Philip Elmer-DeWitt explores an argument by a Swede named Peter S. Magnusson about how he sees a huge missed opportunity for Apple with regards to the iPhone. This goes beyond the run-of-the-mill wishlists (copy and paste, MMS, user-replaceable battery, etc.) that have been bandied about since the launch.
This particular omission is a new angle and far more interesting: Magnusson feels that Jobs, despite all the game-changing user interface advances, still designed the iPhone around user behaviors of his generation, rather than the generation of today:
“Here’s my theory. Apple can only do really interesting products if Steve Jobs understands the end user. And Jobs does not understand the 21st century computer usage paradigm. In this century, people don’t send memos to each other. And that’s what email is - electronic memos.
“Today, people chat; they blog; they share multimedia like pictures, video, and audio; they flame each other on forums; they link with each other in intricate webs; they swap effortlessly between different electronic personae and avatars; they listen to internet radio; they vote on this that and the other; they argue on wiki discussion groups.”
Now while I’m not going to totally throw Jobs under the bus like that (and I love the fact that many can be addressed via updates, web apps and hopefully the SDK) , I do think that Magnusson is onto something, particularly when he outlines a list of application he would have launched with the iPhone. Here’s a sampling of them:
* Social networking would have been front and center
* Location-aware signaling would be built it. The phone would sense if you were in your favorite coffee shop and flag that to friends.
* The wifi software would support peer-to-peer; it would let you know what people in your vicinity are listening to
* It would include a bunch of multiplayer games that you can play right away with friends (or strangers!)
* Messaging would be integrated into a single view, with iconic/font/color indicators to separate news items, blog entries, text messages, chats, etc.
* There would be an official Apple iPhone wiki that all iPhone owners are immediately subscribed to for communal sorting-out of issues.
* The Google Maps function would plot all the iPhone owners with a little red dot; you can click on the dot to send a message to them. Or click on yourself to make a “talk” comment that nearby iPhone owners can “hear”. Or click twice on “yourself” to “shout” to iPhone owners that are within a few miles. A simple “/ignore” function would allow you to silence pesky shouters.
I highly recommend you check out the rest of the article, as well as the very heated comments section.
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