“Folks, remember what BlackBerry said about the iPhone when it first came out?” William Feng asks for Seeking Alpha.
• [Apple and the iPhone is] kind of one more entrant into an already very busy space with lots of choice for consumers … But in terms of a sort of a sea-change for BlackBerry, I would think that’s overstating it. – RIM half-CEO Jim Balsillie, February 2007.
• Again, I have said this before and I will say it again; Apple has done the industry an enormous favour because they basically told the world to expect a media player [the iPod] as a software feature on a good smartphone. As the leading smartphone appliance company and platform company, we could not buy that kind of validation for $100m. – Balsillie, April 2007.
• As nice as the Apple iPhone is, it poses a real challenge to its users. Try typing a web key on a touchscreen on an Apple iPhone, that’s a real challenge. You cannot see what you type. – Balsillie, November 2007.
• The most exciting mobile trend is full Qwerty keyboards. I’m sorry, it really is. I’m not making this up. – RIM half-CEO Mike Lazaridis, May 2008.
“When an innovation is being first introduced, it is always met with fierce resistance and ridicule by those who fear change. But in the end, action speaks louder than empty words and time will tell who is right and who is wrong,” Feng writes. “As history wills it, since then, Apple has risen to unprecedented heights through the success of the iPhone, while BlackBerry has faded into obscurity by stubbornly adhering to outdated traditions.”
“Now, seven years since the first iPhone was introduced, it seems that history will repeat itself once again. With the release of the upcoming iPhone 6, it is widely expected that Apple will introduce a revolutionary sapphire glass screen, and this time, standing in the way of Apple’s innovation is Corning – the maker of Gorilla Glass. Much like BlackBerry to the iPhone, Corning has ridiculed and downplayed the merits of the sapphire glass,” Feng writes. “In Corning’s arguments against the usage of sapphire glass, it has listed high production costs and inferior physical properties as its main concerns. However, Apple is well ahead of the curve and it is expected to have enough production capacity to supply the sapphire displays for both versions of the iPhone and for the iWatch. Very likely, in its partnership with GT Technologies, Apple has managed to find a way to dramatically improve the production efficiency for its sapphire screens. Moreover, based on the recently surfaced videos of the iPhone sapphire display, there is evidence that it would also be a superior product to the Corning Gorilla Glass.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Like makers of antiquated 32-bit mobile processors, Corning will still be able to supply all of the wannabe iPhone knockoff outfits ringing the globe for quite some time.
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