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| Remembering the first iphone |
On
the tenth anniversary of the launch of the first iphone, Jose Manuel
Sanchez sent me two questions for an article he was preparing for ABC.
The final title, "Apple, the giant who staggers and misses the talent of
Steve Jobs" (pdf), does not particularly reflect my opinion about it,
but it includes some of my comments, and it has made me remember that
time.
I
lived the presentation of the iphone on January 9, 2007 from the CES in
Las Vegas, checking how the launch of a single device by a company that
was not even there was able to completely steal the limelight to all
the rest of the powerful consumer electronics industry. Already at that
time, the feeling that Apple had the ability to mark the agenda of the
entire industry was clear and obvious.
Shortly
thereafter, I had the opportunity to try my first iphone, which I did
the photograph that appears on these lines (which ended up included in a
wired article). In those days I was a devotee of BlackBerry, a device
whose keyboard I will miss all my life. My first impressions on the
iphone were not particularly good: the use that made the BlackBerry then
already approached much to the idea of smartphone, of device where
talking on the phone was the least important and the interesting thing
was the ability to connect and run applications, and although the iphone
approach seemed to me deeply disruptive-and so I said in a training
session to the rim itself in June 2007-I continued to use BlackBerry up
to 2010, the year I started using Android terminals.
I
didn't come back to iphone until mid 2015, and without considering me a
fanboy of the company, I still think that while covering the gap that
left jobs is a difficult challenge, the company is not going through any
bad time derived from it – or if it is, I hope that my worst moments
are like the one that is currently happening apple. Strategically, the
company continues to mark many of the trends in Consumer electronics,
continues to maintain significant leadership in many respects, continues
to maintain its ability to reinvent categories, and continues to sell
products with a quality that I still consider differentially superior.
Then the full text of the questions and answers that I exchanged with Jose Manuel:
Q. What do you think the iphone has contributed?
A.
The iphone contributed practically everything that we now understand as
a smartphone, that is not enough: with the iphone we went from
considering the terminals as phones, as devices whose main function was
to talk, to consider them as pocket computers, whose function was to run
apps that provided all kinds of functions and, eventually, could also
serve to talk on the phone. The approach was so radical, that many took
years to realize, and when they did, all the brands had copied it and we
had a whole generation of users who used their terminals in a
completely different way. Few products have generated a change of
consideration so strong and have managed to install in such a way in our
lives as the smartphone, and everything comes from the change that
meant the launch of the iphone.
Q.
Do you think that since the death of the founder of Apple, Steve Jobs,
the company has not been the protagonist of the great technological
changes, has lost the capacity to innovate and has not presented any
product considered as revolutionary?
A.
Apple's ability to innovate depends on the categories in which it is
able to raise reinventions. It did it with the personal computer (there
were many computers, but the Mac reinvented the idea of personal
computer), he repeated it with the ipod (which led the category "MP3
player" before disappeared), he did it again with the ipad, which
revitalized and completely reinvented the tablet category, and has done
it again, but still timidly, with the smartwatch. To me, a company that
is capable of, in a single event, rethinking how we pay, how we access
the music and how we use a watch seems to have still a lot of innovative
muscle, and that Apple did in an event just two years ago. On the other
hand, the cycle between reinvention and imitation has been shortened a
lot, what makes Apple more and more less time to exploit the categories
it reinvents before competitors with similar approaches arise, and that
leads to refuge in the creation of not so much of products, but of
ecosystems. In any case, and although Steve Jobs was a genius whose
space is difficult to fill, it seems to me in no way that Apple is going
through any kind of innovative drought.
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