Saturday
January 26, 2008 Missing Buttons on iPhone

Recently I was checking out the IEEE’s Spectrum mag’s October 2007 issue, I’m not a nerdy mag fan though. There is an article in the old magazine about the missing buttons on the iPhone’s main screen. As default phone comes with 16 buttons but also there is an empty row for another four. And the author discusses the cost of putting one by guessing the business effect you may get with such a button. According to Ian Lano, a senior analyst at Scottsdale, Arizona the each button is worth over $10 million USD at least.

I’m posting the full page scan of the magazine article, featuring a market share discussion that iPhone has.

Listen now, only an author without any business sense can write such an article to be published on an internationally distributed magazine. What’s Apple’s goal in the mobile devices market: 10 million (1% of the whole market). How much buzz that phone got? In 2007, there wasn’t even a simple joke around without iPhone in, months and months TV discussed it, mags printed it, blogs speculated it. Even Google and Facebook made custom pages for a phone that nearly reached the 0.3% usage of the mobile devices market.

What media and regular guy on street usually does wrong is judging Apple by numbers. Just take a look around, iPhone users are not regular guys. They are generally tech addicts. If Windows Mobile team puts a fancy application communicating with an external service in their OS, who will use it? In fact, this question answers why Apple’s typical customer lifestyle is the only power it has.
This again reminds me that Apple is a cult and our products’ main success was never about the numbers behind them. That’s absolutely not for traditional business man and that’s the reason why only Steve can run this company.