Marc Andreessen has argued to me that iPhone 1.0 was a wormhole product, one of those rare new things that felt like it fell from the future into the present. By way of corroboration, read this fascinating piece about how RIM execs thought Apple was lying with respect to the first-generation iPhone’s functionality.
A key nugget:
The BlackBerry maker is now known to have held multiple all-hands meetings on January 10 that year, a day after the iPhone was on stage, and to have made outlandish claims about its features. Apple was effectively accused of lying as it was supposedly impossible that a device could have such a large touchscreen but still get a usable lifespan away from a power outlet.?
The iPhone “couldn’t do what [Apple was] demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life,” Shacknews poster Kentor heard from his former colleagues of the time.
Astonishing, isn’t it. Here are executives being surprised by the state of the art in their own area of competence, and not just surprised, but caught completely flat-footed. They then found out during disassembly that “… that the phone was [a] battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it.” It was, in other words, a completely different way of thinking about mobile phones, orthogonal in important ways to how RIM thought about its devices.
All of this helps explain why RIM (and Microsoft and Nokia and …) played crummy defense for so long after the iPhone launch. They had been blind-sided, taken aback by a wormhole product that they just knew couldn’t do what Apple said it could. I’vewritten elsewhere about how I remain bearish on RIM, but it is worth reminding yourself that RIM wasn’t the only company that in early January of 2007 had no idea how that Apple product had just dropped into our little corner of capitalism.
More here.
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