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The iPhone’s Secret Sauce
Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 4:00 PM - by John Martellaro
The secret sauce to the iPhone design may or may not be unique to Silicon Valley, according to Charles Cooper at C|Net. Other companies, in other locations, also have a lot of smart employees. However, two key elements stand out in Apples case: software design and technical restraint.
Mr. Cooper posed the question: "So how is it that a novice in the cell phone arena produces a technical tour de force the first time out, putting to shame the likes of Samsung and Nokia (and U.S.-based Motorola)? Its not like the handset makers dont know how to pull together the necessary hardware functions into a single unit."
So Mr. Cooper asked Brad Meador, one of the principals at ClearContext, a San Francisco-based software developer, who had important insights into Apples success with the iPhone.
"Listen to what the market needs and strive to meet those needs in as simple a way as possible," Mr. Meador said. "Its a little tricky because the initial feedback you get on a new software product is usually from a more tech-savvy, early adopter crowd, a group thats prone to lead you down a path of too much complexity for the market youre ultimately trying to reach." [Emphasis added by TMO.]
And just as important, new products need to "just work," a concept thats hard to implement when software is complex and confusing. Drawing the line is the key, and Mr. Cooper observed that, "How a company answers the question [simplicity/functionality/complexity] separates the winners from the losers."
The result was borne out when Mr. Cooper saw an iPhone for the first time: "Ive seen lots of other smart phones, but nothing like this. When a colleague brought his newly purchased iPhone into the newsroom on Monday, a room full of otherwise hard-bitten reporters was reduced to a gushing scrum of starry-eyed goobers."
As are we all.
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