“Seven years after Steve Jobs unveiled the first Apple iPhone, top tech leaders are willing to discuss openly just how gravely they misjudged the device that ignited the mobile computing era,” Aaron Pressman reports for Yahoo.
“Back in January 2007, when Jobs first showed the new device, he pitched it as a combination phone, music player and Internet communicator. But competitors including Microsoft’s then-CEO Steve Ballmer and Motorola’s former CEO Ed Zander could barely contain their disdain,” Pressman reports. “‘There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share,’ Ballmer said of the lineup that has since sold more than 500 million devices.”
“This week, top executives from Ericsson, Intel and Cisco Systems admitted that their companies had failed to appreciate the iPhone’s potential,” Pressman reports. “Intel’s motto, coined by former CEO Andy Grove, was, famously, ‘only the paranoid survive.’ But the semiconductor giant completely missed the booming market ignited by Apple for simpler, lower power chips that run smartphones and tablets. ‘We thought of it as the phone business,’ Intel president Renee James, who has been with the company for more than 25 years, explained at the Fortune conference. ‘And we’re not in the phone business.'”
Pressman reports, “Now Intel is rushing to catch up…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Revolutionary iPhone.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “BD” for the heads up.]