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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Prediction #7 about the mobile revolution was particularly interesting to me at the time. I was working in the telecoms industry and everyone was saying that super-smartphones were coming out in just a year, 2 at most, that would revolutionize everything, but that was all marketing hype. The reality at the time was to my mind looking really bad. WAP was pretty much a conscious effort by the telecoms industry to trap itself (or actually the users) in a technological stone age ghetto run by committees of marketing executives. The fact that Apple forced the carriers to allow an open mobile internet was utterly shocking to me - in a good way. I was expecting mobile computing to be a dismal carrier-controlled dystopia for a generation at least.

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> The reality at the time was to my mind looking really bad. WAP

shudders I worked in that space right around the time the iPhone landed, WAP was way beyond looking really bad, it was an unmitigated disaster, it was horror.

> The fact that Apple forced the carriers to allow an open mobile internet was utterly shocking to me - in a good way.

To be fair, high-end nokia did already have "open mobile internet" available. Technically anyway: compatibility was a craspshoot and the experience was terrible, I had an E70 with a relatively competent webkit-based browser (IIRC), it did technically render pages but:

* very small screen, making interacting with pages difficult (mobile-adapted pages were not a thing, and the browser didn't do much adaptation)

* arrows moving a small cursor around on a small unzoomed page made for a terrible experience

* device lacked both CPU and (especially) RAM, interactions would be very slow and browser would regularly crash and OOM

* flash was still very present, the device didn't handle it at all, it didn't cope that well with javascript either

After it was released Opera Mini did help with the resources side (but not UI and compatibility). Anyway my point is, open mobile internet was available before the iphone, it was just an utter wreck of an experience (though still not as bad as WAP)

I did some playing-around with WAP for my Moto RAZR. Turned out the phone could only store a page stack of about .. five. This varied with page complexity, so you might only get 3 deep before it locked-up the phone.

> To be fair, high-end nokia did already have "open mobile internet" available.

Not really sure this is relevant. Apple forced the carriers to change their business models -- first AT&T and then the others; Nokia et al just played along. I was really disappointed that Google did not persevere with selling their own phone -- there was this shining moment where it looked like Apple and Google would unite to tear down the carriers; I think Google's shying away from customer service may well prove pivotal -- e.g. it's going to be hard to sell cars if you don't do customer service.

People often point out that Apple doesn't really understand the cloud or that Amazon's forays into hardware have been at best mixed. Maybe. Google -- alone of its rivals -- doesn't understand end-users (its customers are advertisers). Which is more important in the long run? (Bezos may suck as a boss, but Amazon's customer service is first-rate.)

> Not really sure this is relevant. Apple forced the carriers to change their business models -- first AT&T and then the others

1. didn't see it then, don't see it now. Then again I'm in europe, mayhaps US carriers were significantly more overbearing. I don't recall carriers being good friends of the consumer though so not overly likely

2. this responds to a comment specifically mentioning allowing "an open mobile internet". Again this might have been because I was in Europe, but as my comment notes I did have access to an "open mobile internet". The experience sucked but technically there it was.

> 1. didn't see it then, don't see it now. Then again I'm in europe, mayhaps US carriers were significantly more overbearing. I don't recall carriers being good friends of the consumer though so not overly likely

The U.S. was indeed terrible: very restricted competition on phones (two year contracts, models often specific to one carrier, etc.), prohibitively high data rates and extreme barriers to entry for anyone trying to build a phone-based business.

Around 2000, I worked for a web company in San Diego where Qualcomm was trying to build a stable of companies developing mobile apps to boost demand for better hardware. We looked into the business model and each of the U.S. carriers wanted roughly $50K simply for the privilege of listing your app in their store plus a generous cut of the sales, should you have any and that number wasn't fixed but based on what they thought you could afford so our better-known clients got estimates well into 6 figures, again simply for being listed.

