Jobs' Reason for iPhone Timing Proved False

In my January 18 Computerworld column, "How Steve Jobs blew his iPhone keynote," I argued that Jobs' decision to discard Apple's winning formula and announce the iPhone far in advance of its ship date was an error that would eventually harm Apple stockholders.

Predictably -- as any observer who criticizes the assumed infallible pronouncements of Apple's CEO or his company can expect -- I was attacked (in some cases cordially, and in others, viciously) on blogs, message boards and e-mail -- even Slashdot.

The critics mostly made two points in counterargument: 1) that the early announcement was justified; and 2) that it won't harm Apple shareholders.

I'm planning a follow-up column for Fall to say either "I told you so" or "I was wrong" about specific predictions I made about harm to Apple shareholders. But today, I can write an "I told you so" about the first point.

Hundreds of my column's critics pointed out Jobs' own justification for the early announcement, which he mentioned in his keynote. Jobs said: "We’re announcing it today because, with products like this, we've got to go ahead and get FCC approval, which takes a few months. And we thought it would be better if we introduced this rather than ask the FCC to introduce it for us."

This statement seems transparently bogus to me. That FCC approval "takes a few months" is irrelevant, as no details are revealed until the official publication of documents and photographs on the FCC web site. And the distance between FCC "introducing" products and their actual ship date can be weeks, not months. Still, Jobs' reasoning was good enough for The Faithful.

I argued this point on as many message boards and e-mails as I could: that avoiding an FCC introduction was a good reason to announce the iPhone in May, not January. In fact, May turns out to have been an ideal time to announce the iPhone. The FCC published the approval documents yesterday, which means that if Jobs had announced the iPhone the day before yesterday, instead of early January, he still would have "introduced" the iPhone before the FCC.

Also: The fact that Jobs actually devoted a few seconds of his highly scripted keynote to justifying his early-announcement decision with the best argument at hand -- as bogus as it was -- hints at internal division on the decision or at least expectation of external criticism. He apparently felt the need to justify this decision very publicly (another exception to the Apple norm).

In any event, it's official: Jobs' iPhone announcement was more than four months earlier than necessary for the reason stated.

So what was the *real* reason?