Why the iPhone will fail 20 Jun 2007

Al Ries, writing in Advertising Age, tells us "Why the iPhone Will Fail". His argument is based on the idea that the iPhone is a "convergent" device (i.e. combining phone, media player, GPS, email, etc. into a single item), and that only "divergent" (i.e. specialist) devices are successful:

"In the high-tech world, divergence devices have been spectacular successes. But convergence devices, for the most part, have been spectacular failures...

"...When the cellphone was first introduced, it was called a 'car phone' because it was too big and heavy to lug around. You might have thought it would eventually converge with the automobile. It did not. Instead it diverged and today we have many types of cellphones...

"...What convergence device has been a big success? Not many, although there have been a lot of convergence failures.

• The computer/phone. AT&T, Motorola and others introduced combination products. Few were ever purchased.
• The computer/TV. Apple, Gateway, Toshiba, Philips and others tried to market combination products with little success.
• Interactive TV. Microsoft spent $425 million to buy WebTV and then poured more than half a billion dollars into the venture. That didn't work, so it moved on to Ultimate TV, which didn't work either.
• Cellevision. Everybody is talking about the third screen, watching TV on your cellphone, but relatively few people do. (The real action in TV is the booming market for divergence products such as big-screen plasma and LCD sets.)
• Media-center PCs. Everybody was going to run everything in their homes from personal computers. It never happened.

[via Daring Fireball]