Mobile: A Walk Down Memory Lane, 2000 to 2011

We've come a long way in mobile from 2000 to 2011 and I'm excited about where the industry is heading.  Going forward, I believe many challenges endure, including multi-platform global distribution, monetization, retention, mobile enterprise, payments and networks of apps/services.  And these are the areas in which I am interested in investing in the next few years.

To put things in perspective, I thought I would do a little walk down memory lane:

Way back in early 2000, I thought that mobile had arrived. Little did I know that we were too early, too early by a decade.  

I co-founded a mobile app development platform company (Phonespan at that time, later renamed to Covigo) in early 2000. It was so early, in fact, that our demos were literally delivered on green-screen Motorola StarTAC phones (remember those!).   Our revolutionary (at least to us, at that time) demos included the ability to transfer money between checking and savings accounts on Bank of America and the ability to check eBay auctions, both from a WAP 1.0 phone.  The only problem was that in our pitches to VCs, our demos would never work because there never was (and still isn't) good cell coverage on Sand Hill Road.

Since then, the a lot has changed (except for cell phone coverage on Sand Hill Road).  A lot of the players in mobile are different, the apps are different, the business models are different, the go-to-markets are different.  However, a lot remains the same as well - app development in a heterogenous environment remains tough, mobile enterprise is still in its early stages (although picking up steam), carriers/OEMs still have some power to exert in distributing services (although far less than before), featurephones still dominate the installed base around the world and texting/SMS still dominates mobile communications.

To summarize this change, I've tried to list below some of the memorable differences and similarities between mobile in 2000 and mobile in 2011.  

	2000	2011
Mobile subscribers in the US	100 million	300 million
Mobile subscribers globally	600 million	5.2 billion
Mobile penetration rate global	~10%	75%+
Leading mobile geographies	Japan, Scandinavia	USA
USA wireless data revenue	$200 million	$50 billion
USA Mobile operators	SBC, AirTouch, AT&T, Bell Atlantic, GTE, Sprint PCS	AT&T/T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint
Leading OEMs	Nokia, Palm, HP/Compaq, Motorola	Apple, HTC, Samsung, Motorola, several Chinese OEMs
Popular content type	Ringtones, wallpaper, J2ME games	Apps, apps, apps
Popular OSs	MS Pocket PC, Palm OS, BREW, J2ME, RTOS	iOS, Android, J2ME
Popular device types	PDAs (side-loaded), flip-phones, candy-bar phones	Smartphones, tablets
Go-to-market	Mobile operators, device OEMs, ISVs	Direct-to-consumer, app stores, web, enterprise
Browser standards	WAP 1.0	XHTML/CSS/JS, Webkit, HTML5
On-device storage	16MB RAM, 128MB memory	300MB RAM, 8GB++ memory
Cell network	2G, 2.5G (EDGE), 100kbps	3G/4G, Wifi, several Mbps

I can only imagine how the mobile industry will change in the next ten years. Bring it on!

Comments

[Dkhare]

Brij,
Yes, Symbol did acquire us. We spent an interesting time there launching mobile device management and wireless network management products.

Regarding the user interaction change, i absolutely agree with you. Touch has arrived in a big way. Audio/voice reco though is still a bit challenged. The promise is there, there are still some hurdles though - enough accuracy/efficiency in voice reco (note the terrible nature of Google Voice translations and how Spinvox had to use humans to do the translation); definition of must-have use cases (car is a must-have but what else?); change in user behavior from text/display.

[Brij]

I still remember Covigo. I think it eventually ended up at Symbol. Good overview of how things changed in one decade.

I will request one more row in your table and that will be for interaction model - interaction model has changed from keyboard to touch/voice and that is a significant shift.

Brij

[Dkhare]

Miten,
Thanks. If one believes in the exponential rate of change in this business, in a decade, mobile might just disappear as a category and just be equal to computing. And computing might just disappear as well as it gets subsumed into all our surroundings (into our cars, our home appliances, our digital screens etc.).

dev

[twitter.com/mitensampat]

staggering growth !

thanks for drawing the distinction, great times ahead