Tom AustinDaryl Plummer and I have been carrying on a conversation (with several others) about understanding what an iPhone is. First and foremost, it is not a phone.
The iPhone is the first clearly visible member of a new class of Internet-savvy populist toolkits that you can carry with you. (Insert list of newly introduced competitors to the iPhone with similar toolkit capabilities.)
It has a phone application. A music application (actually, many). A camera application (again, actually many), news applications, entertainment applications, communication apps, collaboration, hobbies, specialties, peccadilloes and “what have you” applications.
It’s not an extension of your corporate phone or the IT-designed, special PC image on your notebook or desktop. It’s your personal toolkit.
We were writing at the turn of the century (circa 2000) about the “Supranet”, how internet, wireless, mobile telephony and intelligent objects all come together. But we were writing about the business side – how businesses would take advantage of this (and how it would benefit end-user consumers) so we didn’t have the same populist, consumer oriented vision of Steve Jobs. (Too bad, eh?)
But that’s OK. We detected the coming tsunami. But we didn’t understand, at the time, how the populist part would become (and has become) far more important, at least for now, than the corporate part.
So… when I say that the iPhone is not a phone, I suggest we think of it as a Populist Electronic Toolkit (PET). You could buy the Apple version (PETA – a/k/a the iPhone) or not. You could go “business only” and buy a No-Pets-Allowed appliance…. or something in between.
Help me understand. Do I have this right? How often do you use your iPhone as a phone? How often do you use all the zillions of other apps on the device?
Is it just a phone for you, your family or your users?
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3 responses so far ↓
1 Richard Fouts May 6, 2009 at 12:04 am
Interesting post .. I had not thought of it quite this way. I use my iPhone as a phone when I travel, which is 15 to 20% time. The other 80% is consumed by all the things you mention.
2 Tom Short May 8, 2009 at 10:41 am
reminds me of the insight we had at IBM about the intranet and employee’s PCs. The insight was that the intranet portal was not the whole portal – the PC itself was. The intranet part was only one aspect of accessing one’s personal work area, but the apps and files on each person’s pc varied a lot. The aha was when we pointed at the hardware device – the laptop or desktop pc – and said, “*this* is the front door to the office.”
The iPhone is v2 of this. And now we have a term to describe it: mashup. Only a matter of time before employees will start expecting to have the same level of control over the work PCs as they have over their iPhones. Mashup.
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