Apple’s
Gillette Moment?
iPhone
5 confirms what we long suspected — innovation in smartphones has plateaued. At
least for now
Part of the
problem for Apple, and its chief executive Tim Cook, was meeting the burden of
expectations. This was one of the first really big launches since Cook took
over and he was always going to be compared to Steve Jobs and the huge
anticipation caused when the late Apple founder walked onstage. Couple that
with the fact that this was an iPhone launch, and following just weeks after a
major legal ruling in which a US court decided that arch-competitor Samsung
infringed Apple phone patents when building its line of Android phones.
In retrospect, no one, not even Apple, could match the burden of expectations it seems, and they must have realised this early on. And this was why, in the weeks leading up to the event, there were leaks galore among the tech blogs and tech press about what the new iPhone 5 would have — in retrospect it all looked an awful lot like expectation management. When it finally came out, the iPhone 5 was a damp squib.
Mat Honan described the iPhone 5 in Wired magazine as “completely amazing, and utterly boring”. “It is the Toyota Prius of phone updates. It is an amazing triumph of technology that gets better and better, year after year, and yet somehow is every bit as exciting as a 25 mph drive through a sensible neighbourhood at a reasonable time of day....The iPhone 5 can simultaneously be the best phone on the market and really, really boring. And that has almost nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with our expectations.”
Five Blades, Up From Four
Its always a problem when a satirical show unwittingly, but near-perfectly, anticipates your product launch by years. In 1975, the popular Saturday Night Live show in the US, featured a mock tripleblade razor 23 years before Gillette released the real thing. And the Oniondid it again to Gillette, when, following the release of the four bladed-version, it parodied the launch of a five-bladed one. And sure enough, Gillette, on cue, went on to release the five-bladed razor. Apple, and to be fair, the rest of the smartphone industry, is having its own little Gillette moment in a way. Innovation as of now, is fairly predictable — bigger screens. Check. Sharper, more higher resolution displays. Check. One more photography app. Check.
It doesn’t help that a large chunk of the smartphone business simply copied, sorry, was influenced by, Apple’s design. Perhaps the biggest innovation that Apple bought to the business with the first iPhone was touch, especially ‘capacitive’ touch. Till the iPhone, touch screens existed, but were a pain to use, depending as they did, on responding to the level of pressure that a human finger put on the screen. Modern smartphone screens, beginning with Apple, abandoned such ‘resistive’ screens altogether, leading to a quantum jump in the ease and comfort with which such screens could be used. It was a genuinely new, and far more intuitive way for users to interact with their phones.
And because of the new way of user interaction, it led to a whole set of other changes — screens could become larger without allowing an increase in the size of the phone. This meant a much better experience for customers, for the uses for which smartphones are put to nowadays such as video or gaming. Of course, smartphone manufacturers, not being content with the automatic increase in screen size from moving to a touchbased phone, have gone ahead and built bigger phones anyway. And Apple, a laggard in this area, has jumped on the bandwagon, by increasing the size of the iPhone 5.
It is a mark of a big innovation, such as capacitive touch, that it is followed by several less substantial and more incremental innovations. Interacting and moving between apps and screens now involves more intuitive hand gestures, rather than pressing buttons. There was a lot of hoopla over Swype — a new keyboard on Android phones that, rather than forcing you to type out each letter of a word on your phone, allowed you to input a word with one continuous motion of your finger across the keyboard, making input faster. The Nokia N9, the Finnish phonemaker’s stillborn experiment with a brand new mobile operating system to succeed its Symbian OS, did away with physical buttons on the phone altogether, such as the kind of home buttons that you find on an iOS or an Android device.
But incremental innovations also add complexity, gilding the lily as it were. There’s now a wide range of touch gestures which make your interaction with the phone much more simpler and quicker. The key problem of course, especially for a new user, is remembering all of them (though it gets better with practice). This is more than reminiscent of the vast range of keyboard shortcuts available on desktops and laptops today. Who, beside really professional applications users, can remember all of them?
The bottomline is that, like the five blade-razor, innovation in the user interface seem to have run its course at least for now. If there is a next big leap in smartphone innovation, it will be in this area. Apple made a start with Siri — its voice activated phone assistant. But Siri has not (yet) dramatically shifted the way that users use smartphones, unlike touch.
Who Cares?
But really, who cares? Even those most critical of Apple’s latest launch concede that the iPhone will be a huge seller, like all its predecessors. Its one thing, to bring in a radical new innovation, but even investors, who are notoriously high-maintenance, don’t expect you to do it every year.
And indeed the comparison with Gillette is not all bad. For decades, till it was taken over by P&G, Gillette dominated the market for men’s razors (as well as a range of other products which were household names). In the 80s, it suffered what in retrospect was a short-term rout, when it didn’t anticipate the shift towards disposable razors. It was in 1989, that Warren Buffett, made a $600-million investment in the company. By 2005, at the time of Gillette’s acquisition by P&G, his holding in the company was worth around $5 billion. Gillette is a stock that has famously been beloved of smart, savvy investors.
