"Rumours of the iPhone's death have been greatly exaggerated!"

Fortune journalist Philip Elmer-DeWitt has trawled back through predictions from the not so great and good, who saw nothing but disaster awaiting Apple after it launched the iPhone in 2007.

Apple has since sold over 33 million iPhones and revolutionised the smartphone industry with its App Store.

Below are some of the best quotes.

'Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized, with a plan? It is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine… So, I, I kinda look at that and I say, well, I like our strategy. I like it a lot.'
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, 17 January 2007

'Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone… What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a ‘reference design’ and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures… Otherwise I’d advise people to cover their eyes. You are not going to like what you’ll see.'
John C. Dvorak, 29 March 2007

'How do they deal with us?'
Ed Zander, Motorola CEO, 10 May 2007

'There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.'
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, 30 April 2007

'What does the iPhone offer that other cell phones do not already offer, or will offer soon? The answer is not very much… Apple’s stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008 seems ambitious.'
Laura Goldman, analyst at LSG Capital, 21 May 2007