Success Quote by Ian Jackson

Jackson’s certainty lands like a time capsule from the moment when “convergence” was a secular faith and every gadget was supposed to eat the others. Coming from a scientist, the bravado isn’t just marketing fanfare; it borrows the authority of prediction. “I think” softens the claim, but only just enough to sound measured before he swings for the superlative: “the most successful…ever.” It’s the language of inevitability, not preference.

The real tell is what he chooses to praise. Not the PSP’s games, but its “versatility,” with music downloading as the headline feature. That’s a snapshot of the mid-2000s logic: if a device can hold your “great tunes,” it has graduated from toy to lifestyle. The subtext is status anxiety dressed up as utility. A handheld game machine needed cultural permission to live in adult pockets and commuter bags, so it gets framed as a mini media hub.

There’s also an unspoken competition embedded here: the iPod and, looming just offstage, the smartphone. Jackson is arguing for a world where discrete devices remain dominant, where dedicated hardware wins because it’s optimized and aspirational. History didn’t reward that bet. Phones swallowed music players; app ecosystems replaced the romance of proprietary platforms. That’s why the quote works now: it captures the optimism of an era that mistook feature lists for destiny and confused “can do” with “will matter.”