Apple made their big yearly announcement today, coming down off Mt. Cupertino with the word from on high of new MacBook Pros and new iPhones. While the announcement was something of a mixed bag – a (very) few surprises, a lot of nice, new features, and one or two that didn’t make it into the products – overall it made for a pretty savvy media/marketing event. Nobody but Apple (even in the absence of Steve Jobs) can whip the faithful to a frenzy, not to mention get some serious ink by the mainstream media, like Apple can.

Earlier today, I read an editorial by marketer Laura Ries that reflected on the popularity of the iPhone. She offered that she’d originally believed that the iPhone would fail, because “convergence” is generally a bad idea, but owned up to the fact that the iPhone has been a success in spite of – not because of – it’s blending of a cell phone and a PDA. She then cited reasons she believed the iPhone took off (here’s a clue: “marketing”), and finished up by admonishing Apple to “keep it simple” and not continue to add functionality and features to the iPhone.

With all respect to a marketer that usually hits it out of the park, analysis-wise, I think she’s got a swing and a miss here. Here’s why…

While virtually every other device on the market is, as Laura puts it, a “convergence” device, the iPhone, oddly enough, is not. The iPhone is a universal developer platform – in other words, just like it’s kissin’ cousin, the personal computer, the iPhone is a “Swiss Army Knife” device – a tool that can be used in almost any way you can imagine. While my “Wagon Queen Family Truckster” Windows Mobile phone is an inelegant mashup of phone/PDA/computer/music player/battery hog – and performs none of those functions well, the iPhone was designed from the ground up as an integrated platform – allowing the seamless development of a virtuously unlimited number of applications that can do almost anything.

By trade, I’m a marketer, but in experience, I’m not just a marketer, but also a designer, an animator, a writer, and a entertainer. I’ve done all these things professionally, for most of my life. One of the things I’ve specialized in was software user interface design, and what we in the field call “human factors engineering,” or more simply, “usability.” The iPhone stands at the pinnacle of usability. (The Windows Mobile platform wallows at the bottom.) The beauty of the iPhone is that it is so well thought out. The gestures, the zooming, the dearth of buttons – all intuitive. The more intuitive something is, the less friction you encounter using it. Less friction = ease of use. As ease of use increases, the usefulness of a device does as well. Simply put, it is far easier to do even simple things (like make a call) on an iPhone than on a Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, or Android device. Period.

Ms. Ries is correct when she cites the iTunes AppStore as the thing that made the iPhone take off like a rocket. Nothing like opening up a platform to free market enterprise and unbridled capitalism to stoke the fires of profit and increase market share. But what she fails to understand is that just as people buy apps to solve problems, and therefore buy hardware to run software, you must constantly improve hardware to keep up with the demands of software.

Bill Gates once famously opined that he could not envision a world where anyone would need more than 512KB of RAM in a computer. Today, even the cheapest PC comes with 2GB of RAM. (For the non-propellerheads in the audience, 2GB is the same as 2,097,152KB. PCs evolved to handle the demands of software, and software evolved to handle tasks that users wanted handled. It’s a simple as that.

Ries makes several points to show why she thinks that the iPhone is not the all-powerful dreadnaught that everyone thinks it is. She cites iPhone’s market share of the cell market (9%), Blackberry’s (17%), the rise of Netbooks, her KiSS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) philosophy, and the inability to use applications to advertise (?!) as reasons that the iPhone still might falter. I disagree. The iPhone is currently in the final year of a 3-year exclusive distribution agreement in the U.S. with AT&T – a move that might have helped iPhone get early market share by way of a partner who needed them as much as they needed a carrier – but a move that is now holding them back. (If I had a nickel for everybody that had asked me about getting iPhones on the Verison network…)

the iPhone is tool. Tools have form factors. Just like no two women seem to carry the same size purse, or pistonheads disagree over the best engine, there’s no need to narrow a market to a single form factor. I worked for a company back in the early 90s who’s CEO once told me they were in the CD-ROM game business. I replied, “No, you’re in the entertainment business. CDs are just a delivery mechanism…if you focus on the delivery platform, you’ll miss the Next Big Thing, and be out of business.” Guess what? He missed a little thing we call “Internet distribution” and his company is now one for the history books.

The thing about the iPhone is that it’s an elegant tool. Netbooks look cool, but as they stand now, I don’t see them used as a phone. Some people prefer separate gadgets. As for me, I prefer carrying one tool – not so many that I end up with Batman’s utility belt around my waist.

If you ask me, the iPhone has succeeded because it put ease of use ahead of everything else, and because of that, became the platform of choice for developers that saw it’s potential as a platform. Until and unless other phones take that same path, they will fail in the same way that other “convergence devices” have failed in the past.

Like Laura, I have no idea what the future will hold. However, I do know that new opportunities require more than just a cool gadget or an a+b approach – it takes people that are willing to come up with ways to solve problems that make life easier, and shun answers that create barriers or make things harder, rather than easier.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 6:25 pm and is filed under design, marketing.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.