iPhone crazyness, innovation management and product-driven business model innovation
Some observations on the inevitable – well, there are roundabout 200 entries in my feedreader dealing with all aspects of the iPhone, sometimes drooling over this coming gadget, most of them repetitive, only some of them digging deep. So I thought its a good idea to separate wheat from chaff, at least because the Apple case study in my dissertation now needs another update … and because I wanted to integrate some of the reading I enjoyed.
Well, let’s start with some remarkable issues:
– How it came all about, TIME tells it all in an insightful article …, like on the start, the cooperative innovation with Cingular (does the tail wag the dog or isn’t this how it should work?), the inner workings of Apple and its CEO
The iPhone developed the way a lot of cool things do: with a notion. […] Jobs, being Jobs, figured he could do better, so he had Apple engineers noodle around with a better touchscreen. When they showed him the screen they came up with, he got excited. So excited that he thought he had the beginnings of a new product.
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Apple’s new iPhone could do to the cell phone market what the iPod did to the portable music player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority.
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To Jobs’s perfectionist eyes, phones are broken. Jobs likes things that are broken. It means he can make something that isn’t and sell it to you for a premium price.
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Why is Apple able to do things most other companies can’t? […] because the company has highly diverse talent who are good at hardware, software, industrial design and Internet services. Most companies just do one or two things well.
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Jobs […] keeps Apple’s management structure unusually flat for a 20,000-person company, so he can see what’s happening at ground level. There is just one committee in the whole of Apple, to establish prices. I can’t think of a comparable company that does no—zero—market research with its customers before releasing a product. Ironically, Jobs’s personal style could not be more at odds with the brand he has created. If the motto for Apple’s consumers is “think different,” the motto for Apple employees is “think like Steve.”
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It’s not quite right to call the iPhone revolutionary. It won’t create a new market, or change the entertainment industry, the way the iPod did. When you get right down to it, the device doesn’t even have that many new features—it’s not like Jobs invented voicemail, or text messaging, or conference calling, or mobile Web browsing. He just noticed that they were broken, and he fixed them.
– How Apple kept it secret for two years, whilst partnering with Yahoo!, Google and Cingular
One of the most astonishing things about the new Apple iPhone is how Apple managed to keep it a secret for nearly two-and-a-half years of development while working with partners like while working with partners like Cingular, Yahoo and Google
– the design, outstanding … looks like no other phone, you want to touch it
The iPhone is a typical piece of Ive design: an austere, abstract, platonic-looking form that somehow also manages to feel warm and organic and ergonomic. (TIME)
– the user interface, the user interaction design (on-demand largeness!)…
All right, so it’s pretty. Now pick it up and make a call. A big friendly icon appears on that huge screen. Say a second call comes in while you’re talking. Another icon appears. Tap that second icon and you switch to the second call. Tap the big “merge calls” icon and you’ve got a three-way conference call. Pleasantly simple.(TIME)
– the huge presentation, err performance of Steve Jobs (read Nicholas Carrs take (and the discussion) here and some cheeky stuff by Bob Sutton …) … great stuff documented at Engadget.
– Apple changes name, drops computer … believe me or not, for confirmation have a look at the 90+ minutes video of the presentation, still there’s nothing about Leopard (or its built-in wiki capabilities …), no generic Mac news … just iTV and iPhone)
So why the fuss?
– iPhone is a game-changing device
The iPhone breaks two basic axioms of consumer technology. One, when you take an application and put it on a phone, that application must be reduced to a crippled and annoying version of itself. Two, when you take two devices—such as an iPod and a phone—and squish them into one, both devices must necessarily become lamer versions of themselves. The iPhone is a phone, an iPod, and a mini-Internet computer all at once, and contrary to Newton—who knew a thing or two about apples—they all occupy the same space at the same time, but without taking a hit in performance. In a way iPhone is the wrong name for it. It’s a handheld computing platform that just happens to contain a phone. (TIME)
Rajesh has a great summary of the important stuff:
* iPhone was developed over 2 years
* 200 patents have been applied for technologies used
* Apple partnered with Yahoo! for delivering IMAP “push” emails
* Apple partnered with Google for Google Maps and a host of other services
* Apple partnered with Cingular for developing Visual Voicemail – you can search and listen to the voicemail you want to listen to.
* There is no pointing device. Your fingers are the pointing device. They are introducing a technology called Multi-touch.
* iPod, Phone and Internet communication device – fully integrated
* Foundation software – OS X – the power of Unix on a mobile phone.
* Conference calls on cell phone in a snap
Moreover, there’s excellent research (HERE, here and here) by the people of Jupiter Research (namely Michael Gartenberg), ongoing coverage by people like Erick Schonfeld of Business 2.0 , Sadagopan or at GigaOM – all worth checking out.
And to get a grip on what is still missing check out this.
