Storm Envy

It’s always interesting to see what a catalyst product will do to an industry.

Look at JetBlue in the airline industry, for example. You give people a TV, leather seats, new planes and treat them like human beings, and you’re the best of the bunch. Certainly easier said than done, but obviously not impossible.

JetBlue was untouchable with service and features for a number of years, and the legacy airlines were struggling to turn a big ship with an absurdly small rudder to go the direction needed to compete with this new product.

But now, Virgin America is poised to take the flame from JetBlue. JetBlue will stay in business of course, but will find its rudder too small to change direction to compete with Virgin’s list of features and services.

The iPhone gave birth to the touch screen phone, which serves a purpose greater than looking sleek and cool. Having all the controls based in software rather than hardware makes the phone an incredibly versatile device. New features are easy for developers to add, and less moving parts mean less mechanical flaws. That’s just the beginning.

It’s no coincidence that other manufacturers scrambled to release phones with an increasing number of touch features after the iPhone was introduced. It’s also not surprising that most of these phones hid their now extinct button-keyboards (with actual buttons) and had their limited touch functionality touted in advertisements.

When you fly JetBlue, your TV does not always work, and the flight attendant is not always as nice as you think he should be on the 6AM flight out of JFK. But they’re a better airline than the one that booked you in a seat that no longer exists because you’re flying a different airline’s plane that has only 40 seats and not 56 and will still make you pay for a Diet Coke when you get on the plane to where you wanted to go 14 hours after you were supposed to get there.

My iPhone still can’t send MMS messages and didn’t come with a voice recorder built in. Even the phone they practically beg you to take when you get a phone plan has those things. But you see where I’m going. I think those oversights and inconsistencies are inherent to industry-changing catalyst products, and they’re still more complete than incomplete.

I have not had phone envy until recently. The first pangs of jealousy came upon seeing a friend’s phone with Android running on it. Pretty cool. Still, a close second to my iPhone. Then came the Blackberry Storm. I think I might want one. I think. I felt a little weird thinking those thoughts about another phone- almost like my iPhone could hear me and felt like I was cheating on it.

But then it occurred to me that my jealousy meant the iPhone had done to the mobile industry what it came to do. Apple set the bar a notch higher with the iPhone, delivering a product that had such superior innovations, the rest of the pack had no choice but to catch up or die trying.