I sent the article iPhone to sell 5 mil. by end of 2008 - But what next? to Vassili le Moigne from Microsoft, and he gave me a beautiful comment on it:

“The biggest value the iPhone brings to the picture is not the 5M it will sell (too small on the grand scale of the smartphone market and non scalable without a platform play) but the education it does for the masses about doing more with a phone than just talk. Indeed, all their marketing and using their brand is helping educate the consumer market to the value of smartphones, effectively giving a boost to the past efforts of Symbian, Windows Mobile and RIM in the business segment. Consumers might buy their first smartphone with the iPhone, but chances are that, by the time they get their second smartphone, 6 to 9 months from now, they will be much better educated about what they want (vs. the brand value they bought). At that point, it will up to Nokia, HTC, Samsung, Eten, RIM, Asus, Moto, HP, LG, and so on to show that they (think they) know better than Apple (a newcomer in that market, unlikey to have a new phone within 12 months) what smartphones are supposed to be like (keyboards, mobile email, MS Word, SMS, UMTS,…). And by then, you can bet the different OEM will have learnt from Apple on the design and usability. 


Apple is therefore growing the market for everybody.”

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