RETHINK Partners

Big game-changing trends come along only occasionally, and it is often hard to see their full impact during the early stages. It took over five years for AOL to reach almost 20 million subscribers in the 1990’s marking the widespread consumer use of an online service and email. It took slightly more than four years for Netscape to bring the Internet to almost 50 million users. These milestones were indicative of the larger trend of broad Internet adoption that has played out over the past fifteen years, reshaping entire industries. But in the early days, few businesses saw clearly how these changes would ultimately impact them. Notable examples of companies that misread this trend include Borders who in 2001 signed a deal for Amazon to handle their online sales, and Blockbuster did not anticipate how Netflix would reinvent video rentals.

In the past year, smartphones have outsold PCs for the first time ever, and Apple’s iPad sold over 28 million units in about one year. The mobile Internet and the movement toward smartphones and tablets is a game-changing trend that will create large new companies and kill off existing ones, changing many aspects of how we live, work and play.

Here is what makes mobile such a game changer:

Ubiquity – the numbers alone make this a compelling trend. Smartphones currently represent 40% of mobile phones in the US and appear to be growing at around 49% annually. This is significantly faster than the original adoption rates of PCs or the Internet itself. There will be more mobile Internet users than desktop Internet users within three years.
Ease of Use – mobile devices are fundamentally different from desktop and laptop PCs. They are much more like appliances, very easy to use, always on and easily mobile. They are geared for consuming content (music, movies, books), communicating with others (phone, text, social networks) and simple tasks like shopping and browsing information. This represents probably 90% of what most users will want to do.
Location – location enables a whole new range of features and makes local a much more powerful part of the mix.
Cloud Services – Users will want to be able to easily access their information from any of their devices. Cloud based services will become very important; from downloading books and reading them on your tablet or your phone, to accessing your photo library, and streaming music. Storing, syncing, and utilizing data in the cloud will become standard.

Unfortunately many companies are still woefully unprepared to take advantage of mobile. Earlier this year Google found that only 21% of their largest advertisers even had a website that was optimized for mobile. If your company is in this category you should be concerned, paranoid even, because someone somewhere may be reinventing your business from the ground up based on mobile technologies and cloud services. There is no time to waste, now is the time to rethink your business from the ground up for mobile.

With Sherry Turkle’s opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times, The Flight From Conversation, a dialog has sprung up about the impact of today’s social technologies on personal interaction. These kinds of commentaries always appear when new technologies emerge that offer new ways for people to interact and engage. And they are true in a way.

Years ago, a co-worker had a tendency to send me emails even though he was two cubes away . It annoyed me and felt like he was avoiding face-to-face interaction. I responded by constantly parking myself in his cube to engage in a conversation on all of the items he emailed me. The one-to-one conversations lead to a better understanding between us and ultimately more effective email communication.

Surely all of us have sat in long, boring meetings doing our email, or texting on our iPhone only to be embarrassed when our name is mentioned or something comes up later that we missed while being distracted. I think Sherry Turkle’s article is a good reminder that sometimes putting down the technology and seeking people out for a face-to-face conversation is the right solution. Ultimately our most important relationships are with people. We should not lose sight of that. Technology often does facilitate those relationships but we have to have judgment in how we use it.

We are all guilty of using the latest gadget to excess. When all you have is a bright, shiny new hammer (or social networking site), everything looks like a nail. Social networking isn’t bad except when it is. Everybody should lighten up, social networking has a place in your life, it just shouldn’t BE your life.

RETHINK Partners

The Mobile Opportunity

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