The iPhone will Fail... NOT!

In a recent article by Al Ries, published in Ad Age entitled “Why the iPhone Will Fail,” Mr. Ries stated the following:

“When Apple introduces its iPhone this month, will it pass the acid test?
In my opinion, no.

Prediction No. 1: The iPhone will be a major disappointment. The hype has been enormous. Apple says its iPhone is "literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone." A stock-market analyst says, "The iPhone has the potential to be even bigger than the iPod." I think not. An iPod is a divergence device; an iPhone is a convergence device. There's a big difference between the two. In the high-tech world, divergence devices have been spectacular successes. But convergence devices, for the most part, have been spectacular failures. The first MP3 players (the Diamond Rio, for example) were flash-memory units capable of holding only 20 or 30 songs. The first iPod, on the other hand, had a hard drive and could hold thousands of songs. Now there were two types of MP3 players, a classic example of divergence at work. Every high-tech device has followed a similar pattern. The first computer was a mainframe computer, followed by the minicomputer, the desktop computer, the laptop computer, the handheld computer, the server and other specialty computers. The computer didn't converge with another device. It diverged. 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. Every Best Buy and Circuit City is filled with a host of other divergence devices that have been enormously successful: the digital camera, the plasma TV, the wireless e-mail device, the personal video recorder, the GPS navigation device. What convergence device has been a big success? Not many, although there have been a lot of convergence failures.”

I could not disagree more!

I understand that the best predictor for the future is the past. However, you cannot ignore the changing landscape and expect that history will continue to be repeated when consumer needs have changed.

It is this very ignorance that is plaguing the entire advertising industry – predominantly on the consultant and agency side. Repeatedly, I see so called experts reverting to old ways because they clearly do not understand today’s technology and therefore tomorrow’s consumer.
Media consumption habits have changed. It is time that you stop preaching the ways of the past and start reading up on your clients’ consumers – they have changed and want convergence.
Of course, I agree that execution is key, but it is not convergence that will fail.

The true problem is that many organizations are so anxious to stay a technological step ahead of competition, that they ignore consumer need. Convergence has failed in the instances that you listed because the consumer was not ready – need was not evident in the consumers’ mind.
As technology continues to change the habits of media consumption, consumer needs will aggressively begin to demand more and more convergence in order to obtain access to information on their own terms.

Convergence will succeed if it is based on meeting a need – not just selling widgets.