A self-proclaimed VC (but really just a business angel syndicate gateway keeper with no real money, as I later found out) once told me (in 2005) "Even if it will be possible to use the Internet from one's phone one day, it will be too expensive for ordinary people to use it."

This was already wrong when he said it to me (I was pitching a mobile question answering system developed in 2004), as then an ugly HTML cousin called WAP already existed. I have never taken any risk capital investor that did not have their own tech exist seriously since then.

Uh, as the page says, these were cheap feature phones for emerging markets. In 2007 Nokia had smartphones vastly more capable than the original iPhone. They just didn’t have a large touchscreen.

Read that thread again. pg said iPhone needs at least 5% market share to make the needed impact, that was discussed in the thread.

I can translate the answers to you:

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> What marketshare do you think iphone needs to make such an impact?

5%

> And why do you think it will gain that huge marketshare?

Because of iPod (because iPod already has quite a bit of market share).

> Its the first "nice looking internet in your pocket". But is that enough to take over the mobile world?

Actually, iPhone is much more than just that.

> First Mover = guaranteed success?

No, of course being first mover does not alone guarantee success.

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Then again, pg was wrong is his main point that either Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight would take over the world.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32994

That seems like a strange interpretation of the comment you linked. He was responding to the question of how much market share the iPhone needs to make an impact; not predicting an upper bound on the market share.