主题：iphone是超女 -- 小小曾

First:

Newsflash, the iPhone is going to be a success. That was largely guaranteed when the 31,000th article was written about it (no exaggeration). There are very few single phone models that sell more than a million units (we’ve only had something like 3 to 5 of ours do that), and the iPhone probably has already done so (or they will soon). There’s no way to look at this as anything but a success for them.

There are a lot of components to selling a product, and making people interested in buying it is one of them. You have to appreciate how amazingly good Steve Jobs is at this. Let me say that again, 31 thousand articles written about the device before it was even released. None of them paid for by Apple. Be as cynical as you want. Talk about “reality distortion fields” till you’re blue in the face. This is an impressive achievement and I bow to his skill.

Second:

Newsflash, Apple will be a player in the phone market for a long time. Believe it or not, I view this as a good thing. Microsoft does better competing with others than with ourselves. There are a lot of examples of this in our history, but the canonical one is IE. When we were competing with Netscape, we rocked. When Netscape died, we seemed to grind to a halt (yes, I know it wasn’t that simple). Then, when Firefox appeared, we started making cool browsers again. Look at the phone market. We’ve beaten PalmOS. We’ve beaten RIM. Nokia completely dwarfs us, but we’re growing much faster than they are and are taking share. We’ll beat them. It may take 5 years. It might take 8. But we’ll beat them. And, at that point, we’d be in the situation IE was in after they beat Netscape. But, now we’ll have Apple to provide competition for us. They’re fundamentally better at the game we play than Palm, RIM, or Nokia is. And that’s a good thing.

Third:

Viva la revolución. I read an article about Steve Wozniak showing up in line at the Apple store and cheering about the iPhone “revolution.” At first I was pretty disgruntled about this. What revolution? The device does nothing that hasn’t been done before. Are they really claiming that snappy graphics make for a revolution? But I’ve come to realize that there is something incredibly revolutionary about the iPhone. But it has nothing to do with the device itself. The revolution is that Apple is manhandling the mobile operators. AT&T, the company, is an afterthought with the iPhone. They don’t enable the phone. They don’t gatekeep updates. They clearly don’t have any say in what goes onto it. Is this a chink in the MO armor? Will this someday translate into us getting more freedom with them as well? Will we someday be allowed to distribute security fixes directly to customers? Will we ever be able to say, “You don’t make Apple submit to this requirement, why should we?”

Apple’s greatest weakness is working with partners. It’s our greatest strength. I don’t want to play Apple and start walking over my partners the way they do. But if my partners start saying, “Gee, I sure like working with Microsoft more than those Apple people,” that’s a good thing. And if Apple forces some of my partners start saying, “You know, some of these requirements aren’t as important as we thought,” then Apple’s is a revolution I can get behind.

Let me give you two examples. 1) WAP. We once spent an entire release cycle adding WAP support to our browser. We could have spent that time making our browser better, but the MOs insisted that we make it compatible with junky, less capable browsers instead. I don’t know if AT&T told Apple to add WAP to Safari, but if they did, Apple told them to pound sand. 2) The GSM Global Certification Forum spec. GCF is a compliance document that all GSM phones need to pass. Its 5134 pages long. I’ve just spent the last few weeks scrambling to fix a failure in test GCF 31.8.1.2.3. This is a test about changing the Call Barring password. You type in your old password, your new password, and your new password again to confirm it. In Windows Mobile, we do a string compare of the new password and the compare, and if they don’t match, we put up a message box that tells the user to retype them. That behavior causes us to fail GCF certification because 31.8.1.2.3 requires that we send both passwords to the network so that it can do the string compare. Insane, right? Well one of the top five cell phone manufacturers, a company that has shipped hundreds of times more phones than Apple, is being told that they can’t ship phones in Europe if they don’t pass all GCF tests, including this one. Apple probably fails half of the GCF tests. But I’ll bet they’ll still ship.

Fourth:

iPhone positives. I’m not sure if this device will ever be measured on its merits. But if it is, here are some of things I like about it. The UI is snappy. There are a lot of reasons why they’re snappy and we’re not, but I’d say the biggest is that they made being snappy a priority where we didn’t. I’m sure that, in the past, passing GCF tests was more important than being snappy. We’ll see if it still is in the future. The screen is really pretty. It’s bright and inviting, and has nice icons. The web browser is very nice, especially with the effortless and instantaneous zooming. Zooming on our browser follows the desktop model, which really amounts to, “The screen is big enough, but you may want to change the text size if your eyes aren’t good enough.” Clearly that’s not appropriate on a small screen device. Apple does a much better job here. The screen has more pixels than most of our devices do. We do support a larger resolution than Apple’s, but the screens are expensive and few devices use them. A device in the hand is better than a theoretical one in the bush. Kudos to them for putting a big screen on the device. The device is nice and small, roughly the size of my Dash, but they’re pulling some impressive battery life numbers from it (reported, I haven’t personally confirmed the battery life). Nicely done.