Viswanathan K's Thoughts

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'r...

My parents were considering buying a second desktop for themselves. Second as in “addition to”, not as in “replacement of”. Why? For two reasons (this is just my opinion; I could be totally wrong): 1)       The existing desktop is getting old and might conk out sooner rather than later; 2)       One device ain’t enough for two people! My father was considering a laptop as an option. That is when my wife told me to suggest the tablet option to them. I did; and initially, they were wary of how easy or difficult typing without a (physical) keyboard might be. They then Googled to learn that they could plug in a physical keyboard to a tablet. I was amused by how my dad knew about iPad and Android as the only two options (I guess he learnt about Android from the book I lent him and, surprisingly, one he actually read: Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution ). I pushed them hard to buy the iPad rather th...