Steve Jobs introduced iPhone (if you haven’t ever seen this video, or if it’s been more than 5 years, give it an hour and be amazed at Jobs in his prime Apple-comeback era).
Of course the world didn’t change overnight, but by 2008 I was seeing this little device devour our local IT group’s Blackberry usage, then our users’ Blackberry devices disappeared. By 2010 1 in 3 of my end-users were carrying an iPhone or Android phone, and by 2012 I was retiring our BES server. At first nobody saw the potential of a multi-billion dollar Apps market, but by the time the App Store launched it was all over and we were living in a new world of Uber, Yelp, and GrubHub (to name a few of the many disruptors that emerged).
I remember IT colleagues discussing how iPhone would never sell, citing some of the same reasons that Steve Ballmer and the CEOs of RIM/Blackberry gave a few years before this little Apple device began its march to own market share and change how consumer users viewed their computing devices. Almost nobody, and I mean nobody I know, thought of their phones as a place for rich productivity and computing experience. Palm Pilot wisdom notwithstanding, we in IT had only a few indicators that mobile was this dam waiting to burst when the right device-OS combination came along.
I can’t believe it’s been 10 years, but looking back it’s interesting to see how the world first reacted to the iPhone. It’s fascinating to see how very different things are today than they were that year, how the technology landscape changed with respect to this huge mobile-developer career market that virtually didn’t exist in 2007. Steve Jobs is no longer with us, and Apple is regularly on a silly “Deathwatch” or the subject of other Click-baity “journalism”. Still, I think anyone watching tech in 2007 would agree that it might be a little while before something this huge (yet seemingly small during its announcement) will come along again. But I learned to never count technology out, and the next shift may come from a completelly unexpected place.