Friday, January 11, 2008

iPhone Article

How The iPhone Blew up The Cell Industry is a good article in Wired about the iPhone development and business change. Since I have one in my pocket, it may be more interesting to me. I remember a time when in order to buy the latest and greatest PC it was $5K or better of more expensive dollars.

No longer. Where the iPhone is built makes very little difference, the design, deals and profit end up with Apple and AT&T. Japan thought that manufacturing excellence was the way to a perpetually growing economyin the '70s and '80s. Their stock market peaked at 39K in the late 80's and it hovers around 15K now. If we would have listened to guys like Lee Iaccoca and most Democrats in the '80s, we could be sitting at 50% of our 89 market highs as well.

The need for continual innovation to provide growth ought to be plain. This article shows a concrete example. The "growth economy" of tomorrow is not going to be the same as the growth economy of today, and the way to predict that economy isn't by listening to government bureaucrats, MSM reporters, or even ivory tower professors. "The way" is the way of creative destruction, and it involves a lot of experiment, failure, and plain old luck. There better be millions of people taking part in that, not any supposedly super brilliant central planners. If they WERE super brilliant, they would realize they weren't as smart as millions of people.

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