The coming revolution
A revolution is coming. It's sneaking up on us much faster than most of the country realizes. No, I'm not talking about anything political -- I'm talking about mobile phones.
We've seen the initial rumblings of change with the iPhone over the past few years. In a recent comScore survey, a little more than 40 percent of iPhone owners reported browsing the web more often on their phones than their PCs. Apple itself has gone from a luxury computer company to a self-proclaimed "mobile devices company," as noted by both COO Tim Cook and Steve Jobs himself. The smartphone has replicated and to some extent replaced many of our day-to-day PC tasks.
At the same time, we've seen a trend toward smaller and more portable devices in computing. At one time, computer purchases were tied to Moore's law, with prospective buyers purchasing a new desktop every two to three years as speeds doubled. But a few years ago, the computing requirements ceased to double along with the capabilities, and suddenly it was the decrease in size that fueled purchases. The market for a primary computing device went from desktops to laptops to toying with netbooks and, most recently, tablets.
These two trends are going to collide rather forcefully in the U.S., where the mobile phone market has a forced acceleration in technology adoption. Because carriers in the U.S. are able to charge high prices for monthly service by hampering a competitive marketplace through two-year contract lock-ins, our mobile phone adoption is ahead of the rest of the world. Every two years, carriers nearly force consumers to replace their handset and heavily subsidize the cost of those handsets to do so. As a result, roughly 60 percent of U.S. mobile phone subscribers have a phone less than 12 months old, and the entire marketplace is transformed in a two-year cycle. No other technology market evolves this rapidly.
In two years' time, mobile phones will resemble phones about as much as a laptop installed with Skype would today. They will be running on 4G networks, which are data-only networks with no separate voice channel. The cloud will have evolved to a point where the tasks currently requiring a dedicated computer can be performed from a pocket-sized device. The world as we know it will be radically different. But fear not -- here are five basic ways to survive the coming revolution.
