Microsoft would have been totally incapable of coming up with a product like the Iphone.
Even if you gave them a crystal ball in 2006 that sees 8 years into the future and showed them pictures of the smartphones being used in 2014, they still would have botched it, because they're culturally incapable of understanding the end user.
So, I while I do think the second mover advantage contributed to the Iphone's success, the biggest factor was Jobs' user-focused, opinionated vision.
The concept of second mover advantage doesn't mean you have to go exactly second - your reply is somewhat pedantic - you just get the advantage by not being the very first. Apple absolutely enjoyed some second mover advantages in bringing iPhone to market.
The second mover advantages Apple enjoyed went beyond just the cellphone design too - they completely rearchitected the relationship between a carrier and a cellphone OEM. People forget that pre-iPhone, virtually all cellphones had to carry crappy software insisted on by the cell carrier - the iPhone was one of the first ever handsets that shipped with the OS completely under the control/design of the handset vendor with no network involvement. Just getting AT&T to agree to this alone was massive, and hadn't been figured out by any of the pre-existing smartphone manufacturers on the "first move" either. We take this for granted now across the industry that cellphones can easily arrive this way in carrier stores with little/no carrier interference.
Heck, pre-iPhone, it was close to impossible to buy a phone in an AT&T/"Cingular" store that didn't have AT&T/Cingular's logo custom printed on it, such was the extent of the carrier choke-hold on the OEM handset supply side. This was true of virtually all the carriers in North America at that time. Again today, it's rare a phone is branded with the carrier logos, and smartphones rarely ever now have bundled carrier software/OS changes at the user application level.
