How Steve Jobs blew his iPhone keynote

By comparison, you could easily fit every stoner comedy, inane chick flick and bus-oriented action movie Keanu Reeves has ever starred in on an iPod G5. But you probably couldn't squeeze even the Matrix trilogy on the 8GB iPhone and no more than one Matrix movie on the 4GB iPhone.

Another thing that will dash expectations is the fact that Apple is not yet opening iPhone to applications created by third-party developers. By contrast, besides letting you surf the Net, chat, do e-mail, listen to music, watch videos and so on, BlackBerries, Treos and Windows Mobile devices have literally thousands of applications developed by third parties. IPhone users will miss out on all of that.

All this will lead to "a backlash of sorts as people figure out how much this thing doesn't do," Current Analysis analyst Avi Greengart told Macworld UK. The point isn't that the iPhone will be bad. The iPhone, of course, will be insanely great. But it can't match the expectations raised in Jobs' keynote.

2. Jobs raised Wall Street expectations too high.

Wall Street rewarded Apple for Jobs' Macworld keynote by running up Apple's stock by 13% in two days. But expectations on the part of The Street will be dashed just as they will be for consumers.

Jobs made the mistake of specifying Apple's target of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. The goal sounded modest when Jobs said it represents just 1% of the global handset market. In fact, it's probably an unreachable goal, given the iPhone's price, Cingular-only availability in the U.S., and lack of business appeal. To put that 10 million figure in perspective, Research in Motion sold about 5.5 million BlackBerries last year -- and BlackBerry is available in many models from several carriers, has a huge cult following and is sold by the truckload to both business and individual customers.

3. Jobs gave competitors a head start.

Jobs' keynote unveiled the iPhone for all to see, including Apple's many competitors in Finland, Korea and Japan. Now, these companies have six more months to copy features and work on competitive products than if Jobs had stuck to the usual formula of not announcing product details until the product ships.

Now, these companies have enough time to develop competing products -- or at least competing marketing strategies -- before the 2007 holiday season. If Jobs would have announced the iPhone in June, these competitors would all have been caught flat-footed.