Unsurprisingly, we looked at WAP instead but it was so limited in practice that we gave up and nobody I knew used WAP or J2ME apps. As far as I could tell, that only changed when Apple had enough clout to get AT&T to go for a smaller slice of a much, much larger pie.

> The U.S. was indeed terrible: very restricted competition on phones (two year contracts, models often specific to one carrier, etc.), prohibitively high data rates and extreme barriers to entry for anyone trying to build a phone-based business.

For the most part that was also the case in Europe, though countries started cracking down on some of the bullshit fairly early (e.g. the ability to move your number from one carrier to the other and requirements that phones be unlockable after some time). I don't know about the phone-based business aspect.

In the U.S. number portability didn't happen until November 2003:

https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-03-284A1.p...

Unlocking wasn't a requirement until last year:

http://www.cnet.com/news/president-signs-cell-phone-unlockin...

The big thing which I believe really killed business options, though, was data pricing. Before the iPhone made affordable unlimited plans the expected default, it was assumed that anyone who wanted data was a business user on an expense account and the pricing was so high that everyone I knew treated app usage as an emergency-only measure rather than a part of daily life.

I remember reading a blog post by a mobile dev manager saying that it was was shocking that the iPhone didn't support J2ME and that Apple would inevitably be forced to support it by market realities. Good times.

Everybody knew were mobile telecom was heading ever since data became possible: downhill race to a commodity. You only had to look at Northen Europe or Japan to see how usage had changed. Everybody was scared.

The idea that the telco controls what software you run was unknown there. Data is data. You could almost see operators taking the first steps from inflexible contracts where they gave phones away, to leasing-like models (for business customers, consumer markets went though the same change a few years later).

The only surprising thing is that Apple didn't change telco business models more, but I guess they didn't have to. US telcos continued to sell phones through their own channels and didn't have to yield to bigger data plans until years later.

But change is coming, because data by nature wants to be dumb. Soon all customers will find the idea of operator controlled phones just as foreign as some did ten years ago.

I remember going to a trade show in London in 2001 called "m-Commerce World", which was all about the impending revolution in mobile transactions and payments.

At the time I worked for a web development company that identified itself as an "e-business solutions agency". It was in the process of collapse following the dotcom bust, and we were looking out for any new opportunities to cling to. I remember feeling a bit second-rate at this trade show when I introduced the company I worked for, because we were only "e-business" while the exhibitors were very proud of being "m-".

Nothing came of any of it of course.

The phone makers at the time really had no idea how to make a full-featured mobile computer OS. Nothing happened until Apple giving them a kick and Google saved their butts by handing them Android on a platter.

You are forgetting about Windows Mobile for Smartphone and Symbian. There was a reason to expect smartphone revolution - because early adopters had smartphones in 2004.

Yes, but they were utter crap. Their browsers were crippled, side-loading software was strictly for geek hobbyists only and their apps were generally appallingly designed. Mobile internet was restricted by the carriers to a teletext-style menu driven system with menu space sold to the highest bidder. It was awful. They had no idea what they ere doing. Mobile payments were supposed to take over the world in 2001+. The carriers have spent the last 14 years utterly failing to execute on that, and even in 2004 they'd spent the previous 3+ years being utterly incompetent. Steve saw what was going on, and he was completely correct that even 5 years wasn't going to be long enough to sort all that out.

That was WAP.

Windows Mobile back then had a fully featured browser. It was all pen driven, but it actually worked really well. The first iPhone seemed like a step back at least as far as the browser is concerned.

Data was just extremely expensive, but it was faster than the dial-up internet most of the country was still stuck with back in 2004.

"It was all pen driven, but it actually worked really well."

Steve Jobs was right in that no one wanted to use a pen (stylus). As the market matures, this is changing, and the stylus is regaining importance at least in certain niche areas. However, for the vast majority of the mass market, your statement was, and still is, a contradiction.

I said that it worked well back then. I didn't say anything about the mass market. So I didn't contradict myself. I think that you skim-read my post ;)

But, on the subject of the "mass market"...

