the Onda

And for this month's best techno-porn, look no further than "The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry" in this month's Wired. In it, Fred Vogelstein tells the inside story of the development of the iPhone, from its guts to the crazy deal that Apple got from AT&T, to the bumps along the road. As with all great tech-porn there is a fair bit of dramatization in the piece, but it does make three really interesting observations:

1. Steve & co saw the coming crunch on their near-perfect monopoly on the iPod and decided that to get ahead of it by going to a media-playing phone well ahead of when their business was impacted by it. This is something that I've heard a few times from VJ, my boss here at HP over the last few months: you have to innovate the next big thing when you're on top and can still afford it, not when you're managing an empire in decline. That said, it is extremely difficult to get big companies to do this especially when they are as arrogant as Apple, so kudos to them.

2. I love the idea that even as it was going to market, Jobs knew that the Motorola Rockr was a camel (a horse designed by a committee). Senior executives that engage with their product— from how it comes out of the box to how it feels to how it breaks— are really really rare in my experience. It's why you often get such goofy products from big companies so I 100% buy that it is a big part of the secret to Apple's success.

[ One quick aside: in 2005 while at the WSJ D conference, I arrived late (as usual) and went to get my badge only to see that there was a technician working on one of the HP PCs that had been set up for registration. It was one of the first all-in-ones and he had flipped it on its side and was closely examining the bottom of the case in the empty registration hall. Before I had time to figure out what the hell could be wrong with the computer than would manifest on the outside of the case, two executive assistants straight out of Entourage came in and whisked the technician away. Imagine my surprise to figure out that it was Steve Jobs who had someone ended up alone in the registration room and had wandered over to one of these machines to inspect it.]

3. The piece only hints at this general point, but one of the most amazing things about the iPhone is how well the hardware engineers timed the development of the mobile components such that they hit a perfect balance between CPU speed, performance, and battery. It's been my experience that in other consumer products with long multi-year development cycles, the hardware folks either radically under-estimate Moore's law, or worse yet, over-estimate it and end up with pokey and over-priced devices.

Overall a great read for junkies of Cupertino's shenanigans.

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