry a "Pocket A
to Z" guide, which is basically a book that is a high level map of the city.
It was my top priority purchase on arriving in the UK. Now though I would
simply use an iPhone or Android phone instead.

And it is in this area of _convergence_ that I think RIM is falling behind and
their lack of vision and bad products (storm etc) are most telling.

------
guelo
I don't know what the point of this article is except as some kind of Apple
gloat. As far as I know everyone was blown away by the 2007 announcement, the
event was a worldwide shock, it would be news if a competitor hadn't reacted
strongly. Techies such as everyone here went into straight nerdgasm, the media
went gaga, consumers went into gotta-have-it mode, and the entire rest of the
industry went into shock and then desperate reactionary mode.

The announcement was a historical event in computing and consumer electronics.
But it is ancient history, 4 years ago, what's the point of this now?

~~~
Samuel_Michon
_"ancient history, 4 years ago, what's the point of this now?"_

The point is that 4 years after the introduction of the iPhone, RIM still
hasn't managed to ship a phone that competes with the iPhone.

And since they have a long way to go with QNX, I don't expect RIM to catch up
in the next two years.

Which raises the question: what has RIM been doing the last 4 years?

~~~
potatolicious
It's also important to note that Google has been able to ship a mostly-
competent competitor to the iPhone, and is improving incredibly quickly. Palm,
a company with vastly inferior resources and shallower pockets than RIM, has
been able to also.

Both of these companies were largely reacting to the success of the iPhone and
got sideswiped much like RIM. Unlike RIM, though, both companies recovered
quickly and were able to ship compelling products (though not all commercially
successful).

RIM hasn't shipped squat that would even begin to compete with the user
experience on iPhone. Hell, RIM hasn't shipped anything that I'd use over the
_first-gen_ iPhone, much less iPhone 4.

~~~
pedanticfreak
RIM has been the entrenched market leader. Abandoning all that made it
successful would be equivalent to the Digg redesign. Instead of placing bets
on RIM's comeback play we'd be analyzing the wreckage of RIM's sudden
implosion.

Google and Palm had no users. They could afford to completely change focus and
abandon the existing user base.

