Dan Markham

Apple’s earnings report is out and there is much iPhone love, today, over at John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. Take a look at one example, the post “No Likelihood”, read the quote, then come back.

Yeah. Ooops. It seems to me that there are two things Mr. Dvorak, obviously, did not understand when he wrote the article associated with the quote on Daring Fireball.

First, Apple, in hindsight, was not simply creating another cell phone. They were developing a entirely new platform. A computing platform, no less, that has, in it’s DNA, the ability to morph and change simply by virtue of the fact that the phone, for the most part, is a computer as much as it is a phone and it’s identity is forged as much by the package as it is by the software in the package.

So, there is the above referenced quote of by Mr. Dvorak and then there is this one, from the same article, framing the market for mp3 players in the pre-iPod period:

First the MP3 player business was segmented and unfocused with numerous players making a lot of cheap junk and not doing much to market any of it.

From where I sit that is exactly what the “mobile handset” business looked like before the iPhone. Motorola’s RAZR is the only exception that comes to mind but we all know how that worked out. Motorola’s flagship product needed no push from Apple to fall from it’s perch. In fact, not only is the above quote a perfect explanation of the state of the cell phone market, in general, but is equally perfect in defining the confusing deluge of products even within any single company’s offerings.

So, therefore, the second point of misunderstanding exhibited by Mr. Dvorak is that phones, historically, go in and out of fashion because, for one thing, that is how the cell phone manufacturers choose to make their money. Most phones simply do not represent a revolutionary — or even evolutionary, for that matter — change upon release. High turnover is the name of the game. Phone companies are free to churn out cheap junk — and lots of it — because there is not one particular phone in their (extensive) lineup they intend to rely on to bring in the money. At the end of the day the plan seems to be to flood the market with as many iterations of cheap crap as they can, as fast as they can and make their money by way of sheer volume. It is, in fact, this confusing array of seemingly similar choices that confuses the consumer and dilutes whatever mindshare any one phone or brand can have.

On the contrary, Apple was building the phone that they intended to focus on for the foreseeable future. Notice the amount of static out there, before the iPhone 3G burst on the scene, about weather or not Apple was going to introduce, not only a new iteration of the classic iPhone but also a new, smaller form factor “iPhone Nano”.

Didn’t happen.

If there is one thing Apple has learned to do in it’s second Jobsian era it is to simplify, simplify, simplify. Before Jobs came around again Apple’s Macintosh line was a confusing jumble of letters and numbers. It was difficult to see which product in Apple’s lineup was the product for you because there were far too many forms of that product to choose from. Hence, upon Jobs’s arrival, what did Apple do? They axed the clones and simplified their lineup of offerings. It’s worked out wonderfully, don’t you think? If the cell phone manufacturers are paying any attention at all they will follow the model put forth by Apple. Flooding the pipeline with “dozens of variants” is what has kept any one phone — or phone manufacturer, for that matter — from achieving the sort of amazing brand recognition that Apple has been able to achieve in the cell phone market in such a short amount of time.

Apple does not play the same game as anyone else in any of the markets is decides to enter. If you don’t play the same game, well, then, you don’t need to follow the same rules. If you don’t follow the same rules, well, then, there are going to be some that are going to be surprised, time after time, when you hit one out of the park, pulling victory out what seems a fool’s game, seemingly, out of nowhere.