Right device, wrong town

    One day the mobile thing we were all waiting for arrived.

Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone on January 9, 2007, to an ecstatic crowd of faithful Macintosh mavens at Macworld in San Francisco. Unfortunately, I was with a handful of top EE Times reporters in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show.

For many reasons, the always probing and occasionally prescient group of tech journalists at EE Times didn’t send anyone to cover Macworld. It wasn’t our kind of show; the event was more of an end user gathering, not an engineering conference. In our eyes, it was a bit lightweight, a rock concert where Steve Jobs dominated the spotlight.

And, not incidentally, we probably weren’t invited. By that time, Apple and EE Times were like oil and water.

We lived to break stories about semiconductors. Apple kept its product’s ingredients top secret. We were all about skeptical analysis of people and products. Macworld was all about the worship of Apple products and Jobs.

I witnessed this firsthand at Macworld 1999 in San Francsico, one of the few Apple events I attended. With great panache, Jobs introduced new desktops, modestly upgraded all-in-one iMacs. The big deal was they came in translucent plastic colors -- blueberry, grape, tangerine, lime, and strawberry. In an over-the top TV commercial that debuted at the event, the 40-pound computers spun through the air to a slick soundtrack of the Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow.”  The crowd roared as Mick Jagger sung, “she comes in colors everywhere.”

I was embarrassed, sitting in a back row at an event where the only news for EE Times was a computer using a slightly faster version of a PowerPC processor, a chip that had already been announced.  

Still, I got the message. Jobs was showing a PC industry obsessed with megahertz and megabytes the game wasn’t about speeds and feeds anymore. It was about design, coolness, the user experience. (Microsoft quickly caught on calling the 2001 version of its operating system, Windows XP for experience.)

Jobs had fans for a reason. He was a combination of the industry’s most charismatic leader, a savvy marketer, a funny guy, a tyrannical boss, a handsome dude and most of all the best product manager ever.

His iPhone keynote that winter day in 2007 was a master class I’ve watched many times since on YouTube. He showed a slide of the top mobile products of the day, including the Blackberry from Research in Motion (aka RIM) that had introduced attorneys and other professionals to mobile email.

Suddenly, with their tiny keyboards, the best handsets of the day looked sillier than a bunch of fat old men with their pants down. Mobile computing is not about a keyboard or a stylus, he told the crowd, it’s about the largest screen you can put on a handheld device and your finger to operate it.

He announced three products—a phone, a Web browser and a music player. Of course they were all one—the iPhone. The cheers were so great you thought the crowd might rush the stage to grab the prototype in Jobs’ hand.

Behind the scenes, Apple had to sell stodgy cellphone companies with a new concept: devices would make them money not by consuming minutes of call time (their business model in those days) but bytes of data. I imagine there were many difficult meetings before Apple found a champion at AT&T.

Jobs had a track record that no doubt caught their attention: Apple had already helped disrupt the music industry. The iPod, Apple’s first big mobile product, exploited a misstep the music industry made entering the digital era. It had published on CDs all the latest music without any security mechanisms. The Apple billboards around San Francisco (Job’s key test market) said it all: “Rip, Mix, Burn.” I imagine some digital-savvy cellphone execs at AT&T pondered the music shift and wondered if a similar transformation was ahead for their business.

And so, the iPhone was born. But in the few months before it shipped, my colleagues and I remained skeptical. We were so used to looking at the horizon for the next-big-thing in mobile it was hard to focus on something right in front of us.

Next: In the iPhone’s Wake

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