The only solace is that you can modify Android to the point where there's almost no Google interference whatsoever. But of course some apps choose to rely on that (e.g. Banking).maybe one day Apple will begrudgingly get to that point.
MS beat Apple to market by a considerable margin. Windows Mobile substantially predates the iPhone, and it was actually usable. (I had one of their flagship devices.)
But MS’s OS concept was incoherent, their UI was laggy, their web browser was unbearably slow despite arguably superior hardware, their form factor was not snazzy. And, unlike Apple, they utterly failed at marketing to consumers.
Also, Apple out their foot down against carrier nonsense, so Apple users didn’t have to deal with $14.99/mo for Verizon Location or whatever they called it. (Although, to be fair, the original iPhone didn’t have GPS. Blackberry had far superior hardware at the time and really ought to have been able to compete, but they didn’t.)
By the time the App Store showed up, it was pretty clear that Apple was beating MS.
This is the main point, not the "also". Apple's revolution was actually getting it in the hands of real life consumers who paid for cell phone plans. The tech was already there with blackberry, but you had to have business to afford it. Yes, the original iPhone itself was a technical marvel, but it would have been a dead fish if it wasn't for the at& t deal that came out as part of it.
This was a marketing and perception issue, not a price issue. When the original iPhone came out, I had a very nice blackberry, with a personal plan, effectively unlimited data, and the full blackberry suite (minus corporate integration, obviously). And I think it was less expensive than the iPhone plan. But it was a pain in the neck! I had to pick the correct phone plan, add the correct data supplement, negotiate the correct discount (basically everyone was eligible for a discount, but you had to find your particular reason for being eligible in a ridiculous menu), and then convince the sales person to add the special $3.99/mo supplement for blackberry services. It clearly never occurred to anyone involved that this was not a competent way to sell to consumers!
I did make fun of my friends for paying several dollars more per month for a device with no keyboard, no GPS, slower data, less efficient text input, and dramatically worse performance in marginal network conditions.
When I finally switched to an iPhone 3G, I could do real in the browser, but wow, the ability to make phone calls was seriously downgraded. I feel like my old blackberry may have had the best behaved cellular modem of any smart device I’ve ever owned.
I think that, if RIM had gotten YouTube and a music player working, had improved the web browser, and stuck a capacitive touch sensor on their device, and if they had marketed it competently (make it so that customers could walk into a store, pay $55/mo, and walk away with a working device without a fight!), they might have remained competitive.
Apple didn't invent anything in the original iPhone, except the software. And the first version was really lacking and very buggy.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steve-jobs-rigged-first-iphon...
Other phones that predated the iPhone release had more capabilities and more software. There was nothing really "marvelous" about the original iPhone, it was many years behind Microsoft.
The HTC Wizard was a "technical marvel" in 2005. Apple was playing catch-up in 2007.
windows was well windows 8 and everyone hated it and everything about it. (and pre-windows phone 8 it was to fragmented with to many incompatible versions and little 3rd party support)
Palm/HP WebOS was the real mobile OS with the best chance to win but failed because well HP... need i say more.
Blackberry was doing great with keyboards and refused to sell more of. Windows Mobile had tons of muscles as market share they just trimmed off. Windows Phone had Marketplace trust issue that couldn't be solved. Nokia burned itself down before Google. Palm did most of it right, but couldn't be bothered with exclusivity reneg.
I can't say solving any one of them could have saved each of the brands, but they all had one giant elephant each that were enough to drag them down.
Has trapped so many businesses.
Enterprise customers can afford to pay enough to support good profit margins...
... but there are many more regular consumers, and regular consumer demands tend to produce better solutions than baroque enterprise demands (usually company- or VP-specific).
That was the attitude for a minute until the CEO got a cool iPhone.
Same with Macs. And jeans.
Apple didn’t bother, they used an entirely different UI from the start, and it was a UI aimed at everyone from kids to grandparents, not just tech people.
that's because they half assed it.
There's always the risk that mobile phones supersedes the desktop, and thus cannibalize the desktop windows sales. Microsoft also likely not able to force OEM licensing in the same way that they could with windows on PC sellers.
If you could literally run windows apps on a phone back then, i reckon the MS phones would've at least grabbed some marketshare. Of course, the mobile hardware back then isn't as powerful, so there's the excuse that win32 cannot run there.
Microsoft execs had their heads buried too deep in their own asses to be able to understand what was needed at the time.
They pushed a platform (Windows phone) that lacked interesting features out of the box, lacked cloud services integration to fill the gap left by the lacking base features, and required Windows as a development platform (and, iirc, C# as well?). It didn't even have any particular windows-ecosystem speciality: no special exchange integration, no special windows pc integration, nothing. Microsoft could have exploited the same reasons they exploited with Azure, Office365 and the general enterprise: microsoft phones should just integrates perfectly with other microsoft stuff. It could have been the no-brainer choice: we use ActiveDirectory and Office365 as a suite, we'll get a Windows Phones as everything just works immediately. No, nobody had thought of that.
The value proposition was just not there.
So basically another walled garden, but dumber. And the hardware didn't have anything special to make it "worth".
Seriously, the original iPhone had little going for it technically. No GPS, poor data bandwidth, no apps, and minimal ability to make phone calls. (It took the combined efforts of Apple and AT&T a couple generations before you could reliably place a call.)
But it had a touch screen that felt nice, and you could watch videos and play music! The web browser actually performed well despite the low bandwidth. It could zoom. And Steve Jobs marketed it well, whereas Steve Ballmer was terrible at marketing.
IMO the iPhone was considerably worse for business use than Windows Mobile, and neither one held a candle to the BlackBerry. But it didn’t matter.
Basically an observation that consumers were interested in digital media players, which Apple had some expertise in building (iPods, for younger folks).
And that a usable browser was a killer feature (most of the web not having reactive mobile sites, and no apps, then).
And if you combined all of the above with a cell phone, customers would rather carry 1 device than the 3 it previously took.
And not coincidentally this is exactly how Jobs pitched the original iPhone unveil.
An iPod, a phone, an internet communicator, an iPod, a phone…
Things that apparently were not that important at launch. Apple did negotiate "unlimited" data plans with Cingular/AT&T.
> But it had a touch screen that felt nice, and you could watch videos and play music! The web browser actually performed well despite the low bandwidth
Better UI, better media playback, web browser that worked. Sounds like a classic example of Apple taking what is out there and simply doing it better.
you could have just shortened that to "Steve Ballmer was terrible" and been more accurate.
IMO the real problem with Windows Phone was the complete failure to produce an actual platform. Windows Phone 7 was incompatible with Windows Mobile, and _Windows Phone 8 was largely incompatible with Windows Phone 7_! The whole thing was comically developer hostile.
(Second mistake; Windows Phone 7’s UI ran at 30fps, presumably in an attempt to save battery. This made it feel a lot worse than iOS and Android.)
Now, Apple is achieving per-eminance in the cross-device consumer OS market in the latop+tablet+smartphone space and Windows is slowly dying. Microsoft will just set to become yet another boring cloud services company.
Only in the US and global high-end market. This is an extremely profitable market to be leading and I'm not trying to minimize Apple's achievement, but globally relatively few people use their phones and tablets, and ever fewer use their traditional computers.
Apple has a sizable lead, but I think the "idea" of what a smartphone is has been locked in essentially in the mind of consumers and their technological lead will only last so long as time passes. They are Microsoft but of smartphones and 20 years younger than windows desktop PCs. They know this, which is why they constantly make new things and try to develop new products (vr headsets, etc).
