And maybe Apple, of all companies, will be the one that actually succeeds in breaking past that simplistic and unscalable interface. Ironic.

It certainly isn’t the first to try to do so. (And, this isn’t even Apple’s first attempt at trying to do so, but let’s stay focused for a moment.) When Microsoft launched its internal efforts to replace Windows Mobile with a new platform that could be more competitive with the iPhone, the firm, to its credit, really thought outside the box. Unlike Google, with Android, Microsoft sought to be both different and better than iPhone, and to do that broadly across the new system, called Windows Phone.