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That question rankled several readers, who accused me of fostering a know-nothing ethnocentric view of the world. What about Nintendo's Wii or Sony's Walkman, Chas? Neither was made in the USA and neither has fared badly, to say the least.
One person simply summed up my question as "ignorant parochial drivel." To wit: "This is a global economy, and if you guys don't clue in to the fact that you need everyone else just as much if not more than they need you (because how many of your precious American workers would be willing to work for the wages and hours that workers in Asia do) as well as fix your education system and pay more attention to world benefit rather than self-serving gain in your foreign policies. It won't be long before revolutionary products like this are completely conceived of and created outside the U.S. As it is, most of their parts are created elsewhere."
Ouch. It stung even more because my interlocutor didn't understand that we mostly agree. Something may have been lost in translation, but I don't need to wake up and smell the "global economy coffee" to recognize the achievement of a talented cohort of transnational software designers, many of whom work in Silicon Valley.
As other readers in this space have correctly noted, the driving force behind much of the iPhone was not an American, but a Brit by the name of Jonathan Ive.
The more interesting question is why Apple enjoys a consistent qualitative design edge over equally brainy rivals in other countries. Critics can quibble, but the iPhone is a remarkable piece of work. I've 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.
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)? It's not like the handset makers don't know how to pull together the necessary hardware functions into a single unit.
At the risk of belaboring the painfully obvious, Apple does not enjoy a monopoly on brains. Steve Jobs quite obviously is a remarkable CEO, but does he deserve all the credit? Put Jobs at the helm of Samsung and would you get the same results? I'm not convinced you would.
With the iPhone--and most high-tech gadgets--the secret sauce comes down to software design, a field where the good stuff is akin to artwork. And this is where so many of the intangibles that we've come to associate with Silicon Valley come in. I put the question to Brad Meador, one of the principals at ClearContext, a San Francisco-based software developer, who said the answer boiled down to two basic elements.
"Listen to what the market needs and strive to meet those needs in as simple a way as possible," he said. "It's 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 that's prone to lead you down a path of too much complexity for the market you're ultimately trying to reach.
"Software designers need to make sure that their products 'just work,' he continued. "Features that are buried in the user interface are unlikely to be used. Packages that require anything beyond basic configuration to provide value will lose most of their customers within minutes."
Where do you draw the line? That's a judgment call, the same as deciding whether to select one hue on a canvas over another. How a company answers the question separates the winners from the losers. You can't reduce the success of the iPhone to birthright or nationality. Yet the evidence is beyond contestation: Silicon Valley companies continue to invent the best software designs (though they often do so with the active input of foreigners who have chosen to make their lives here).
But nothing lasts forever. Everyone knows the best wines in the world always come from France. Everyone? That used to be true. No longer. Napa Valley now gives the vintners of the Old World a run for their money. If history's any guide, the clock also will wind down on the U.S.'s unrivaled domination in software design.
A lot depends upon an incentive system that rewards innovation, rather than achieving consensus or playing it safe. In a networked world economy, transnational skills go hand in hand with transnational corporate cultures. I don't know if it's entirely good or bad but globalization is elbowing aside the old ways of doing business in nearly ever corner of the globe.
So why should we be shocked if one day, the next software super-hit comes with a foreign accent?
Biography
Charles Cooper is CNET News.com's executive editor of commentary.
See more CNET content tagged:
Silicon Valley, Apple iPhone, Steve Jobs, reader, worker
the iPhone could have been invented elsewhere. As the author
noted, Motorola was not able to pull it. People tend to forget
why Nokia reached over 35% of the cell phone market: because
back in the middle of the nineties the user interface of those
phones was absolutely awful (Motorola was a classic example of
bad UI). Enters Nokia with a very simple and logical UI, at a time
when nobody knew who Nokia is. Now the time has come for
Apple to usurp Nokia's place (they will, if Nokia does not react
properly).
I believe that most of the credit goes to Steve Jobs, not only
because he is a genius in realizing what the consumers want,
but also because he has a talent to get the right people around
him, able to translate his ideas in practice.
And "one more thing": the GSM standard was "invented" in
Europe.
For $50B so being outsourced to India and China, have we seen an actual innovation come out of either country? Have we seen two PhDs noodle on a problem of fundamental science or problem of human interface, crack the code on something that generates discontinuous improvement, and invents a whole new industry? No, and there are many factors that lead to this phenomenon that are cultural, economic, political, social, etc.
One needs to understand the difference between software analysis, design, development, and distribution. Analysis is having rich understanding of customer needs, Design is having rich understanding of unique solution methods, Development is implementation and architecture, and Distribution is sales and marketing. I'll agree wholeheartedly that India has create competitive advantage around software development, but I can't think of any place in the world, even within the United States, where technology analysis and design thrive as competencies, in a manner that is replicated, taught, acknowledged, valued, and funded like Silicon Valley. Try as the world may, and I mean this with respect to the Japans, Chinas, Indias, Finlands of the world, no other region can systematically and perpetually generate technology analysis and design like Silicon Valley.
At the moment, the hype cloud covers the facts. When the smoke clears, we'll see if the iPhone is a new class of communication device or a faster horse.
all the Inquirer-esque reporting that has accompanied it's
arrival.
It marks a profound shift in how something orninary is done.
Apple is very good at giving people what they want but never
imagined they did.
