You can’t walk five feet these days without hearing stories about this being the collaboration phase of our economy. Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed are allowing businesses to interact with customers on a scale that has never been experienced before.
Without a doubt, the iPhone is the ultimate in collaboration design.
No, this is not to say that the iPhone was designed with the input of millions of people. But rather it was designed to allow collaboration between it’s customers to turn the iPhone into something more than a smart phone. Apple proved this by releasing their developer SDK. “Make any application you want.” People responded by creating over 100,000 applications for the iPhone.
Watch this. Using the iPhone on submersible vehicles on the ocean floor? That’s just cool.
Yes, one could argue that you could take any cell phone to the ocean floor. But if you watched the video, you saw the people using four different applications that you’d never find on a Blackberry. And those applications weren’t specifically designed for underwater usage. They were simply designed. The engineers at this plant simply picked the best applications that would help them respond directly to their customer needs.
The reason for this is that the Blackberry was designed for a segment of the market: business. Most people I know who have Blackberrys definitely fit the “business” aspect of this model.
The iPhone was designed, using Apple’s tried and true “Think Different” montra. Apple almost issued the challenge: “Business apps? Sure. But why not show us what you can really do.”
And people responded.
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