How Apple wins the smartphone game: By ignoring the marginal customer
According to the 2008 "Business Wireless Smartphone Customer Satisfaction Study" by J.D. Power & Associates, Apple's iPhone — a smartphone with no turn-by-turn directions, copy-and-paste, physical QWERTY keyboard, user-installable programs, expandable flash memory, or removable battery — rates a perfect five-out-of-five in the "Features" category, winning out over HTC, Motorola, Palm, RIM, and Samsung.
There's only way to interpret that data: for iPhone owners, Apple has provided every feature that matters, even if that means leaving some features out. Obvious at first, it becomes something more when you ask the follow up: why are phones with more features perceived by their users as still having the wrong features? (Or worse, not enough features?)
Restraint, I believe it's called. Or perhaps focus.
(Let the grousing in the comments commence!)
Smartphone Customer Satisfaction Survey [JDPower.com via Apple Insider]
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Apple has a tendency to locate the pain factor in a technology, and eliminate the most glaring and obvious aspects that customers find problematic. In fact they are often late to a party because no doubt they are watching to see what that advantage will be. Then they pounce.
Once Apple has you converted and shows you the beauty of a technology...there is a delay before they actually catch up with the features you now discover you want to add to what they have graced you with. We all loved the iPhone...and then we discovered all the features we wanted to add to it...and where are they?!?!?!
I have owned cell phones since 1990 and in the past three years I've been through a slew of lovely to look at, but painful to use phones. The last phone was actually quite good...an asian market Sony...but even it was missing many of the aspects of the iPhone and the simplicity in which Apple executed it.
I can honestly say the iPhone experience on the whole has been the best I've had in 18 years...however...I'm already starting to feel the itch of wanting more from Apple than they are currently giving me. But...I'm willing to wait...a...bit....longer.
sigh
The problem with most other cell phones, I think, isn't so much that they're overburdened with features, as the ones they have don't work as advertised. Most of Apple's features, on the other hand, work very well (well, with the exception of Safari Mobile, which crashes more often than a drunken teen on prom night). That being said, there's plenty of room for improvement, and a lot of people's requests seem to fall upon deaf ears. And when they try to fix things themselves, they run into Apple's sleazy protectionist policies.
My Samsung is clearly a capable little pocket machine, unfortunately all I want my phone to do is call people, and occasionally take pictures (for photo id on the phone, only) so the other 90% of the phones functionality actually annoys me by taking up real estate and adding quite un-needed menus I have to sift through. Not to mention how often I almost accidentally go online with it and the panicky moments that button causes.
Maybe it's not about how many features a phone has so much as the quality and overall experience that wins people. Personally, i find that my $45 basic samsung phone with minimum features does a perfect job of giving me all the functionality i require from a phone, plus some i never use (like the sucky camera). I use my jailbroken iTouch for other stuff.
If i want to call someone, i use a small, cheap cell phone. If i want to take pictures, i use a decent camera. If i want to listen to music, check my email, read some news feeds, or play some games, i use my iPod Touch. I'm not looking for an all-in-one device. I want the devices i use to be of decent quality and provide me with a great end-user experience.
iPhone users are self selecting. For example if the virtual keyboard is more error prone they rationalize it as bad typing. Other smartphone users are prone to being more critical of their selection.
Also, Apple does succeed in a high degree of consistency and simplicity as a result of their doctrine that there is only one right way and you must adapt to that! This reinforces the self selection.
I personally find the Apple interfaces to be tremendously annoying due to a level of simplification which counterintuitively makes them quite awkward.
Personally, I think this is fanboy syndrome at work. I used to own a iPhone, and while I certainly feel it was one of the better designed phones I ever owned, it wasn't enough better to make me buy another when I dropped the old one. It was missing a number of features, the biggest one that comes to mind right now is voice dialing-- useful on any phone, but critical on an iPhone since it's impossible otherwise to dial without looking at the phone (granted, people shouldn't dial and drive, but I live in the real world). Other key missing features are stereo bluetooth, expandable memory and (for me at least) a decent calendaring app. Maybe 4 out of 5 on a good day, but 5 out of 5 is absurd.
