We Have The iPhone Because Steve Jobs Has Big Brass Balls

The iPhone is an outstanding engineering achievement. That said it is not a break through engineering achievement. It is the bringing together of technologies and concepts that, for the most part, were fairly well understood.

The brilliance of iPhone is in its politics, and that credit must go personally not just to Apple as a company, but to Steve Jobs as an individual. Steve understood intuitively that Apple could do something that perhaps no other company in the world could do, which is to shift the dynamic between the handset manufacturer and the carriers by delivering a useful product in a cesspool of cell phone crap.

Pre iPhone, if you had had any conversations with handset manufacturers about why things were the way that they were, why phones sucked so badly, they would blame it on the carrier. They would say, the carriers dictate this, or the carriers won’t let us do that, and that is why we suck.

The real truth is that the dynamic between carriers and handset makers was focused on the dynamic between handset makers and carriers. They were focused on the minutia of existence. They were focused on the next feature they wanted in the next quarter that could perhaps generate the next 1% increase in carrier revenue. They were focused on Joe Blow getting fired and who is the new guy managing handset relations. The one thing neither side was focused on was how crappy their products were. But it was all too apparent to the customers.

Of course it wasn’t just a horrible carrier/handset manufacturer dynamic. The carriers did have lots of control, but that did not stop Microsoft or Palm for that matter from making fairly open platforms with little carrier interference. They did what they wanted. They just sucked regardless, and you really can’t blame the carriers for that. Palm and Microsoft were just massively incompetent. Palm to this day, hasn’t been able to ship a real OS on their phones. This is something they have been working on for *years*. The technical leaders at Palm are (or at least have been) idiots. At Microsoft, they just suck at everything until Apple shows them how to do it.

But the bottom line is anyone who actually used a phone over the last few years knew they sucked, and intuitively knew that they could be far better. This is why, for years, people have been anticipating the iPhone. Not because such a product was unimaginable, but because cell phones were so bad that something that could blow away the status quo was *easily* imaginable.

What Apple did was to rethink everything and, presuming a clean slate, design something that would actually be useful. The willingness to rethink, was brilliant, and risky. I think the actual design could easily have come from any of the top flight design firms like Frog or IDEO. But Jobs actually believed, actually *knew* that such a product could be delivered to the market, despite the perceived politics and carrier dynamics, and that was the revolution.

Not being in the market to start with, which some pundits viewed as a disadvantage, was actually Apple’s greatest strength. They were unafraid to uncompromisingly deliver a radical shift in the market. And they were willing to Apply their substantial engineering and design resources to the task. Their outsider perspective allowed them to think *purely* in terms of what the world should look like – not the way it is. Correction – not the way it *was*. At the end of the day, Apple changed the market forever, in part because Steve had a little bit of vision, but more importantly because he had a pair of big brass balls.