[Thread] A look back at the state of tech and mobile industries during the first iPhone keynote 14 years ago, the importance of which took years to sink in
Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi : Tweets: @stevesi , @cblatts , @danrose999 , @richminer , @stevesi , @ednutting , @raztweets , @ravithinkz , @kushaanshah , @grady_booch , @gassee , @ziiyuuaan , @tfadell , @anildash , @ramez , @waltmossberg , and @counternotions Tweets: Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi : @EdNutting I worked at Microsoft. I'm familiar with not inventing things. Innovation = Invention + Impact I come from the perspective that innovation is the hard part. That's what Apple did in this case. Chris Blattman / @cblatts : Great thread. I remember around 2010 I was redesigning my blog and the developer said “we should really design for mobile reading” and my first reaction was “that sounds bonkers”. As if people would really read stuff on their phones! https://twitter.com/... Dan Rose / @danrose999 : @stevesi @stevesi Great thread! I had a few meetings w/Jobs around this time. He admired Zuck/FB and took him/us under his wing. We had a partnership with Msft at the time as you'll recall, and I was struck by Jobs' hostility to you guys. He was surprisingly direct - “Msft is evil.” Why? Rich Miner / @richminer : @stevesi A great thread but I'll respectfully disagree with this one and I believe the market data proves that point. Also we announced and release our 3rd part dev tools, emulator and Android Market concept all before the app store. Steven Sinofsky / @stevesi : @richminer Obviously a fair view. It depends on what metric is used and how one measures ecosystem robustness and innovation. This is the kind of debate Windows v. Mac had for years as well so I can appreciate both perspectives and find both useful and valuable. Ed Nutting / @ednutting : @stevesi Now write the version of Apple's history that doesn't pretend they existed in some bubble of brilliance, by admitting many of the ideas originated elsewhere. Apple did/does a superb job of integration, but didn't invent or discover many of the things its biographers credit it for Raz / @raztweets : Amazing thread. A reminder that Apple were the greatest innovators of mobile devices before the rest even joined the scene. https://twitter.com/... Code-daata / @ravithinkz : Around that time Nokia was the BigTech. https://twitter.com/... Kushaan Shah / @kushaanshah : If you're a nerd about unraveling the history of product acceptance like I am, really enjoyable thread 🧵 https://twitter.com/... Grady Booch / @grady_booch : A fascinating thread into the past. https://twitter.com/... Jean-Louis Gasse / @gassee : Thanks to Steven @stevesi Sinofsky for remembering the 2007 iPhone launch. Taking our thoughts away from the insanely bad DC scene for a few moments. https://twitter.com/... @ziiyuuaan : @tfadell @stevesi I heard that there was indeed such a design. Is it true?@tfadell Tony Fadell / @tfadell : That was what the iPod+Phone felt like to dial a number not in your contacts when we prototyped it. We tried everything to make the click wheel work. It was clear to many of us it was a losing battle so it was one major reason behind the iPhone design - a touchscreen of course. https://twitter.com/... Anil Dash / @anildash : @stevesi Other interesting thing is they learned from the really poor Sony Ericsson iPod phone partnership. Justifiably forgotten, but I don't think iPhone v1 would have been as right without it. Ramez Naam / @ramez : Great thread. https://twitter.com/... Walt Mossberg / @waltmossberg : Typically fascinating @stevesi thread on what the tech world was like when the iPhone was unveiled on this date in 2007, and how it changed @Apple and the industry. 👇👇👇 https://twitter.com/... Kontra / @counternotions : The Way We Were. Microsoft man remembers the unveiling of the iPhone 13 years ago. ↓ https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Steven Sinofsky — who ran through this era from inside Microsoft — uses a 14-year retrospective to argue his core framing: innovation equals invention plus impact, and the hard part at the 2007 keynote was the impact, not the invention. The related coverage fills in both sides of that ledger: the interviews with Fadell, Forstall, and other Apple employees show how contingent the touchscreen-over-click-wheel decisions were, while the look back at the Windows business at the start of last decade shows the incumbent side — PC growth already decelerating toward 3% while disruption felt imminent but unproven.
First-order effects
- The thread re-frames the keynote for a technical audience that lived through it: with Nokia dominant and Android's developer tools announced before Apple's store existed, the retrospective argues contemporaries systematically underweighted what Apple actually shipped versus what rivals had on paper.
Second-order effects
- The retrospective feeds directly into today's platform debates — the argument that the App Store won on being the only choice rather than superior developer distribution ([[a:954924]]) only makes sense against the 2007 baseline Sinofsky reconstructs, where no such channel existed.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the durable lesson is that integrated hardware-software platforms compound their early execution advantage for years — visible again in how the iPhone X's hardware-software integration fended off less integrated rivals like Google — while incumbents with strong existing franchises (Nokia, Microsoft) misread the shift until it was priced in.
The trend: Platform-defining launches are consistently undervalued at announcement and only recognized as inflection points years later, which is why retrospectives keep re-litigating them.