Apple iPhone disrupts yet another product category…
Steve Jobs, one of the great showmen of our time, has done it again. Following on the heels of the Apple II, Macintosh, iPod, iTunes and OS X, Jobs demoed the new iPhone at the keynote presentation for MacWorld Expo San Francisco.
Meanwhile, nearly 2500 miles away, in Columbus, Ohio, a group of geeks young and ol… uh, seasoned, were hungrily pushing the refresh button on their browser to get the latest word from Ryan Block, a reporter from Engadget.com covering the closed keynote and posting transcripts and photos to the website in near real time, thanks to the wonders of wireless. (Does anyone remember the press corps running to the phone booth after an announcement to file their breaking news???) Between the four of us, we have owned countless phones from Motorola carphones and handhelds of the 80’s to the latest Treo and Razr and Q, and used almost every cellular service in the region. Any cellular company would be privileged to have us as a focus group.
And we were in awe of what we saw.
Apple has not taken an incremental approach to improving the cellphone. Instead, as they so often have, they have rewritten the rules of interaction with the device in ways that seem so patently obvious and intuitive that it makes you think: ‘That’s how it should have been done from the start!’ This phone is ALL touchscreen. No stylus. One button on the front. Use one or more fingers at a time to operate it. Beautiful scrolling. Turn it sideways and it automatically goes into widescreen mode. Simple. Except here is Apple, clearly thinking so far ahead of the pack, and already to market – shipping in June from Cingular / AT&T. Explore Apple’s new iPhone, here. See the full presentation, here.
One anonymous quote we saw on the blogs: “Today, it would suck to be any other cellphone manufacturer.” We would agree.
If you haven’t seen Steve Jobs in action, watch Apple’s previously-recorded Keynote presentation, here. Oh – one more thing: they also released a box that plays your digital content on your TV. And changed their name from Apple Computer to Apple, Inc. And had Yahoo and Google onstage at the same event. And ended the presentation with a mini concert from John Mayer. Busy bees…
Now here’s the big business strategy question coming out of Apple’s example: Does your organization see itself as an innovator? Is it putting up the resources and doing the head-hurting thinking, planning and execution required to redefine your product category? If not, what will it REALLY take to rewrite your organization’s destiny?
Photos appropriated, with appreciation, from Engadget.com.
