When the iPhone was first officially announced (in 2007), I grumbled a lot. Some of my friends took issue with my grumbling, and I had to explain that I wasn’t angry at Apple, nor was I saying the iPhone was a bad idea. I was irritated at a lot of the technical press who were elaborating (incorrectly) on some parts of the news. And I was angry at the executives and processes at the company that owned my employer at the time, and another company that we were working with on a joint project.

I was angry because if they hadn’t thrown so many obstacles in our way, a phone we had been working on for a few years would have been released before the iPhone. Don’t take me wrong, the iPhone would have still leapfrogged over us, but if we’d released it when originally planned, we would have been just a competitor at a slight disadvantage. Because of the delays, the soonest we could possibly release it would make our independently developed product look like a quick attempt to copy some of the iPhone’s features.

But the story begins more than a decade earlier than that…

I worked at the same company for over twenty years, which is very unusual in the tech industry. Though over those years the company, the market, and our business changed a great deal. And my job changed, mutated, grew, was re-directed, grew some more, and so on, right along with it.

I was employee number six. When I first started working for them, the software ran on DOS. It was intended to run in the background on a desk computer used for other business purposes (I remember mocking up screenshots showing the DOS version of Lotus 1,2,3 with a little bar across the top of the screen giving status messages of our background software). This background software could answer the phone, play some voice menus, transfer calls to other extensions in the office, and/or record messages.

Pretty slick for a background process on a 8088 processor, when you think about it.

But it only worked with a couple of models of office telephone systems and could bog down the system when trying to handle two calls at once. Configuring it to work with other systems, and customizing it in other ways made it too resource-hungry to work as a background process, particularly on the 8088.

So it became a stand-alone voice server and automated attendant running on various versions of DOS, supporting a much wider variety of phone systems, handling many more lines, and so forth. We added features for handling faxes, sharing messages with other brands of voice server, supporting various kinds of networking, added email integrations, and so forth. During that, it migrated from DOS to OS/2, then to various flavors of Windows server, before we finally re-architected the whole thing from scratch to introduce a much more flexible, comprehensive, and scalable universal messaging server.

At which point a company I usually refer to as Behemoth Systems swooped in, bought us, split us into two companies, and sold the portion I wound up in to the company that had previously been our biggest customer, and was a big rival of Behemoth.

Before we got to that point, among the auxiliary products we had created was software that would run on your desktop and tell you various things about your messages and callers, and giving you lots of options. My particular favorite was one that, if you came back to your desk and saw that a caller you knew was leaving you a voice message, with a single mouse click the system would interrupt them, tell them you were back at your desk and wanted to talk live, and offered them the choice of whether to be connected with you, or simply finish leaving the message.

We never had a lot of success selling those call and message control apps in North America. The only place they took off was in Japan. And for that market, we developed a version that ran on the phones manufactured by one particular company. So about 8-9 years before the iPhone was announced, our software was providing people with (among other things) a visual list of your messages, right on the phone, and allowing users to pick which messages to listen to or whether to call the person back from that list.

By the time 2007 rolled around, certain other companies had come out with similar functionality on their phones, as well. But the number of people using phones with either our software or these other companies was small. Most cellphones had nothing remotely like it.

Thus, my irritation at tech pundits who described the original iPhone’s message list as a revolutionary new idea (Mr Jobs had simply said it was a feature users would find easier than the way most of them accessed messages).

Backing up for a moment to when the company I worked for was bought, split up, and then resold, our new owner, Venerable Corp, couldn’t make up its mind what to do with us. We’d be pushed to create updates to the products we still had, then be told to put that on hold and make some more customized versions of un-updated products for other divisions of Venerable Corp to sell, then get scolded for not developing brand new products faster, and so on.

Then Venerable Corp entered into an agreement with a certain Finland-based telephone manufacturer (let’s call them FinPhonic for fun) to develop a product that could take on the Blackberry. The two big companies decided that the messaging server and client software that our little division made would be the perfect basis for a phone and integrated messaging system. So while FinPhonic was busy designing the hardware, we set to work on the software—for both the phone and the back-end messaging systems.

The original ship date was September 2006. We didn’t make the date because of obstacles Venerable Corp and FinPhonic kept throwing in our way. I know now that FinPhonic had launched a bunch of different initiatives with the same goal as our project. A sort of, “throw all these teams into competition and see which one produces a winner.” That may have contributed to the crazy delays that FinPhonic kept having about sending us prototype phones. Or forgetting to tell us about changes they were making to the phone design.

Another problem might have been because the software we were developing, both for the backend and the phone, was all Linux-based, rather than the propriety software FinPhonic was used to working with.

Venerable Corp had always been difficult to work with. Before we were owned by them, they would hire us to make a product that had to run on their hardware, but then didn’t want to loan any of the hardware to us to develop on. When the hardware was still in development itself, they would sometimes refuse to tell us even the specs in advance. We had hoped that would change when we became part of their organization, but it actually got worse.

Make no mistake: the phone we were working on was not as revolutionary as the iPhone. It was clearly aimed to compete with the Blackberry. It had a touchscreen, yes, but it also had a full physical keyboard. And the touchscreen was mushy and not always reliable. It was so imprecise, that at about the third generation of the prototype, they put a little joystick button back onto the keyboard, as an alternate way to select things on screen.

And because they didn’t tell us they were putting it on the phone, the software we were going to test on that prototype didn’t work properly when we got the phone, causing yet another round of redesigning and coding and testing.

Then the iPhone came out, which kicked off a new flurry of directives to redesign our phone. A year later, Venerable Corp and FinPhonic were still arguing about which direction to take with the project. Then Venerable Corp, independent of that, decided our division needed a major shift, laying off a whole bunch of people (including me) in the first of a series of layoffs and restructuring that would result, about a year and a half later, in selling a tiny remnant of the division to yet another company altogether.

The only reason I’m sad, now, that we never got that phone out, is simply because we put so much time and effort into it. Looking at the industry now, I don’t think our little project would have made much of a difference. We were chasing the hockey puck by staring at where it was. We were not anticipating and skating to where it would be. Which is what everyone else was doing. It’s why the original Android prototypes all looked like Blackberries, complete with physical keyboard, until the iPhone (and why the Android operating system has fundamental architecture that still is not optimized for touch input, and those won’t be removed unless and until Google decides to bite the bullet and tell their partners they’ll have to scrap and redesign apps and such from scratch).

And the executives at FinPhonic and Venerable Corp were telling all their divisions and partners to try every idea they could think of, and keeping each group mostly in the dark as to what the other teams were doing. This meant that several groups would come out with products almost indistinguishable from each other, and then we’d all be competing with ourselves.

It works all right if your business model is, “produce something newish about every six weeks that is good enough to get some customers to buy it, don’t invest in any long-term support or customer care plan, and keeping throwing new models out ever couple months so it looks like you’re doing something.”

That’s how fast food chains do it, and they’re profitable, right?