“Joi Ito is the director of the ‘Media Lab’ at MIT — a place where brilliant creatives come together to grope around on the edge of the inventive darkness in which the future most of us think we see melts into things far more mind-blowing,” Lance Salyers writes for Forbes. “In his recently released book Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future, Ito quotes Google’s Larry Page, from this 2013 interview in Wired magazine: ‘[M]ost companies decay slowly over time. They tend to do approximately what they did before, with a few minor changes. It’s natural for people to want to work on things that they know aren’t going to fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time. Especially in technology, where you know there’s going to be non-incremental change.'”
“I was reminded of these words and Ito’s principle of ‘Risk over Safety’ as the internet took note of the significance of Monday’s date: the 10th anniversary of Steve Jobs’ memorable reveal of the first iPhone at Macworld,” Salyers writes. “That iconic moment radically altered not just the smartphone world, but how we interacted with technology on a far more fundamental level. Even beyond that, however, the development of the iPhone exemplified Apple at its absolute best — bypassing mere incremental advances in favor of aiming for exponential ones, even at the expense of their own current products.”
“Today, at the ripe old tech age of 10 years old, the iPhone now sits where the iPod once did as the single most important product in Apple’s financial universe,” Salyers writes. “Which means it’s time for Apple to kill the iPhone…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple will be just fine, thanks. No need for them to heed Larry page’s advice, since it was likely Steve Jobs who gave it to him in the first place. Apple knows what to do. An arbitrary time unit between iPod and iPhone debuts is not the proper impetus for change.