Dent in the Universe

As I never tire of saying, the smartphone must be the fastest adopted technology in human history. How fast? As Ben Evans says:

“Of 5bn adults on earth today, close to 4bn and growing have a mobile phone today, almost all of whom will convert to smartphones over the next few years.”

It’s easy to believe that: after all, everybody has a smartphone these days: from CEO’s to the middle class to illegal immigrants and those in refugee camps. Not bad for a product just launched a few years back, in 2007!

There’s something else that this incredible pace of smartphone adoption is doing: it is changing the very nature of the Internet. Evans explains how. Once upon a time, he says:

“Our mental model of how and where you used 'mobile' was that it fitted into specific, occasional places and times where you were walking or waiting or needed a single piece of information and didn't have a PC.”

Fast forward to present day:

“Mobile today does not mean 'when you're mobile'. It means ubiquity - universal access to the internet for anyone at any time. People use their smartphones all the time, very often when there's a PC in the same building as them or the same room, or on the sofa next to them.”

As this graph shows, more surfing happens via tablets + phones than via PC’s + laptops:

No wonder then that, as Eugene Wei said:

“Many tech companies …are already going mobile only.”

That’s happening because as Evans said:

“(Mobile’s) not a subset of the internet - it IS the internet.”

Steve Jobs famously described the scale of impact he wanted to make:

“We're here to put a dent in the universe.”

I’d say he made that dent on Planet Earth at least with the smartphone (ironically, with some help from Google’s Android) because, most people would agree with what my dad once said:

“(The smartphone) is pretty close to Aladdin's genie.”