Assclown Number 5: Ed Zander, Motorola CEO/Chairman and amateur juggler, 10 May 2007
How do they deal with us?
Click to viewYes, how would they deal with you now that Motorola is almost dead, Ed?
Assclown Number 4: John C. Dvorak, tech columnist and professional assclown at large, 28 March 2007
Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone… What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it's smart it will call the iPhone a ‘reference design' and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else's marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures… Otherwise I'd advise people to cover their eyes. You are not going to like what you'll see.
Click to viewWhat we don't like to see is you, John, getting into these bags of hurt all by yourself.
Assclown Number 3: Jon Rubinstein, Palm CEO and former Apple Vice President, iPod Division, September 27, 2005
Is there a toaster that also knows how to brew coffee? There is no such combined device, because it would not make anything better than an individual toaster or coffee machine. It works the same way with the iPod, the digital camera or mobile phone: it is important to have specialized devices.
Click to viewExactly like the Palm Pre, Jon, which is a smartphone and a cheese slicer. Also, there IS a combination coffee making toaster. Two mistakes, one quote!
Assclown Number 2: Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO and zoologist, 30 April 2007
There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.
Click to viewRe-reading that must hurt. If you are Steve Ballmer.
Assclown Number 1: Ed Colligan, Ex-Palm CEO, Bono's pal, and stamp collector, 16 Nov 2006
We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.
Click to viewApparently, Ed, they walked right in, stole your lunch, your dinner, your wife, your car, your horse, and all your pudding. And then they ate the pudding. And pooped it out.
Special Bonus Assclown: Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia's chief strategist and famed red herring tin can collector, 30 Nov 2009
The development of mobile phones will be similar in PCs. Even with the Mac, Apple has attracted much attention at first, but they have still remained a niche manufacturer. That will be in mobile phones as well.
Click to viewI have a hard time believing that Nokia's chief strategist—aka this guy—actually said that last month. Wake up, Anssi, and smell the coffee, because you are being smashed. [AAPLinvestors via Fortune]
DISCUSSION
It actually makes me mad sometimes thinking about winmo and all the money and effort I've wasted. People take the iPhone for granted. This makes me a total idiot but I've had close to 20 phones in the last 9 years. Switching from carrier to carrier based on phone.
I paid $700 dollars for an Imate Jam in 2003. I paid $900 for the Imate Jas Jar. Treos. Nokia Ngage. You name it and I bought it. I've owned almost every incarnation of windows mobile phone or palm phone. Samsung BlackJack. Motorola Q. 6700. HTC. Verizon to ATT to Verizon etc....
All of them sucked giant balls. I remember struggling to connect to my wifi on EVERY SINGLE PHONE until the first few decent HTC phones. The interface on each was terrible. Trying to use my fingers to navigate was frustrating. The screen mushyness and response was terrible. Managing dozens of apps all purchased from different sites, all with different installation procedures and pointless desktop apps was a nightmare.
Just to install a single app I might need to connect to a PC, drag files to the phone. Run an installer on the phone. Run an installer on the computer. Start ActiveSync. Sync. Then finish the installation process on the phone by clicking through a series of pointless "OK"s. That was if Active Sync decided to work that day.
Not that the iphone dock and audio port were any different initially, but almost every phone had a shitty mini mini audio out, or a proprietary mini USB based one, or none at all.
This is a complete uphill both ways post.But really my point was even in hindsight, at the time of the iphone launch, these guys are assholes and wrong. Even if the iphone delivered half of what it was demonstrated doing initially it was still decades ahead of the shitty shitty shitty winmo phones.