Liberals and Conservatives: An Amazingly Accurate Oversimplification

[ June 5, 2007 ]

Let me try and summarize my position:

Your main point seems to be that Apple is making a major mistake by not
building a device that surpasses (or even competes with) existing phones in
the realm of functionality. You feel the market is about, more than anything
else, features, and that if you don’t have a lot of them then your device
will fail compared to those that do.

My point, which I feel is Apple’s direct strategy with this device, is that
you can actually blow away the market without playing the features
game. The concept being that it’s possible to actually win with fewer
features as long as you do each of them extremely well.

This includes the stuff we normally don’t pay any attention to, such as: the
size and shape of the device, the look and feel of it in your hand, how it
feels to navigate the interface, and how the system looks and feels when you
use the basic functions such as making and receiving phone calls.

In other words, their bet is that doing a few things beautifully is going
to be beat out doing many more things in a “regular” way.

And I think, barring something seriously wrong with their device, that this
strategy is going to succeed. I think this not based on emotion as you
claim, but based on my observation that most people don’t use most of the
features they have, and that aesthetics are very important for people.

You see how excited I am about the device, but you’re not giving me the
credit for also simultaneously looking at the situation from a true
marketing standpoint. To me it really comes down to doing a few things
amazingly vs. doing more things in a standard way, and my analysis is that
the former will win out. So while I am hyped up about the device, it doesn’t
mean I’ve abandoned my logic.

And that logic tells me very clearly, as I’ve said numerous times, that
there is every likelihood that I am dead wrong, and that the phone won’t
be able to pull it off. And if it can’t it again becomes a game of features, at which point
iPhone becomes a joke like the Apple Cube. All I ask of you is to consider
that this (few great vs. many normal) is a real strategy and not just abject
stupidity, and that if it succeeds it won’t be a matter of stupidity or
luck.

So if they gamble on look and feel of fewer features and it doesn’t work,
then their strategy was bad, but their failure wouldn’t be because they
didn’t think, it would be because they thought extensively and were either
dead wrong or couldn’t execute. And if they succeed, and the industry and
consumers love the phone, it will not be because Apple made a major mistake
but people are just too stupid to realize it. It will simply be because
Apple guessed absolutely correctly that superior experiences for primary
functions are better than inferior experiences on far more functions.

That is my opinion in a nutshell, my friend — that Apple isn’t rushing into
anything without thinking here, but in fact that the whole thing is
COMPLETELY calculated. They could be dead wrong and end up looking stupid,
but that will constitute a deliberate bad move that failed rather than a
drunken misstep.