That's a big part of the reason the iPhone has become so successful — the first release had half the features of other smartphones, but it worked well.
Apple has been slowly adding functionality — third-party applications, video recording, MMS, copy and paste — at a pace that lets the engineers get it all right.
From the blog post:
"Video aspect? Let YouTube handle that part. E-Commerce aspect? Use Amazon’s system. Payments? PayPal. Social networking? Facebook.
Don’t reinvent any of these wheels. Focus on what’s left – what hasn’t been done."
If you take what's been written literally, what did iPhone do in their first release that hasn't been done already?
IMO Apple's greatest addition is their app store. And it came later in the cycle.
Relatedly, the version number you peg on something is entirely a marketing decision, and not even that important of one these days. (Since I don't charge for upgrades, literally the only use I have for it is reproducing bugs. You won't find one written on my website anywhere.)
Back in the "all software users are software enthusiasts" days, all that stuff you learned about "point upgrades" and "beta releases" and whatnot actually made sense to people. Your mother does not care about the difference between a .1 and .01 point release, and never will. Make sure your website distributes the newest and best version, and make upgrading between not-the-newest-and-best-version and the-newest-and-best-version as automatic and painless as possible, to the limit of your business model's ability to do so.
Adjust as required if your product has to be compatible with other things. (Not ordinarily a worry of mine in B2C land.)
(I really envy you web-only guys some days. "The website has the latest version of the software on it" and "All users are using the latest version of the software" being axiomatic are so cool.)
Theres a flipside to that envy though: The time needed to make sure the html+css+javascript renders the same on all the different browsers and their different versions.
... especially when they like to radically change everything all the time for no good reason. I'm looking at you IE.
Why couldn't they just use mozilla or webkit, and concentrate on adding innovative features like chrome did.
Apple has been slowly adding functionality — third-party applications, video recording, MMS, copy and paste — at a pace that lets the engineers get it all right.