Wishful Thinking Does Not Make Facts

We all wish we could wish our wishes into reality - yes, that was intentional - but when a large company starts doing it, short the stock.

Apparently, Martin Fichter, the president of HTC America is convinced HTC is about to dominate the market because, well, iPhones are "a little less cool." The story is on geekwire.

I am not quite sure how you scientifically measure cool. But this is clearly Fichter wishing iPhone were less cool, so that more people would buy his (obviously cooler, in his not-so-humble opinion) HTC phones.

I give HTC a lot of credit: they were a nothing company, that managed to build white-label smartphones for carriers, in Europe and then the US, on Windows Mobile and eventually to make its own name in Android phones. But cool? Perhaps for techno-geeks deep into specifications. However, "cool" is determined by the market at large, and HTC doesn't have it. If they *really* got cool, they wouldn't be named "HTC", would they?

Some day, someone will put the iPhone and its Apple successors away for good, and it will be the right combination of featureset (functionality) and design (style). But unless it becomes extremely cheap and commoditized, the style (cool factor) is not coming from a company named HTC. If you want to be have "cool" products, your corporate branding has got to be cool too.