It was just timing, really. MS invested a lot in PDAs, at a time when the tech just wasn’t good enough. The screens were bad, you had to use styluses, memory was low, batteries would deplete in a few hours, cameras and GPS were too big to even consider shipping... it was a niche market for a certain type of business user, and that was it. Those PDAs did much better than the Apple Newton, but didn’t break into the mainstream.
Then technology improved, Apple made some smart acquisitions, and changed the UI game enough to become popular. It made Windows CE (and its competitors like Symbian) look terribly dated. MS fumbled their response not once, not twice, but three times: first they tried doubling down on what they had, then they rewrote from scratch, then they rewrote from scratch again. By the time they found a good balance, it was all over.
Meanwhile, Google was actually going through the early-MS playbook pretty religiously: get something that already exists, improve and rebadge it, then give it away as free to the consumer (which MS did with oem deals and piracy tolerance), effectively commoditizing it. Spread it far and wide until it becomes the platform, then leverage your ecosystem hegemony to achieve your true cashflow aims with higher-level tooling and apps. Massive availability made it the easy choice for oems, developers, and hobbyists/evangelists alike, turning the mobile OS in a commodity while competitors were still very determined to make a buck on it. This is what MS had done to hardware manufacturers in the ‘90s, and it’s extraordinary how they failed to see the parallels until it was too late. Or maybe not - after all, MS by then was the new IBM.
I can't say I completely blame them. I had the Moto Qs and Samsung Blackjacks and loved them to death. I thought the initial iphone was silly...a phone without a keyboard, what a failure. In fairness, I still prefer a physical keyboard, but wow I was wrong in how far ahead iPhone was capability wise. So I guess I sympathize a bit.
I had a friend at work who'd been a big fan of the Nokia Communicators who got one of the early bastard phone/PDA/Windows CE spawn. Similar form factor to the communicator - sideways foldaway keyboard, but 99% of everything seemed to need the stylus. It even had a start button in the UI. HTC I think - this must have been back in the early 00s.
After he'd bought this thing there was... So. Much. Swearing. :)
From my recollection the only thing it did reliably was crash. A lot. An awful lot. Oh, and that the UI was comically fiddly.
He went back to the communicator, then later bought just a regular phone, the fancy Windows crashing thing became his in car map to run autoroute. It used to crash just running that.
A few of the guys in the office had used Compaq or HP PDAs and were keen on the idea of the then new Windows phones - his early adoption saved them all from an expensive mistake. Me? I stuck with the Psion 5. :)
I lusted after a few of those and eventually got an HP, around 2004. I loved the concept and could live with the stylus, but sync capabilities (ActiveSync, brr) were atrocious, even more so with anything non-Windows (I was on Linux at the time). Also it didn't have wifi, so I had to buy an expansion card, which stuck out very unsightly (and looked very fragile).
When the iPhone came out, I thought it was nice but overpriced, limited by not having expansion cards, and knee-capped by Apple's policy on rooting. It took me a couple of years to admit nobody really cared about those things.
no, those pda where at a price point. Jobs’ gamble and vision was that people would pay at multiples of that price point if the device was useful
To rephrase it, the issue wasn’t fundamentally technological it was an ingrained assumption at Ms, palm, Nokia that the price needs to be below x and Apple challenged that assumption in one risky Vision
Straight from wikipedia: "the device would require a triple layered capacitive multi-touch touch screen, a very new and advanced technology at the time."
The innovation was making the screen the only interface you needed, by pushing the boundaries of what it could do. There was no way to make screens do anything like this in 2001, when PDAs were around. By 2005, the tech was still advanced but mature enough to exploit it, and Apple did it to the fullest.
While I couldn’t find (while zapping some food) who innovated the screen on the iPhone 1 I’m not sure Apple did and neither did you prove otherwise (burden aside)
> MS invested a lot in PDAs, at a time when the tech just wasn’t good enough.
