Thiel is right. In 100 years, people are still going to be talking about inventors like Ford and Edison. I doubt you'll find 22nd century schoolchildren reading about the little company that made shiny, walled-garden media players.
In addressing the question of who invented the incandescent lamp, historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison.
Several inventors devised machines to record sound prior to Thomas Edison's phonograph, Edison being the first to produce a device that could both record and reproduce sound... [Charles] Cros's paleophone was intended to both record and reproduce sound but had not been developed beyond a basic concept at the time of Edison's successful demonstration of the Phonograph in 1877.
I won't bother to quote the enormous list of Henry Ford's predecessors that appears in e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile. I'd never do them justice.
On the way, [Bertha Benz] solved numerous problems. She had to find ligroin as a fuel, which was available only at apothecary shops so she stopped in Wiesloch at the city pharmacy to purchase the fuel. A blacksmith had to help mend a chain at one point. Brakes needed to be repaired; in doing so Bertha Benz invented brake lining. She also had to use a long, straight hairpin to clean a fuel pipe, which had become blocked, and to insulate a wire with a garter. She left Mannheim around dawn and reached Pforzheim somewhat after dusk, notifying her husband of her successful journey by telegram. She drove back to Mannheim the next day.
I can't believe that I haven't heard this story before. Note that at this point in 1888 Henry Ford is still servicing steam engines; he'll start his personal experiments in gasoline engines in earnest in 1893.
I don't think that's true. I think the innovation of the iPhone was in two areas...
1. It was the first product to popularize touch. That's going to have a big impact in the future of technology. The gestures pioneered by the iPhone (swipe, pinch to zoom) could very well exist 100 years from now and if they do the iPhone will be their ancestor. That's a big deal.
2. The iPhone saved Apple and Apple changed the conversation in technology. 10 years ago adding more features and giving users 20 different ways to do things was considered an asset. Now the technology industry has changed direction back towards designing a product and giving the user 1 way to do things that's easier. I'm inclined to believe we'll eventually reach a happy medium between those two philosophies but there's no doubt the design side was losing out before Apple's resurgence.
Introducing your biases does not strengthen your argument.
No one really knows what people will be talking about in 100 years. That said, the iPhone seems to be as good a candidate as your examples. The interface was revolutionary compared to the devices which came before it, and the idea that 3rd parties could distribute apps without going thru the carriers was also a big change.
