True platforms that scale are more than just their physical manifestations of phone or computers. They are like ecosystems, marketplaces, economies, even societies. In the end the strength of a platform is the combined efforts of all it's 'citizens'. The systems that govern how those participants relate to each other is much like a government. As such I'm arguing that the iPhone has a poor system of government and will intimately be about as successful as the other large scale totalitarian systems.
Now if you were to argue that the iPhone shouldn't be viewed as a platform then you might have a valid point.
Yes. Which is why I think it would be best to view the iPhone platform in a similar light as a game console. Cool and fun, but not something you would seriously be expecting to be the basis of the next wave of personal computing.
There is a trend in what people think and how they accept iPhone. Which is in its turn a platform, and in my opinion it's an interestuing discussion to see if it' viable to target efforts into development on this platform.
If you read like two lines from the whole post - well, you go, boy!
I think you're right that it's iOS rather than hardware, but Apple already has no competitive advantage in the mobile space when it comes to industrial design. Others caught up on the hardware and physical product design in the last couple years; it's now the software and service ecosystem which keep Apple customers buying iPhones.
True. I'm not trying to diminish the importance of Apple hardware, but the design philosophy of the hardware is minimal because the software is the focal point. In the end, the phone is a rounded rectangle of varying degrees of thinness. IOS is the reason why the iPhone is a joy to use: the metal does its best job to stay out the way. Responsive touch screens and awesome cameras allows the user to forget they're even using a phone.
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