Can I just go ahead and close this down with:
It's because we're all "fanboys" who "drank the kool-aid" and will "suck Steve's cock."
Does that sum it up?
Oh, nevermind, I see gnoodles beat me to it.
I still don't know what makes me more or less pathetic, the fact that I don't have an iPhone or that I have absolutely no need for one.
Since no one else has said it yet, I'll do it:
Copy & paste.
Quite simply the only allure of the iphone and the only thing it does better than other phones is the browser but from a functional point of view, for myself at the least, I need copy and paste with this function.
Rather than bashing the iPhone user for being a tool, or praising him for being an enlightened consumer, I'm more intrigued by the "feature-neutral" observation itself.
How does Apple attract consumers who want the features they offer, and don't want more (or who are satisfied with the ones offered)?
Why don't other cell-phone manufacturers replicate this methodology? Wouldn't other phone makers like to have customers that rate them so highly in satisfaction? Wouldn't it be advantageous to not spend money on features that the target audience was ambivalent about?
Perhaps there are other factors. Perhaps Apple succeeds in attracting the "perfect match" customers, but as a trade-off in this market, has a smaller potential audience. Perhaps it's actually better, in the long run, to have a larger customer base of slightly unsatisfied consumers than a small but very happy base. Perhaps, like environmental niches, there are natural places for both types of companies.
None of these observations or questions indicate that Apple is producing the "great" phone, or that their customers are "fanboys". The questions arise because of how different Apple customer satisfaction is from other phone manufacturers, despite the lack of features on the iPhone that are evidently desirable (regardless of their "real" merit) to other phone purchasers.
What is Apple doing differently from other companies in this market? Is it advertising, design, research? Can other companies emulate this method? Would they want to?
All of those things can be examined without praising or condemning the iPhone's particular design, or audience.
Perhaps if they were better cameras, or better GPS gizmos, we would be less likely to think of them as all purpose portable media browser phones, and more likely to push their use into a narrow niche. The jack of all trades master of none theory might have some weight here; in fact it may make the feature set more transparent, when the users don't expect it to do certain extremes extremely well, they end up using it for a lot more on a 'good enough' level. Rather than wowing for kicking ass for one feature over others, they end up being more utilitarian and general purpose, and used more frequently without thought.
Meanwhile, smart phones with better specs, but worse UIs, get ignored.
Is this the same J.D. Power & Ass. that gave a call center certification to Network Solutions?
Yeah, stick to cars, guys.
The T-Mobile G1 (aka Android, AKA Google Phone) has copy and paste.
W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne's concept of Value Innovation relies in part on the idea of the "Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create Grid".
Basically, many products and services are too complex, driven by technologists' love of inventing new things and thinking that by continually adding to something, you make it better. Looking through the microscope of VI, you get rid of the stuff that people care less about, and concentrate on the bits they do care about. (And by 'people', they don't necessarily mean the readers of BoingBoing and slashdot)
So, iPhone has SMS, but no MMS. Personally, I have never sent an MMS in my life, despite having a string of Nokia phones that were capable.
iPhone has a camera, but no video calling capability. I have made one video call on my Nokia N80 in my life, and that was just to see if it worked. Video calling is inherently broken in the UK, as the carriers don't allow you to make cross network video calls (is that still true by the way? Brain dead or what?)
Lots of you seem to think that the cut and paste issue is a terrible omission, but again, I have never used cut and paste on any of the Nokia phones I have owned. Perhaps if I'd had a Blackberry or a WinMoFo I might think differently.
So they've left stuff out, and concentrated on making a GREAT phone calling and music listening experience.
iPhone? Meh. I'll stick with my centro. PalmOS is so old now, it can be considered steampunk cool.
Plus, it does ten million things an iPhone will likely never. I've got music composing software, a programmable chord calculator, a chromatic tuner, databases, books, financial software, an encrypted password vault - all free or dirt cheap.
Been with Palm since the ol' Handspring Visor (with phone module!), and I've yet to see anything to make me switch. Keeping my eye on Android, though, it seems to have potential.