And they were not at all alone in that. A lot of us were totally blinded by that wave of PDAs and first experiments with tablets. E.g. I spent '98-'99 largely working on a tablet [1]. It was a beautiful piece of hardware for what we could do with the constraints, but those tradeoffs also all reflect the limitations that killed it:
The back "tube" held the batteries and doubled to lift the back slightly to make it easier to read the screen if you put it on a desk like a phone. But you could not get away from the fact it made it builky. It used a DECT (cordless phone standard) extension because wifi was not yet common, but of course the moment wifi took off nobody wanted that, and it had to get wifi.
We spent lots of effort writing a GUI toolkit for Nano-X (an compact little GUI engine with a somewhat X11 and somewhat Win32 API frontends [2] ), and contributing a bunch of code for Nano-X itself. And while Nano-X was excellent for what it was, all of that effort was down to memory and flash limitations (32MB RAM, 16MB flash), and meant applications had to be custom written, as while the API was X11-like it was not a direct match. And browser based apps was certainly not a option because that, well, it wasn't really much of a thing yet.
We spent ages with Opera getting them to port Opera to work under those constraints (to their credit the browser engine took very little time to retarget), though, and the results were great for the size of the device, but again it was a choice that was expensive for a small startup, but necessary because the device was so hardware-limited.
The bezels are massive partly because a bigger screen would have been too expensive, heavy and power hungry, partly to accomodate the rest of the board.
Touch was all resistive, because capacitative touch screens where not a viable option at the time.
The batteries didn't last long. Not that it mattered much, as you'd have to stay within a few hundred meters of your DECT base-station anyway, and so couldn't really take it out of the house.
And many more.
That it'd fail to get traction seems obvious now - it got geeks excited (especially because it ran Linux). I loved working on it. But just like "everyone" I knew had a Palm Pilot but Palm Pilots still didn't break through into the mainstream, this didn't get regular people excited either, and unlike Palm Pilot it didn't fit into a niche that had already gotten itself semi-established through a long range of previous devices (e.g. Palm Pilots gave mobile computing; FreePad didn't, and was too bulky anyway). We were not the only ones by far - e.g. Ericsson had a project to produce a Linux "screen phone". A bunch of others tried laptops with rotatable screens, or more directly tablet-like devices.
So when all of the various attempt to make the PDA and tablet markets break into the mainstream failed, and the iPhone then came, a lot of us looked at it with the eyes of someone who had seen it all before and we didn't spot what made it different:
This was suddenly a mass market consumer device rather than a niche techie device. We compared it to J2ME phones and complained about too few features, rather than comparing it to the vision of what we had wanted our devices to be (which was largely Star Trek or 2001 inspired - don't let anyone suggest this class of devices were invented this recently; we never thought the idea of that type of device was new) and spot that they'd done that, but had overcome enough of the worst limitations that the hardware constraints of the first wave of these devices had to deal with and designed something that would appeal on look and feel and capabilities to end-users, rather than appeal to super-early adopters.
To me it's one of those things that have made me much more cautious about judging new tech. Especially when I catch myself thinking "that's not new" I try to force myself to look for what is new about it, because it's so easy to judge something based on flaws of past implementations rather than by what the new iteration does differently.
[I just noticed at least some of the phone numbers on the dialler screenshot in the referenced article appears to be real; and most of the people listed were working on the project at the time, including me]
Then technology improved, Apple made some smart acquisitions, and changed the UI game enough to become popular. It made Windows CE (and its competitors like Symbian) look terribly dated. MS fumbled their response not once, not twice, but three times: first they tried doubling down on what they had, then they rewrote from scratch, then they rewrote from scratch again. By the time they found a good balance, it was all over.
Meanwhile, Google was actually going through the early-MS playbook pretty religiously: get something that already exists, improve and rebadge it, then give it away as free to the consumer (which MS did with oem deals and piracy tolerance), effectively commoditizing it. Spread it far and wide until it becomes the platform, then leverage your ecosystem hegemony to achieve your true cashflow aims with higher-level tooling and apps. Massive availability made it the easy choice for oems, developers, and hobbyists/evangelists alike, turning the mobile OS in a commodity while competitors were still very determined to make a buck on it. This is what MS had done to hardware manufacturers in the ‘90s, and it’s extraordinary how they failed to see the parallels until it was too late. Or maybe not - after all, MS by then was the new IBM.