Nokia’s Next-Day Internal Competitive Analysis of the Original iPhone Largely Got It Right
A few days ago Nokia unveiled their Design Archive at Aalto University in Finland. Fahad X spotted a real gem — an internal confidential slide deck shared within the company the day after Apple had introduced the original iPhone at Macworld Expo in January 2007. To the credit of the team that put this presentation together, they mostly got it:
“iPhone touch screen UI may set a new standard of state-of-art: The new user interface may change the standards of the superior user experience for the whole market”. They quote Avi Greengart (a keen and sharp observer): “visually stunning and incredibly responsive”.
The on-screen keyboard is mentioned only in passing on a deck titled “Other Great Innovations” as “Predictive, corrective input from on-screen qwerty-keypad”. Most of the existing smartphone makers simply could not believe the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard would work. Steve Ballmer famously laughed his way into getting sacked from Microsoft over the iPhone’s price and lack of a hardware keyboard. BlackBerry was obsessed with hardware keyboards. This Nokia deck is remarkably open to the idea that Apple was onto something. It does have a bullet point, under “iPhone has the biggest impact on the definition of coolness” (true!), that states: “Even though Steve Jobs emphasized iPhone superiority to ‘Buttons’, it is to be expected that the Consumer QWERTY category will continue to succeed.” But still, this deck is remarkable for acknowledging the potential significance of the iPhone’s keyboard.
It’s a swing and a miss regarding third party software: “No mention either of Java support, unusual user input method may be the reason. Lack of Java would shut out a big mass of existing SW.” So close to getting it right. The iPhone’s lack of support for the then-“dominant” Java ME (Micro Edition) platform did shut out all existing mobile software. But all of that software sucked, big time. Sucked to develop, sucked to distribute, sucked to install, sucked to use. Not supporting it was a huge win for the iPhone, just like not supporting Flash Player wound up being a huge win for both the iPhone in particular and the mobile web generally.
