People had been trying to make devices very much like the iPhone for decades before Jobs pushed through a mass-market-acceptable iteration. MS had a tablet and natural voice UI projects as major priorities around the turn of the century while Apple was working on the click-wheel of the original iPod.<p>It takes a lot of iteration before something becomes mass-marketable, and there&#x27;s almost always a long, multi-competitor heritage in devices that seem to appear overnight, like the iPhone.