The Year of the iPhone

Having worked at Apple during the period when Michael Spindler tried to create an OEM Mac ecology and failed, when the iPod came out I foolishly predicted that Apple would once again grasp defeat from the jaws of victory and screw things up when it came to high-volume, low cost devices. Boy was I wrong. Now, possibly equally foolishly, I'm going to step out on the other side and suggest that the iPhone will take over the world (at least at first approximation). The question I ask is how many categories of portable and mobile devices don't really make sense any more if you can just create iPhone apps instead. Car Navs for example: most are pretty clunky compared to the iPhone versions, and a phone has built in cellular connectivity to boot (not to mention Wi-Fi in many cases going forward). If you own the phone already, and the navigation apps don't cost very much, why would you want a new and different device rather than just buying a car mount? John and I were breakfasting in Palo Alto recently and I encountered a parking "meter-man" and chatted him up. He was using a bright-yellow handheld and entering in license plate ID's manually. I asked him why he didn't just snap a photo and his answer was "damned good question" more or less. The device was a Trimble Nomad, a Mobile 6 device with cellular and camera options, and of course GPS, since it's made by Trimble. But those units seem to sell for $2,500 and compared to an iPhone are harder to program, harder to use and a lot more expensive (that sounds like the Trifecta). Besides, wouldn't it make sense to do the license plate reading "in the cloud" or at least check the ID done locally and refine the algorithm dynamically? The iPhone certainly raised the bar on usability as did the iPod, but more importantly Apple created a whole solution ecology - iTunes on steroids. The biggest breakout of the iPhone was the destruction of the application walled garden by the mobile operator, and the construction of an open market to sell apps that didn't need permission to run. From time to time Steve Jobs' totally unique skills come together for huge home runs, and the iPhone is certainly one of them (Nobel prize in business innovation were such offered). Now that we have usable and programmable phones with GPS and cameras built in high volume and I suspect it won't take a long time for us to collectively realize that there are a whole lot of portable devices that don't make much sense any more. Of course I've been wrong before, and full disclosure requires that I admit to using a Blackberry and having a Garmin GMS in my car (go figure).