Sharing Gruber’s schadenfreude
I normally try and resist randomly reblogging things — although XKCD makes it hard — but this find by John “DaringFireball.net” Gruber is just too marvellous to not pass on.
From the MSDN blog of Richard Sprague, a Microsoft marketing director, dated January 18th 2007:
I can’t believe the hype being given to iPhone. Even some of my blindly-loyal pro-Microsoft friends and colleagues talk like it’s a real innovation and will “redefine the market” or “usher in a new age”.
What!?!? Without even mentioning that the same functionality has been available on PocketPC, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry for years, I just have to wonder who will want one of these things (other than the religious faithful). People need this to be a phone, first and foremost. But with 5 hours of battery life? No keypad? (you try typing a phone number on that screen, no matter how wonderful it is — you will want a keypad). And for all that whiz-bang Internet access, you absolutely need the phone to work, immediately, every single time. Will it do that?
So please mark this post and come back in two years to see the results of my prediction: I predict they will not sell anywhere near the 10M Jobs predicts for 2008. Okay, it’s possible there are enough Apple religious people to buy a lot of them at first, but even the most diehard Mac fans who buy one of these will secretly carry two phones. One to prove how loyal and “cool” they are, and the other to actually make and receive calls.
I remember the lessons I learned working with the Newton team many years ago. I was in Apple’s marketing department at the time and we did this big fancy user study which basically proved that nobody would buy the thing at the price and functionality we were building. So what did we do? We shoved it into the market anyway because it was “cool”. Cool is great, but you still need to make phone calls.
Two years, eh? He’s got about three months to turn it around then. I guess there’s a really fucking impressive WM7 shipping real soon now, yeah? Because right now, and I am speaking as someone who junked a WM6 smartphone for an iPhone and never looked back, I think he’s looking rather silly indeed.
Double irony points because the worst thing about my WM6 smartphone was that it absolutely did not work, immediately, as a phone, every single time. My favourite bit was when it would ring, and the UI would be so lagged it would have diverted to voicemail before responding to my “answer call” button press. That feature was aces.
WM7 won’t hit before 2Q09 – there’s a 6.5 on the way though.
And when it turns up, it’ll be all, like, “Ooh, look at me guys, I’m making people happy! I’m the magical OS, from Happy Land, who lives in a gumdrop house on Lollypop Lane…”
On the other hand, try being an enterprise administrator trying to lock down and secure your user’s devices – you’ll be begging for WM devices :0)
Or better yet, Blackberries.