The real difference between Apple and Gillette of course is also the most obvious. Apple operates in a sector that is highly volatile, and subject to technological disruptions that can seemingly come from nowhere. Apple was a disruptor when it entered the smartphone business — it, more than any other company, knows that it has to constantly watch its back to avoid being disrupted.
In retrospect, no one, not even Apple, could match the burden of expectations it seems, and they must have realised this early on. And this was why, in the weeks leading up to the event, there were leaks galore among the tech blogs and tech press about what the new iPhone 5 would have — in retrospect it all looked an awful lot like expectation management. When it finally came out, the iPhone 5 was a damp squib.
Mat Honan described the iPhone 5 in Wired magazine as “completely amazing, and utterly boring”. “It is the Toyota Prius of phone updates. It is an amazing triumph of technology that gets better and better, year after year, and yet somehow is every bit as exciting as a 25 mph drive through a sensible neighbourhood at a reasonable time of day....The iPhone 5 can simultaneously be the best phone on the market and really, really boring. And that has almost nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with our expectations.”
Five Blades, Up From Four
Its always a problem when a satirical show unwittingly, but near-perfectly, anticipates your product launch by years. In 1975, the popular Saturday Night Live show in the US, featured a mock tripleblade razor 23 years before Gillette released the real thing. And the Oniondid it again to Gillette, when, following the release of the four bladed-version, it parodied the launch of a five-bladed one. And sure enough, Gillette, on cue, went on to release the five-bladed razor. Apple, and to be fair, the rest of the smartphone industry, is having its own little Gillette moment in a way. Innovation as of now, is fairly predictable — bigger screens. Check. Sharper, more higher resolution displays. Check. One more photography app. Check.
It doesn’t help that a large chunk of the smartphone business simply copied, sorry, was influenced by, Apple’s design. Perhaps the biggest innovation that Apple bought to the business with the first iPhone was touch, especially ‘capacitive’ touch. Till the iPhone, touch screens existed, but were a pain to use, depending as they did, on responding to the level of pressure that a human finger put on the screen. Modern smartphone screens, beginning with Apple, abandoned such ‘resistive’ screens altogether, leading to a quantum jump in the ease and comfort with which such screens could be used. It was a genuinely new, and far more intuitive way for users to interact with their phones.
And because of the new way of user interaction, it led to a whole set of other changes — screens could become larger without allowing an increase in the size of the phone. This meant a much better experience for customers, for the uses for which smartphones are put to nowadays such as video or gaming. Of course, smartphone manufacturers, not being content with the automatic increase in screen size from moving to a touchbased phone, have gone ahead and built bigger phones anyway. And Apple, a laggard in this area, has jumped on the bandwagon, by increasing the size of the iPhone 5.
It is a mark of a big innovation, such as capacitive touch, that it is followed by several less substantial and more incremental innovations. Interacting and moving between apps and screens now involves more intuitive hand gestures, rather than pressing buttons. There was a lot of hoopla over Swype — a new keyboard on Android phones that, rather than forcing you to type out each letter of a word on your phone, allowed you to input a word with one continuous motion of your finger across the keyboard, making input faster. The Nokia N9, the Finnish phonemaker’s stillborn experiment with a brand new mobile operating system to succeed its Symbian OS, did away with physical buttons on the phone altogether, such as the kind of home buttons that you find on an iOS or an Android device.
But incremental innovations also add complexity, gilding the lily as it were. There’s now a wide range of touch gestures which make your interaction with the phone much more simpler and quicker. The key problem of course, especially for a new user, is remembering all of them (though it gets better with practice). This is more than reminiscent of the vast range of keyboard shortcuts available on desktops and laptops today. Who, beside really professional applications users, can remember all of them?
The bottomline is that, like the five blade-razor, innovation in the user interface seem to have run its course at least for now. If there is a next big leap in smartphone innovation, it will be in this area. Apple made a start with Siri — its voice activated phone assistant. But Siri has not (yet) dramatically shifted the way that users use smartphones, unlike touch.
Who Cares?
But really, who cares? Even those most critical of Apple’s latest launch concede that the iPhone will be a huge seller, like all its predecessors. Its one thing, to bring in a radical new innovation, but even investors, who are notoriously high-maintenance, don’t expect you to do it every year.
And indeed the comparison with Gillette is not all bad. For decades, till it was taken over by P&G, Gillette dominated the market for men’s razors (as well as a range of other products which were household names). In the 80s, it suffered what in retrospect was a short-term rout, when it didn’t anticipate the shift towards disposable razors. It was in 1989, that Warren Buffett, made a $600-million investment in the company. By 2005, at the time of Gillette’s acquisition by P&G, his holding in the company was worth around $5 billion. Gillette is a stock that has famously been beloved of smart, savvy investors.
The real difference between Apple and Gillette of course is also the most obvious. Apple operates in a sector that is highly volatile, and subject to technological disruptions that can seemingly come from nowhere. Apple was a disruptor when it entered the smartphone business — it, more than any other company, knows that it has to constantly watch its back to avoid being disrupted.
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Avinash Celestine SET120916
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