Technology dispersion rate boosted iPhone

Is the iPhone the most astoundingly successful product ever? Henry Blodget, the former Wall Street analyst, thinks so, but Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, offers a different opinion.

Blodget notes that the iPhone generates nearly $25 billion in revenue per quarter, making the iPhone business itself bigger than Microsoft. Blodget, now cofounder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of Business Insider, writes that the iPhone has destroyed three companies and wounded others—a situation that is “…shocking, considering where Apple was 15 years ago: left for dead on the side of the road.” In wishing the iPhone a happy birthday, Blodget suggests “…that the iPhone might be the most radically successful and disruptive product in history.”

And in response to reader comments, he acknowledges that the wheel, the cotton gin, and the computer might have been more disruptive, but not within a five-year period.

Thompson at The Atlantic has a different take: “Is the iPhone extraordinary? Yes…. But let's be prudent: This is not the most disruptive product in the history of the world. It didn't kill tens of millions of people and reshape foreign policy for the next infinity years, like the nuclear bomb. Its effect on American industry will almost certainly never rival that of the cotton gin, whose invention led to the quintupling of southern slaves and reshaped the global cotton trade, not to mention a century-plus of southern history.”

He goes on to note that the steam engine and its industrial-revolution cousins “…threw 10 millennia of economic stagnation out the window and delivered consistent and global rising incomes for the first time in human history.” He adds that “…the iPhone might not even be the most disruptive technology with the word 'phone' in it.”

What's truly remarkable, Thompson notes, is the “speed of technological diffusion.” Throughout history, he says, ideas could travel only as fast as horses and ships could carry them. He cites research by the historian Richard Duncan-Jones showing that information traveled at an average of one mile-per-hour for most of the last 2000 years.

And history.com presents this anecdote about state-of-the-art packet transfer in 1860: “On [April 3], the first Pony Express mail, traveling by horse and rider relay teams, simultaneously leaves St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. Ten days later, on April 13, the westbound rider and mail packet completed the approximately 1,800-mile journey and arrived in Sacramento, beating the eastbound packet's arrival in St. Joseph by two days and setting a new standard for speedy mail delivery.”

The iPhone's success is a triumph of supply-chain management enabled by today's high-speed communications and logistics capabilities. Concludes Thompson, “…to praise the speed of the iPhone's adoption is really to praise other disruptive technologies—the telegraph, the airplane, the intermodal container—that make the immediate worldwide adoption of new products possible.”