How to create the next iPhone

June 13, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

[Apple is a] company that can make a mobile phone with no buttons, no picture messaging, slow Web access and no video capture into the most desirable phone on the planet © crave @ cnet

This Monday I was following the opening WWDC keynote. I find it remarkable how Apple manages to pump out one excellent product after another. In most of the areas they decide to touch they are able to rapidly become the makers of the most desirable product on the market. Their iPod redefined the music player market, MacBooks are becoming more beautiful faster, than Microsoft can copy even minor bits of Mac OS X, now iPhone with its MobileMe are going to get a decent part of the smartphone market piece. Even their relative failures would be considered a success for many other companies.

Winning with less features

What is especially interesting is that Apple usually enters the well established markets and often with the devices that lack features comparing to the competitors. MacBook Air is severely limited by its single USB port, iPhone went to sales with the lousy camera and being unable to send text messages to multiple recipients. It didn't prevent these devices from becoming at least the very wanted products rapidly.

The Apple Secret

The Apple secret is simple. The typical Apple approach as I see it is to start with solving the most important user problems and nothing else. They don't really care about the feature set, but concentrate on solving a few top problems of the user, ignore every secondary feature in order to focus on these top problems and add more functionality only after they get the live market response. They did just that with the iPhone: solved the top problems (complexity of the very basic operations and of the web connectivity) while ignoring all the secondary issues (such as ability to install 3rd party apps and even fast web browsing). Once they got market acceptance and feedback, they focused on the next level problems such as inability to locate good applications and multiple devices synchronization.

Creating the next iPhone

This strategy sounds straightforward, doesn't it? It does until the moment, when yet another manager comes with the desire to put yet another useful feature into an already feature-bloated product and until you have to focus on the "whole product" instead of cruelly cutting out the secondary features.

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