What Apple/Jobs did was build an awesome device for media consumption.

Up until then we'd been talking about the PDA - a productivity device. It needed a physical keyboard and stylus input to make it "productive".

The best PDA up until then was the Palm Pilot - it has exceptional writing recognition - if you spent two hours learning their alphabet. It works for email, spreadsheets. Battery life was excellent. Most people I know used it with a fold-out keyboard when traveling.

Apple realized that 99% of the time you'll using your phone to play games, read, listen to music or watch videos. Their touch screen was fantastic - it took just seconds to learn how to use it. Sure, writing emails was a pain (even with the smart keyboards), but you'd only do that rarely.

So yeah, you're kind of right: no-one whose main use-case is content consumption is going to want to use a stylus. For content creators however a well-implemented stylus is a big sell.

That's why Microsoft are throwing so much weight behind the Surface Pro, and it's also the main reason people are buying it.

It takes me 100x less effort to shoot, edit, & upload a photo or video using an iPhone compared to the first $8000 Adobe Premiere PC rig I used to learn video editing, let alone comparing to the nearly useless PDAs (in this regard) of their day (and I loved my Palm Pilots & Visors). Voice-to-text transcription today is immensely easier & more accurate than writing with Graffiti input.

Instagram alone is evidence that there are immense numbers of people creating massive amounts of content on their touchscreen smartphones. Spreadsheets are super-niche content. Text, photos, & video are mainstream content.

Compared to email on the desktop during the PDA era, I'd bet people communicate with other people much much more now via their smartphones, whether that's through email, social networks, instant messaging, or video chat.

The reason iPhone was designed for this usage pattern probably has to do with the iPod, with which they owned mobile music consumption for half a decade. A PDA would have been a radical re-think.

Fans wanted a phone in there since day one. The only reason it took them six years to do it was Jobs commitment to getting it exactly right (or "his way" if you wish) which meant technology had to become available.

Windows Mobile had a start button! Microsoft was literally shoving a desktop mindset into any form factor, and not designing for a form factor.

Windows Mobile sucked not because of WAP, but because you had to use it like a tiny desktop UI and poke at it with a tiny stylus to move a mouse cursor (depending onthe version).

The iPhone wasn't awesome because it had a "full" web browser or whatever (though it helped). The iPhone was awesome because it was a pocket sized super computer with a UI/interaction model that actually worked

WM6, when designed to knock off Blackberry devices, was a little better. The "Start" button brought you to an application tray, and it had a 4-way rocker (and optional resistive, stylus-input touchscreen) for navigation. MS took some obvious hints from RIM, but they did deliver a good product.

Of course, it released roughly seven months before the iPhone, which beat the pants off of it. At least it could play NetHack...

I tried two generations of Windows Mobile devices. Aside from anything else their battery life was abysmal, and when they ran out of juice they failed pretty catastrophically.

No, that was in 1999. The mobile browsers in 2005 were built on Webkit (originally from KDE), and had identical rendering as the iPhone. The latter came with a better zoom, but it was the flent UI that caused the greatest stir.

...and there was a browser on the Apple Newton (and, I'm sure, others) a decade before that and Steve Jobs (and, I'm sure, others) talking about developing smartphones a decade before that. It took >23 years of iteration, not 3 years of iteration, to finally reach a hw+sw+service combination compelling enough to actually revolutionize the industry.

Poor Palm :(

I was working on WAP at the time (1999/2000) as well. And then a colleague brought back an i-mode[0] phone from a business trip to Japan.

It was small, had almost a week on standby (if you used it as a phone, which -- before the smartphone revolution, most people did). And it could actually browse the internet properly - gateways had to do some conversion, but unlike WAP, it was working with a real HTML subset.

It was that day that I understood the death of WAP is imminent, the mobile revolution is coming, and that HTML is here to rule mobile as well - because the future was already there, just not evenly distributed.

Prediction is hard, especially about the future, but describing the unevenly distributed present is easier.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode

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