What if Microsoft, with all it's massive clout, had this kind of
imagination...
LG Prada was there even before iphone came to market.
The point is not what technolgy was implemented first, but how
well it was implemented and how it impacted people. The part in
the article that rings true is let the iPhone loose in a room of
naysayers and stand back and watch what happens.
Submitted from an iPhone on gsm
was, and the latest excuses remain, jingoistic nonsense.
Find some new stories ... how about back to the obsession of Green Tech / Global Warming ?
As for calling it hype, why do you hate this phone so much? It's just
a phone.
Also, if you are tired of reading articles on the iPhone, guess what,
stop reading them! Lol. It's not that hard. Articles have titles, read
those and move on if it doesn't suit your taste. Stop whining.
...you mean like Linux?
Actually, Linux is the perfect example of a true global product; it has no physical home. Sure, OSDL/Linux Foundation is located within spitting distance of where I am (it's located in Beaverton, Oregon), but all of the work and effort has been performed and coordinated world-wide, across continents, and over the Internet. Linus Torvalds was a University student in Finland when it began. Early collaborators lived in England, Germany, The United States, you name it. The current contributors' list for the 2.6.x kernel series is near-perfect in its global reach.
I grok what you're getting at in that Silly Valley was/is a nexus and engine for creativity and innovation. OTOH, software and hardware have long since evolved beyond any physical location. The days of one-location innovation are IMHO dead.
/P
Without the WWW, the internet would still be the domain of nerds and researchers.
Open Source is another great example. Most if not all the major projects are multinational.
Any company or group of people with a working knowledge of the Gestalt principles and engineering could have put this together. Apple is a great example of fantastic design, but they are not the only ones.
Without a large company to back it up, would an iPhone built by a smaller company do as well or better? A smaller company probably would not have locked themselves into 1 service provider. So maybe it would have been even more successful.
type of piece. I know all of the reviews have been great, but
those come from tech reviewers who need access to the apple
pipeline. Michelle Slatalla's column in the NYT presents the take
of a write who doesn't care whether Steve Jobs blacklists her
(though I'm sure she had David Pogue screaming in her cubicle
this morning):
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/05/fashion/05Cyber.html
It is quite amusing, who knew that the way to delete a photo on
your phone is to sync it with iPhoto, delete it in iPhoto, and re-
sync your phone. ugggh. Perhaps that can only be designed in
Silicon Valley because of our failing education system, techies
who enjoy complication for the sake of complication, and a
penchant for hype and smoke and mirrors that the rest of the
world does not share!
You can't delete photos sync'd with your iphoto library. This is done in Iphoto, where you create your photo albums and in Itunes where you decide which photo albums to sync to the phone.
This is no different than how music is managed and I don't see this as a drawback.
with Ipod's with video. Also, you misquoted the woman in the
article. You don't sync the iPhone TWICE in order to get rid of a
photo. That's not what she wrote and that's not how it works.
A flawed device... you missed the point of the iPhone.
As for the woman in the article, its obvious that she doesn't have
much of a clue when it comes to tech. She would have the same
problems if not more regardless of the phone she used.
Everyone likes it at first glance, but let's see how people feel in
two weeks.
Other than a cumbersome on-screen keyboard, lack of cut-and-
paste, and an irksome reliance on iSync to handle the most basic
functions like deleting a picture, I don't see any of the
innovation anyone else claims to see.
I agree the original iPod was a wonderfully innovative interface
for quickly finding what you are looking for amongst a long list
(cable box designers have never taken note, but if I could find a
show in less than 20 minutes, you'd sell a lot more pay-per-view
movies), but the iPhone really seems to be a jack of all trades
master of none that other than its pretty face is distinctly un-
apple.
Being in silicon valley, or being an American company is not what let Apple create the iPhone. Being headed by Jobs is.
www.mp4-converter.net/iphone-converter/iphone-video-converter/
...oh wait... was that "pointing at it without touching the phone? or was that using your finger like a thicker, oiler stylus? cuz if you could just point? like from across the room, then yeah iPhone is truly uhm.. revolutionary ...or something.
As for Apple's product design, the iPod styling reminded me of what Bang and Olufsen produced over 15 years ago. Maybe Jobs owned a B&O stereo and liked what he saw.
the answer is NO because if it could have been it would have
been, but it wasn't.
There are a lot of cultures around the world which have great
ideas, histories and creative people. All of those cultures meet
in California more than any place else in the world with the
possible exception of New York. And the one advantage a place
like California has over other places is that no one culture rules
another. A Californian may speak English (or not), live in a town
with a Spanish name, eat Sushi for dinner and drive a German
car. This is considered normal here and there is no other place
on earth where this melding of cultural ideas comes together so
fluidly.
What other culture around the world would even have a Steve
Jobs? After his departure from Apple as an abject failure he
would never have been allowed to save face in many cultures.
Failure and humiliation is final in some parts of the world. In the
US, it's considered a"learning experience". This is why the US
have a higher percentage of entrepreneurs than other countries.
Failure is an accepted part of success, not the end of the road.
There are many great companies all over the world creating
many great products but none of them could have created the
iPhone. All the can do now is try to copy it.
combination are unparalleled.
- Obviously.....
- by kathakalimask July 15, 2007 12:33 PM PDT
- .... you have not used an iPhone.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(28 Comments)The way you delete a photo on iPhone is to touch the photo, and
press 'delete.'