On January 9, 2007, in the shadow of the CES, Steve Jobs unveiled the
iPhone. You know that it was an extraordinary and flawless demo from the outside, but what you don't remember is everything else that was launched — nor how part of the keynote did go wrong.
Context is everything. On Sunday, January 7, 2007, Bill Gates gave the keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Hammering home Microsoft's then buzz phrase 'Digital Decade,' he talked about how great hardware wasn't enough, that we needed connected experiences. "Where people are being productive, doing new creative things, where they're mobile... that is the key element that is missing."
He said that, "Vista and the PC continue to have the central role," though he also claimed that Windows Vista was "the highest quality release that we've ever done."
Two days later and around 400 miles away,
Steve Jobs introduced the very device, the very experience that Gates said was missing. He introduced the iPhone at Macworld San Francisco. While Jobs didn't use the term 'post-PC era' then, that's what the iPhone created. This was truly the device for productive, creative people on the move, and as an extra bonus, it ran OS X rather than Windows Vista.
appleinsider.com
