The success of Apple’s iPhone is often attributed to its apps, but in reality, the iPhone started becoming popular way before the App Store ever existed. So how did the iPhone manage to snag away so much market share from crown holder BlackBerry? The answer is simple: Apple figured out something fundamental to the success of any future smartphone platform before RIM (Research in Motion), BlackBerry’s maker, could figure out its own sales were plunging.
Owning your pocket
It’s all about owning your pocket. In our increasingly digital-dependent regime, mobile devices that take a place in our pockets are becoming a crucial part of our life. We don’t need them, granted, and we always did without before, but like other communication inventions, we create the need for them.
You can live years without a cell phone, never realizing you truly need one. In fact, you’re absolutely right. You don’t need one. It’s not a necessity at all, at least not yet (some other parts of the world like Japan practically require you to have a mobile phone to live a normal everyday life).
But once you get a cell phone and start using it, chances are you’ll get accustomed to having one. It’s like the Internet, or TV. Once you have it, you cannot go back. And one processus telecommunications companies master in terms of sales is the fact that few customers ever get less than they previously had. The taste for features is endless, which is why salesmen at these institutions try so bad to embark you on dozens of trial, because they know you’ll eventually subscribe to them once you tried em.
The mobile phone is creating a need. A need for a constant communication device. The smartphone could do more though, and could create more needs, which is something RIM capitalized on. They created a need for every business man to manage their life digitally. They don’t have to, and sometimes it’s even less efficient than with a good old paper agenda. But the practicality of a smartphone is what creates the need. Once you get to use a real good smartphone, its features will become a new need.
Where is Apple in this?
Apple had already caught an ear on that amazing sales principle. That is, the creation of new needs.
They quite mastered it with the iPod. The iPod fulfills the role of having music everywhere. Granted, nobody even needs to listen to music, although research does prove it can soothe your mind, etc. But it’s not a real need. It’s again, another superficial item of our modern societies.
However, music, unlike mobile phones, has long been entrenched in our societies. The need to create and listen to music is as human as the need to communicate, and portable music players do exactly what mobile phones do, they extend on human needs.
It’s the ingenuity of Apple in all this, to marry both music and communication in one device. However, when the iPhone got out, many came to the realization that the iPhone was not as efficient as a BlackBerry for organization, and questioned whether you needed an all-in-one platform when you could just get a cell phone and a portable music player. In fact, the argument was that a BlackBerry and a DAP (Digital Audio Player) combined were better, and often cheaper, than an iPhone.
And this is exactly what RIM mistakenly took as true, as well as many other contenders that took years to capitalize on what Apple is. The problem is, most of them didn’t and probably still don’t understand why the iPhone model works so well.
It’s all about your pockets
What Apple realized is this: It’s all about your pockets.
In today’s modern societies, the men have two places to tuck in things conveniently, no matter what season; that is, two pockets in their pants. One pocket is already occupied by the wallet. Men don’t carry purses around like women, so their pocket space for electronic devices is reduced to one. This is very important, because instead of being a issue of fashion, the pocket is an issue of comfort for a man. Less fashion-conscient, what’s important here is comfort versus practicality.
This explains why men tend to have smaller wallets. It also explains why men pay with cash instead of change, because change is too cumbersome to carry, or would make wallets to big for appropriate levels of comfort. Equally, mobile devices must not take too much space because they will occupy an entire pocket. Even worse, because mobile devices are fragile, men will often have to put up with shoving away both keys and wallet in one pocket. It’s thus a bit exaggerated to think both a BlackBerry, which were known at the time to be bulky, and in the majority still are in comparison to regular mobile phones, and a DAP would go in the other pocket of a men.
And there, my combining both mobile phone and music functionality in once device, Apple had created a formula for success; that is, a way to have a smartphone that fulfilled more roles than a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device could.
Of course, women are important too, and although most will carry mobile equipment inside a purse, where many, many things may go, the reduction in the quantity of devices, and hence weight of the purse, as well the ability to have a single all-in-one device fit in a tight pants pocket, thus the importance of the iPhone’s slimness and form factor, are also appreciated.
Video Games
Although probably something Apple didn’t quite expect to fire up as much it did, video games are also a crucial aspect of the platform that allowed it to gain popularity over every other device all while eating away at BlackBerry’s market share.
Because of video games, and advancement in the organizational capabilities of the iPhone (namely Microsoft Exchange compatibility), it is now one of the most universal mobile platforms in existence, capable of fulfilling the role of an agenda, mobile phone, music player, video player, camera and handheld video game machine in one go.
Tablets?
Granted, mobile operating systems have come a key target into the “new” tablet computing devices. While technically something really old, tablets weren’t hot, or usable for that matter, before a few months past when Apple announced the iPad. The iPad runs the iPhone OS but it’s not a mobile phone.
The question is now to find out exactly what the need is for such devices. Lazy couch-based Internet surfing? Full-size applications anywhere in the house?
The key to the success of these devices is all about creating a new need, and surpassing what current devices that try to fulfill that need do in their efficiency. Many argue Netbooks with Windows or some flavor of Linux are better than the iPad, after-all, they have have a physical keyboard. They can also do more and blah blah blah. Sounds familiar? Indeed, because it’s exactly the kind of discourse that could be heard when the first iPhone launched in the United States.
“It’s slicker, but is it more capable/useful?”
The truth is, it is not. The iPad is neither as capable or as useful as any laptop or other portable computer with a physical keyboard you’d put in your kitchen. But just like the iPhone, Apple is aiming at a whole other thing that is much more important: convenience.
How convenient was it to carry two mobile devices in order to make phones calls and listen to music on the go? More functional, but less convenient than the iPhone.
How convenient is a Netbook in comparison to a simple tablet like the iPad? It’s more functional, but it’s far from being as convenient.
Lots of people argue tablets like the iPad are useless devices that don’t have a place in our digital life. I beg to differ and I’m sure that in two to three years, the tablet development craze for applications will be on fire. I didn’t say the iPad would be on fire though, as it does have a few upcoming contenders and nearly all other technology-related companies against it (Google & cie.), but those companies better act fast because Apple is already selling the iPad like crazy.
