Convopage
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🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
1/ Great
@BenedictEvans
chart. Phones passed PC runrate pre-bubble. *Huge* lesson for me about disruption. Personal "what was I thinking"…
Benedict Evans
@BenedictEvans
For at least a decade no-one in America understood this. Contributed to Nokia's complacency.
49 replies and sub-replies as of May 25 2017
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
2/ 1998—on sabbatical at HBS & Clay's Innovators Dilemma just forming. Was focused on web (Sharepoint!)/testing early Blackberry pager—❤️❤️!
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
3/ Laptops were finally working well enough that they could be primary computers and you didn't need a bag of batteries. 6lb travel weight!
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
4/ Everyone had Moto flip phone. Voice mail ruled. We called our voicemail between meetings w/ flip phones. SMS didn't work across carriers.
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
5/ PocketPC/Windows CE still a couple of years away as was Palm Treo (but everyone at HBS issued a Palm Pilot). Early HPC cool, but no Wifi!
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
6/ Nokia blanketed Europe. SMS everywhere. Always wild visiting EU subs, watching them triple tap all day. In US that was viewed as 😜!
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
7/ My biggest mistake: visiting my friends in Japan who were deep into i-Mode and were doing *everything* w/ their tiny "push" phones. wtf?
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
8/ Was literally perplexed. I had / loved blackberry. Felt it was specially tuned to email. No web access. Idea of web like iMode… puzzling.
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
9/ Great friends in Japan dragged me around showed me ppl using it for weather, trains, maps…I just couldn't see how that could really work.
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
10/ In US just getting things to work on PCs. Blackberry was perfect for email, even w/o server support (ran sync on dedicated PC) was 💯.
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
11/ Word/Excel files on tiny screen were a "stupid computer trick". Why? Just getting stuff to work on laptops. Just getting web working.
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
12/ I could go on about how dumb I was 12 years ago at a deep product level. I'm in Japan now reliving the absurdity of my POV in '99.
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
13/ OTOH, once Treo came out it became super clear web on phone was *the* thing, not a thing. I moved my whole workflow there…"overnight".
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
14/ What was also clear was PC model would not be phone model. i-Mode was vertical, Berry was vertical. More here -
It is worth recognizing that Microsoft tried to recreate the PC ecosystem with mobile.
Compounding all of this was the aversion to building hardware which even at the time was proving to be the successful path (Palm, Sidekick…
medium.com
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
15/ Not jumping on mobile even while I was using it was massive miss. Will never forget my friends in Japan trying to set me right! // EOTS
Benedict Evans
@BenedictEvans
The interesting thing is that neither PC nor mobile people got what smartphones would be.
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
That's only mildly comforting :-)
Soph 🤓
@sophmoji
Bring back Blackberry!
mir
@mirmanwar
could it be argued that people who got design + tech may have? vision of consolidated utility using tech. Jobs as most significant example.
mir
@mirmanwar
more so than just PC and just mobile people.
Web Barr
@WebBarr
Seems bc so many people/industries feel they "missed" mobile, they're trying to identify the next 📱 for good or bad. Lots more thought now
Atul 🌸 Acharya
@AtulAcharya
I recall back in '05 meeting Nokia folks at Media Lab- they showing a Web Server running on their device (Communicator?). Cool tech but ..
Atul 🌸 Acharya
@AtulAcharya
but they didn't know what to do with it. 🙄🤔 They thought it a cool tech gimmick. Didn't think apps to comm, etc
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
All too late by then. By years.
stu rodnick
@sturodnick
Noble for you to acknowledge👍
Michael Babich
@MichaelBabich
So what is Japan obsessed about now as to a new tech that we still do not get?
Atul 🌸 Acharya
@AtulAcharya
I worked at Docomo early 05. Was totally revelatory! Showed my exp to everyone who'd hear in US - no dice. Ppl dismissed it as gimmicky 🙄
Larry Shapiro
@larrys32
We launched DIS content on iMode in fall 2000 - and I was convinced that every carrier would follow that model. Went around evangelizing
Larry Shapiro
@larrys32
They were small thinkers and control freaks. Didn't get it and treated content services as minor oppty
Benedict Evans
@BenedictEvans
relative to mobile, a $1.tr industry, it *was* a small opportunity for them. that was part of the problem.
Larry Shapiro
@larrys32
Yep. The Disney and ESPN MVNOs were our (flawed) attempt to address directly
Sriram Krishnan
@sriramk
Why? What was structurally different that was evident at the time?
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
The experience that had already happened with HPC and the phone OS craziness already happening.
Philippe MÉDA
@icopilots
Again payment is an interesting parallel right there. Suica, Pasmo = super effective local/vertical solutions. What's next? Not AliPay.
Jahangir
@jnaina
Amazing that Apple bid their time after their Newton debacle, quietly watched where everything was heading and pounced at the right time
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
19 years ago
Johnny W. Lam
@NETSTATINFO
19 yrs ago, I've would changed everything except for one thing, my loved ones and when I met my first true love.
Tren Griffin
@trengriffin
One factor causing people to missjudge was not anticipating how MIMO and a few other approaches would increase wireless capacity.
Tren Griffin
@trengriffin
As late as December 2004 Sprint felt they had to have Nextel's spectrum. The spectrum crisis never actually appeared. That enabled new uses.
Andreas Klinger ✌️
@andreasklinger
iMode was 🙏 afair it's chtml was a subset of html w/ a tolerant parser => you could (worstcase) open normal websites compare that to .wap…
Benedict Evans
@BenedictEvans
Correct. Subset of HTML with some custom extensions. Foreigners always called iMode a 'walled garden', which was totally wrong.
Philippe MÉDA
@icopilots
Interestingly enough, since the demise of i-Mode Japan has no edge anymore.
Philippe MÉDA
@icopilots
Look at how China tier 1 cities are using mobile payment now. Like i-Mode 10 yrs ago. They leap-frogged cards, while we are stuck with them.
HC
@hc2424
Without Apple, would we be more or less where we are with touchscreen smartphones and (more or less) open app store ecosystems?
Johnny W. Lam
@NETSTATINFO
There was also this...but without tv and radio yet! ☺
Johnny W. Lam
@NETSTATINFO
And a yr later there was full NBS support TV, RADIO and all in ASIA Pacific.
Alice Wonder
@AliceWonder32
I still reject mobile for most things, the lack of control over my own device is particularly troubling, especially for privacy issues.
Pushkar Ranade
@magicsilicon
I remember my Samsung Blackjack and thinking how amazing it was to sync my Outlook Calendar to it
🍪Steven Sinofsky ॐ
@stevesi
6+ years later than this thread :-)
Pushkar Ranade
@magicsilicon
Yes, 2005-6! US was woefully behind