From iThought to iPhone…You Can Too!

In all our talk of coffee thoughts, I thought it would be a good idea to tell you about one of the greatest “coffee thoughts” of today: the iPhone. How did it come to be? Here’s the story:

We’re all familiar with Apple’s decline in the years leading into the new millennium. Surrounded by the success of tech giants like Microsoft and Sony, the company struggled to stay afloat. On the eve of co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs’ return to the company in 1997, stock values dwindled, its infrastructure fragmented, and its popularity was relegated to a select group of die-hard fans and shareholding executives.

Many, Wall Street insiders included, thought Y2K would mark the end of Apple, doubting it’s staying power and pessimistic as to its role in the twenty-first century. So why is it that, eight years later, we listen to music on iPods, talk to each other on iPhones, and brag about how stylish our MacBooks are? It’s all thanks to the “coffee thoughts” of Steve Jobs and his Apple team.

In life, if we want to improve at something, we ask ourselves two main questions: 1. “What am I doing right?” and 2. “What am I doing wrong?” But before asking either question, we must first stop what we’re doing all together. This is more or less what Apple did. They went back to the drawing board and said, “We LOVE our products and obviously some others do too. Why doesn’t EVERYONE? We have these great ideas, but why aren’t they selling like we want them to?”

They sat down and outlined everything they loved about Apple: unification of operating system and operating machinery, aesthetic quality, and the user-friendly interfaces in its devices. For months they sculpted and re-sculpted their vision of what Apple should accomplish, ultimately settling on the modern-day holy grail of technology: unity.

Why is this significant? With the introduction of the contemporary personal digital assistant, or PDA, known as the Palm Pilot in 1996, many second-tier companies like Toshiba, Casio, and Atari saw this device as their ticket back in the race; their last chance to appease disgruntled shareholders. They quickly put devices on the market and hoped for the best. Yet Apple, to everyone’s surprise, failed to jump on this bandwagon. Why? Jobs and his team had what can only be described as a remarkable epiphany.

Effectively removing themselves from the PDA race, they foresaw that twenty-first century consumers would eventually find the highly-specialized and fragmented features of the even the most advanced systems a burden. They realized that what people really wanted when they purchased a PDA wasn’t the ability to do 400 things on the go, but the ability to take those twenty or so programs they actually use with them, and work with the same ease of a home computer. They also foresaw that in the year 20XX, people wouldn’t want to carry a cell phone AND a PDA. They said, “We know what we want in our device…how do we do it?”

Fortunately, the number one aspect Apple loved about itself was the same one we would come to love and adore years later: unity in its devices. At this time, Apple is the only tech company that has complete sovereignty over the nature and design of its products: they write the programs, and then engineer the hardware to hold them. Other companies such as Microsoft, which is hindered by control of solely its operating system, Windows, are forced to outsource manufacturing to companies such as Dell and HP.

Apple’s self sufficiency ultimately enabled it to develop the iPhone in 2007, essentially a fully-functional computer and cellular phone in one, nine years late, but seemingly and tastefully on time. Talk about the power of pursuing an idea!