Why the iPhone Won - a Zoom chat
A tweet from mobile industry and tech journalism veteran Simon Rockman set me thinking the other day. Simon was reading Always On and wanted to take issue with my analysis of why Apple’s iPhone had proved so influential:
Simon, who worked for Motorola for some years and still has huge affection for the American phone maker, felt that it was the operators who had handed Apple its dominance of the market on a plate.
He got into a discussion with Ben Wood, the CCS Insight analyst who has a huge collection of mobile phones and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the industry. Ben suggested we three should meet over a beer to thrash all this out.
That will certainly happen at some stage, but in the meantime I proposed an experiment - a Zoom debate about why Apple won and whether it was, as Simon suggests, all the fault of mobile phone network operators who drove a ruthless bargain with the likes of Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson but rolled out the red carpet for Apple, only to find that the Californian tech giant had stolen the industry from them.
Over 25 minutes we roam far and wide, discussing whether the iPhone really was the first mainstream smartphone, whether phones are now all rather similar and boring - and whether Apple and Google will retain their iron grip on the industry.
Let me know what you think of this experiment and whether there are other parts of the book you would like to see debated. Oh - and buy the book!!
Always On is available as a hardback, ebook or audiobook here.
And if you want to support your local independent book shop you can order it at Hive.