By chance, I came across an article from ‘07, discussing why iPhone would fail. There’s a section goes like this:

…the iPhone is going to fail because its design is fundamentally flawed. The designers and technophiles who encouraged development of the iPhone have fallen into the trap of all overreaching hardware and software designers; thinking that their users are like themselves. As I expound in great detail in my book Why Software Sucks (Addison-Wesley, 2006) your user is not you. The iPhone’s designers have forgotten this fundamental law of the universe. The market will severely punish them for doing so.

This serves as a hilariously counterexample to my feelings from a couple of days ago (only make what you want).

Besides the article being amusing, the comments below are very interesting. You can see how fiercely the users are rebutting him, calling him stupid. The users see far more clearly than him because users are the ones who are using and feeling, not analyzing with their brains like the author.

One guy mentioned that he had used all Nokia and BlackBerry devices, and their browsers were almost unusable, Apple was the first one to make it usable:

This is where Apple is fundamentally different. It’s not about features; it’s about simplicity and focusing on the things that you want to make work.

There is a reason why the iPhone has a camera but won’t let you take video (I don’t know what it is – but they decided to skip on that). Most Nokia’s with camera’s can take movie clips now. …

iPhone skimped on a lot of features when compared to equally priced Nokia’s and Sony Ericsson’s – but ultimately it’s the whole package that counts - Steve Jobs will never let a product out of the door that has a browser that works mediocre at best regardless how good the hardware is. That is the price that you pay when you buy Apple.

There was also another user comment that somewhat moved me (not sure why):

I work in IT. I had my first iPhone support call yesterday. I asked the user what they thought of it as I looked up how to set an SMTP port–add a colon after the server name–and got this response:

“This is probably the coolest thing I have ever owned.”