"Simplify & rationalize the most common cases" is Apple's thing in their computers & software, too. I think they manage to fit more into their idea of the common case than you would think, it's like "Things as they are are changed, when played upon a blue guitar."
Also discouraging customization is something they do with computers & software too. If you could easily customize everything people want to customize, it wouldn't be their interface in quite the same way anymore. Their stuff would be just another generic platform. Everybody's would be different, their users wouldn't all be sharing, advertising and teaching the Apple point of view.
I think the reason it doesn't bug me is that I spend so much time on the opposite extreme, in a Unix terminal window.
MMS requires hosting by the carrier, and is actually sort of email without the familar envelope. To have MMS you would have something along the lines of 12015551212@attcellular.net or such, your phone number@carrier.net.
ATT may not want to trouble with storing the content until you are ready to view it. ANd APple thinks there are workarounds for the same functionality, mm like email to other email accounts. But it does pry itself away from the content at permission and control of the carrier that I think Apple at least would like to get away from, if not ATT. ATT would definately see the opportunity to CHARGE you a bit more for MMS, just as they feel justified in charging you for MMS, because it makes them work to talk with other carriers networks.
It's not just about feature, but about how well the features get executed. As you say, focus. It's like the speed/quality/cost choose two method of project management, except I think that apple just chooses quality (no, i'm not serious, but generally i feel like they are one of the only american companies out there willing to just do a good job).
@11
Yep, it does and I want one but I am on the road through December and I will not brave the hell of changing phones mid-tour. I also don't particularly want to change carriers, so I am hanging in with my treo for a bit longer.
@12
Copying urls and pasting them into an email is an almost constant necessary function of my correspondence. No copy and paste is intolerable for me as a user no matter how much I lust after a better browser like that of the iphone or G1
Or you could get a Sony Ericsson and get a perfect J D Powers rating:
http://www.jdpower.com/electronics/ratings/mobile-phone-ratings-(volume-1)
I use cut and paste all the time in my Treo.
Often, in the notes of an appointment or contact, there will be a webpage I have to visit, or someone I have to call or email, and the phone doesn't parse it out correctly and create a shortcut for me.
For example, if I have an appointment to meet someone at "The green tavern", I can select the text with my stylus, copy it, paste it into google maps, and find the address.
Then, if I want, I can even copy the address back into the notes of the appointment so I don't have to keep going back to google maps.
How does this stuff never come up with an iphone??
I need a phone that can do my heavy lifting.
I guess if you're just casually browsing webpages, sand keeping a simple flat todo list, the iphone would be acceptable.
Also, I am planning on getting a G1.
I would much rather have a device which is over designed, and not use features I don't need, than to need features I can't have.
@16
How does this stuff never come up with an iphone??
Partially by not requiring it in the first place. Parsing an URL or an email address is fairly well understood. Why isn't your Treo parsing it correctly?
The iPhone isn't perfect, and there are places (notes, for instance) where it doesn't parse such things. But in an email? If you have to copy and paste, your phone has failed you.
I do not have one, but I am curious: iPhone owners, how many times have you answered or attempted to use the iPhone the wrong way up?
If the number is low, is some subtle design feature telling you which end of the device you are meant to speak into?
Or have you developed personal habits, like always putting it into your pocket a specific way round, that help you?
@17
I have only very rarely seen this sort of parsing problem on the treo but your response misses the point. The point is not just parsing, that is but one example, but rather that there are many times that copy&paste is expedient if not vital and the iphone does not get around requiring it in the first place as you suggest. I have used iphones and touches extensively and I love their browser (though the lack of flash is still inexcusable) but the fact that I cannot easily pull up, for example, a wiki entry and copy a portion of it to include with a citation in an email or other document almost immediately negates the great brwoser's usefulness to me.
I call and text while I drive, very safely I'd add. A phone without pressable buttons to me, is like using a mouse where the buttons don't depress, make some kind of noise, or anything to let you know you pressed them.
I lament the day people decided touchscreen phones is a good idea.
...and I still have a Nokia 3620. I feel like I'm saving myself of a lot of trouble. But it's so boring...