Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2007/07/12/kewney_iphone_magic/
Why the iPhone is a success
Not for the reasons you think
Posted in Networks, 12th July 2007 09:46 GMT
Column Two weeks after the iPhone virus started spreading, the verdict has to be that Steve Jobs has got it right.
The trick with launching a new phone is "keep it simple". He's done that. No, this is not the phone I want, and neither is it the right MP3 player, but it will be a success, and that success will grow as new variants appear - like the 3G version. I think the key to its success will be the fact that this is not a 3G version.
Start off from the iPod, and think back to the Motorola ROKR phone. At that time, the question marketing people were struggling with was: "How can we make a phone which is as good as the iPod at playing music?"
The obvious trick was to build the MP3 player into the phone - a ploy with a long history (I think my first MP3 phone was a Samsung, nearly seven years ago) and a lot of casualties. The ROKR was the first attempt to build an iPod into the phone.
It failed for reasons which have to include the fact that the ROKR was not a good phone, and it was an even worse iPod. Actually, it wasn't an iPod at all, it was a very ordinary Motorola phone with the ability to interface to iTunes.
The Steve Jobs magic was let loose on it, and it simply burned up and disappeared. Even his legendary demonstration skills failed when he tried to take a call while it was playing music. And it didn't have enough capacity for music, and it didn't have enough battery life - but above all, what people want to be seen with is the iPod - that "perfect thing" which transformed the world of music.
So the iPhone went the other way around. Instead of putting the iTunes engine into a phone, Apple put the phone into an iPod. It's a brilliant example of the "keep it simple, stupid" principle - if you are going to innovate, make it a small incremental step. Don't introduce five new features at once.
And the small, incremental step was not the phone. That's typical Steve Jobs magic - "Watch my fingers carefully!" says the stage magician. What he's really doing is something entirely different...he's re-designing the iPod user interface.
If Apple had announced that it was abandoning the spin-wheel for the iPod, and had just launched iNew iPod there's a real chance it would have gone down like New Coke did. People understand the iPod. They can scroll through their songs with their hands in their pockets, or while running or in the dark. Why change?
The short answer is because the Walkman was a success.
I think that initially, the Apple consensus was that it was perfectly possible to simply add phone commands to an iPod, or add iPod functions to a phone. ROKR showed this was not all that easy. And, at the same time, the Sony Ericsson Walkman range showed that people did prefer to carry just one dual-purpose device, rather than a player and a phone.
The thing is, the controls that work really well for driving a music player aren't very good for texting; they're not intuitive for operating a web browser, and they really aren't versatile enough for doing all the other control settings and phone number entry functions that a good phone simply has to be able to do. So a spin-wheel phone was probably not a great idea.
The ordinary mobile with play, pause, FF, and skip had been done. I think Sony Ericsson has done it about as well as it can be done. If Apple went down that route, all it'd have would be another Walkman, with an Apple logo on it. It wouldn't be an iPod.
A nasty dilemma, isn't it? If you fix the iPod UI so it works for phone users, you risk alienating the faithful iPodders; if you borrow the phone UI for the iPod you produce a fake Walkman.
There's another problem. This phone has to work for the networks, and the networks need a phone that people will keep switched on. Rigorous studies show there's a direct relationship between how many bars you have on your battery indicator and how many calls you'll make. When the battery indicates less than half full, people start to turn the thing off to save power.
That's a disaster for the networks. Not only are people no longer making calls but, even worse, they can't receive them. "Termination charges" are where the networks make more than half their money - they get a payment for every call their customers answer. Phone switched off? No termination charge.
The new iPhone user interface is the real trick. It's a typical Apple invention, making control of a cyberdevice easier, more intuitive, and it works well. But, because it's called an iPhone, everybody knows it's an iPod. The phone is what you focus on, and never notice that what's really happening is that the old iPod is no longer in the magician's hands, and the new one has been smuggled onto the stage. A wave of the hands and <pouf!/> - cries of "oooh!" and "aaaah!" and "It's an iPhone!"
Now that we know it works, Apple can refine it. It can sort out the network (AT&T problems are a great test bed) and it can upgrade the wireless (GPRS or EDGE is hopeless for a web phone), and can make sure it gets the battery life right.
And when all that's done, you release the 3G phone.
I dare say several European networks would sell the current iPhone, even though it needs EDGE wireless to be even slightly acceptable, and there's very little EDGE in Europe - they would just like to be able to put it on their advert pages! But for serious numbers, that won't work. I don't know a single European carrier with spare data capacity on their 2.5 G data networks; and the iPhone is a potentially huge data pump.
But most European carriers have far more 3G data than they can find a use for. Probably (say analysts), the problem will catch up with them in two years. As soon as the market find a killer application for mobile data, the spare capacity will become a shortage. There are plans (see femtocells) which may be able to deal with that in a couple of years. Right now, they don't have to worry about 3G capacity, but they do need a successful 3G phone that will generate revenue there. It may not be profitable revenue, but in a fire sale, any price is better than giving it away free.
By the time the shortage of handsets eases in North America (looks like a few months from now) the 3G phone will be ready; there's no need to launch the current model anywhere except on AT&T and Cingular.
I hope Apple does sort out the digital rights management issue. There are problems with some of the music studios, true, but overall iTunes FairPlay has been a winner, and there's no credible competition. Let's hope that the restrictive DRM on the iPhone is a "proof of concept" for people who think they need it, rather than a pointer to where Apple is taking downloads - otherwise, recorded music could hit the buffers (Maybe, it will, anyway?).
But at this point, it really does look like the innovation of putting a GSM wireless into the box as an excuse for updating the spinwheel, has worked. The faithful have loved it, and the phone users seem to understand it.
And even if demand does go soft in North America in September, and Apple has to ship 100,000 odd units into other markets, it won't change anything. At about 10,000 units per country, it won't spoil the market for the Real Thing, which will be around in January. And long before then, we'll know which European networks are carrying the iTunes traffic. ®