Mobile Handset Market Reaches Inflection Point in 2009

Over the years, there is one good rule I've found that applies to major technology trends. Though we are fond of labeling certain years the "year of" something, those forecasts nearly always are wrong. You might think that's because we are such poor forecasters. We are, though that's not the reason for the disconnects.

Most important technology transitions, if not all, always take much longer to get traction than one might suppose. But at least in the case of consequential innovations, there is some inflection point where a period of long or longish gestation suddenly reaches a time of qualitative change, where until that point there mostly had been incremental, quantitative change.

This look at handset leadership in the mobile industry probably is one of those sorts of processes. From 2001 to 2009, you see a remarkably stable market share structure. There is some share change, over time, at positions two and three, but the market remains quite stable. Only in 2010 does one see, appearing in position five, the name of Apple.

Some of us would say that was an inflection point, where a long period of smartphone gestation suddenly erupted. Market shares for handsets will not fully capture all of the changes. But they can signal important shifts, including a new role for the application ecosystem, not just a change to touchscreen interfaces.