thomas fitzgerald.net

When Apple launched the iPhone nearly two years ago at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, industry insiders and competitors were quick to decry the signature feature of Apple’s new phone, the use of a touchscreen. Until then most touch screen devices had been unresponsive and clumsy. With the iPhone Apple showed that this did not have to be the case. Fast forward to today, the iPhone has been a huge success and every major cellphone manufacturer is rushing to add touch screens to their cellphones. An element of fear has gripped the massive cellphone industry, that the company they had all ridiculed 18 months earlier was quickly becoming a behemoth, and they need to counter the Apple juggernaut by taking on the iPhone head on. Unfortunately the rushed responses show that the Industry clearly doesn’t even understand why the iPhone has been such a success.

Case in point, the new Nokia touchscreen 5800 XpressMusic Phone. What Nokia have basically done is shoehorn a touchscreen onto their existing symbian mobile platform in the hopes of gaining some momentum against Apple. Clearly in Nokia’s, as well as most other manufacturers eyes, what has made the iPhone successful is that it has a touch screen, so If they add a touch screen to their own phones and cram in a bunch of other features, then they’ll be even more successful, right? But matching features hasn’t exactly worked for all the iPod competitors out there, and now here’s a whole new branch of the electronics industry lining up to make the same fundamental mistake. They are spending billions of dollars / euros / yen to make devices that may appear to compete very well with Apple on paper, but when it comes to the real world they fail miserably. What makes the iPhone so appealing to people is not it’s feature list, or even it’s design. It’s the whole package, the synthesis of form and function and that’s something that, in the twenty first century very few companies outside Apple seem to comprehend.

I think for a large portion of the electronics industry, product development is broken into three areas: hardware design, engineering and software, and priority is usually in that order. For the vast majority of companies these are separate discreet disciplines. For most the term “Design” refers to the physical look of the device. For Apple, however, the term “Design” is all encompassing. It is, as Steve is fond of saying, in their DNA. It permeates all disciplines of bringing a product to market, from hardware design to the engineering of the electronics to the software that runs on it. For Apple Design is not just the look, but the feel, the emotion of a product, the way it works and its ease of use. Every aspect is carefully thought out, not just in isolation but how it will interact with other aspects of the product. The hardware design compliments the software and visa versa, and all are given equal priority. In the end it is (most of the time) the perfect blend of form and function (occasional bugs aside). And unfortunately (for the industry), no one else seems to get that concept.

In fact most other companies deride Apple for focussing too much on the design of their products. They are stuck in the twentieth century view that products are sold based on their spec sheet. That’s simply not the case any more. The success of the iPod has shown the world that an electronics device doesn’t have to be a collection of disparate functions and features. I think many competitors fail to realize this because they think Apple’s success is down to dumb luck, because Apple doesn’t play by the accepted rules of the industry, and therefore couldn’t possibly be successful.

Out in the real world however, people now realize that form and function go hand in hand, that form can be function and function can be defined by form. For Apple this has led to unprecedented success that continues to confound experts and competitors alike. For everyone else it’s become a constant struggle to stay relevant with their old world views of how the electronics industry should work.