When the Apple iPhone was announced in January 2007, the
response was overwhelming. Within two months of the
announcement, the search term ‘iPhone’ yielded over 60
million web page references in Google [1]. When iPhone
finally launched in June 2007, consumers lined up for days
for the chance to purchase one and over 500,000 units sold
on the first weekend. Since that time, millions of iPhones
have been sold, arguably making it one of the most
successful mobile phone products ever launched. Why has
the iPhone been so successful? The objective of this paper
is to provide evidence showing the factors that have
contributed to success and the lessons that can be learned
from the iPhone. The remainder of this paper is organized as
follows. Section II provides the criteria used to determine
the success of the iPhone, as well as support for the assertion
that the iPhone can be deemed a success. Section III details
the success model containing factors that have been
identified as contributing to the successes of the iPhone.
Section IV provides lessons learned from the iPhone launch
and subsequent strategies and tactics. Section V outlines the
contributions of this research to academics and practitioners
as well as the research limitations and future research
directions.
II. EVALUATION AND VALIDATION OF SUCCESS
To adequately judge whether the iPhone is successful, a set
of ‘success’ criteria was developed. These success criteria
are based on an extensive literature review as well as indepth
Internet searches. The success criteria are market size,
share