The way most of us see things is dependent on what we expect to see, and how it affects us. If you were a farmer with a just planted crop, rain is a great day, but if you are about to go on a picnic, rain sucks.
Similarly, marketing is about setting the context in the way we want our customers, and potential customers to see out product.
The iphone is widely understood to be a disruption of the phone industry, but as John Gruber of daringfireball points out with great insight, it is not. Rather, the iphone is a redefinition of the mobile computer, it just happens to have as one of its capabilities, the ability to make and receive phone calls, but that has almost become a minor item. What is really important is that it put the net into out pockets at all times.
Those phone makers left high and dry by the iphone, RIM, (Blackberry) Nokia, Motorola, at al, all tried to outdo the iphone by addressing the disruption, and building a better phone, but failed. It took those with the capabilities in software and computer hardware to get it at least partly right, Samsung, Google, and perhaps more recently Microsoft (although yet to be successful in the market) to make headway. These guys had little to do with phones, they built computers and the software required and evolving, and are flourishing.
Much is made of the “sameness” of the iphone 5, it is outperformed by Samsung’s galaxy on most objective parameters, but is still making all the money, so which is the more successful? Depends on your context doesn’t it.
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