Comment by gnaffle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnaffle | Hacker News Reader

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What evidence was presented that Samsung had a similar phone in the works in 2007? One with a capacitive touchscreen and a user interface optimized for finger touch?

For all I know they might have been "thinking" about it, but why didn't they do more than think about it if it was that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen phones would dominate the future?

I didn't say the market wouldn't move. Of course it would, but probably with incremental improvements. Why? Because mobile user interfaces changed very little before the iPhone arrived.

All the biggest competitors in the mobile space had their own operating systems that were optimized for navigation buttons/softkeys moving a cursor around, and optionally a stylus. Even new contenders like Maemo and Android were initially designed this way. Something like the iPhone would probably have evolved eventually, but I think it's odd to think that the transition to all-display touchscreen phones would have happened at the exact same pace if the iPhone had not been introduced, and that Apple only was "lucky" to have a shipping product available at exactly the right time.

> Why didn't they do more than think about it if it was that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen phones would dominate the future?

Because, as I said, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens.

> All the biggest competitors in the mobile space had their own operating systems that were optimized for navigation buttons/softkeys moving a cursor around, and optionally a stylus.

Because, as I said, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens.

> Something like the iPhone would probably have evolved eventually

So we basically agree.

When I first saw the iPhone I thought it was the way of the future. But I thought the current form was awful. When the G1 came out it was even worse than the iPhone. The market simply wasn't ready yet; but Apple got in there with something barely usable for a price that a few early movers could afford.

Over time, both Apple and Google refined their systems into amazing, world changing devices.

There were two obvious ways of building these phones - 1. with menus 2. with icons. That is the way all feature phones that I know of worked. Google added widgets to this, and eventually Microsoft came up with the completely new idea of tiles.

> I think it's odd to think that ... Apple only was "lucky" to have a shipping product available at exactly the right time.

I never said anything remotely like that. It was entirely intentional that they put together the iPhone and brought it to market at the exact point in time that it became viable. That's why they are the most valuable company in the world. They deserve the huge success they have had, but, again, they don't deserve a monopoly.

> Because, as I said, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens.

Hm, I don't think the reason competitors had their own operating system and stylus-based touch screens had anything to do with the market being ready for touch screens or not -- nobody created something that was usable, so of course the market didn't adapt to it. Bear with me on my small straw-man argument here: It's kind of like couchsurfing.com existed before airbnb.com, but few people let random strangers stay at their home before airbnb existed. You could say that "the market wasn't ready" or you could say that airbnb executed in a way that transformed the market. If Apple did not create the intuitive interfaces for the iPhone, we might still say "the market isn't ready for large touch screens".

So Apple brought it to market at the exact point in time that it became viable. The other companies were "waiting" as you say, so why did they wait so long? Didn't they see that the technology was about to become viable?

I don't buy that theory. By the sales of the first iPhone, the market was obviously ready. Had it been "barely usable" it would have flopped completely.

Capacitive touch screens use the same technology as touchpads, and I haven't seen any proof that those screens were too expensive before 2006 and that technological advancements broght the price down after that.

What I do think is that Apple was willing to bet on touchscreens and place bulk orders that made the price come down, whereas other companies happy with the status quo and unwilling to redesign their mobile operating systems to fit a new technology.

> why did they wait so long? Didn't they see that the technology was about to become viable?

As I've said ad nausium, the market wasn't ready for large capacitive touch screens. The technology was too expensive.

The market currently isn't ready for "wearable technology", like Project Glass. Every competent observer knows that some form of augmented reality/wearable technology is going to become important in the next few years, but it's currently shit.

If Google or some other company gets granted patents to the obvious design decisions that come with it, it will be a disaster for the consumer in the same way as granting "pinch to zoom on a mobile device" is a disaster for current consumers.

> What I do think is that Apple was willing to bet on touchscreens and place bulk orders that made the price come down, whereas other companies happy with the status quo and unwilling to redesign their mobile operating systems to fit a new technology.

They made a good bet, and they literally made billions of dollars from it. What they don't deserve is a monopoly on basic design ideas, like "pinch to zoom" and "rounded rectangles".

You've said ad nausium that the market wasn't ready, yet obviously the market was ready when the first iPhone launched since it became a big success.

By saying the market wasn't ready for capacitive touchscreens due to price, you're implying that this was the main thing keeping an iPhone-like device from reaching the market. Looking at the response from the competition after the iPhone launched, I don't think that's realistic at all.

I haven't seen any evidence that large capacitive touch screens were too expensive before 2007 and suddenly became cheap enough after that.

I also have seen zero evidence that any of the competitors were working on pure finger-touch based user interfaces before 2007. Which would be the case if the market was just waiting for capacitive touchscreen prices to come down.

I do agree that Apple shouldn't have a monopoly on touchscreen phones, and they don't, not even after this verdict. I don't like software patents either, but Samsung could have licensed the patents if they wanted to.

    For all I know they might have been "thinking" about it,
    but why didn't they do more than think about it if it was
    that obvious at the time that capacitive touchscreen
    phones would dominate the future?

Note that obviousness of an idea and obviousness of the quality of that idea are two entirely different things. It is possible for two companies to have an obvious idea at the same time, but one doesn't think it's quite obvious that it's a good idea while the other does.

For example, many of us here on HN would agree that tv/movie video content streamed over the internet was an obvious idea even in the late 90s. But it wasn't necessarily an obviously good idea at the time.

Maybe you would agree (or not, doesn't matter, the point stands, just pick a different company) that Netflix was the company that made watching videos online enjoyable. Should they enjoy a monopoly on streaming video content over the internet simply because they had the vision to decide that the idea was obviously good enough to pursue at the time that they did?

If they had patented streaming video, or something smaller, like auto-detecting your available bandwidth to optimize delivery quality, would we be so accepting of them trying to destroy Hulu or Amazon VOD in order to protect that "innovation"?

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