Technology Shifts Can Take 10 to 20 Years

Being late to get into a market can be dangerous, but being too early might be the more prevalent mistake.

Though the tablet might be the fastest-growing consumer appliance of all time, most devices and appliances take quite a long time to reach ubiquity. Consider smart phones, which many rightly consider to be among the faster-growing devices of all time.

BellSouth launched the IBM Simon, with its rudimentary touch screen, in 1993. It didn’t catch on. About 2002, personal digital assistants started to have the ability to make and receive phone calls. RIM shipped its first BlackBerry about that time.

In late 2006 only 715,000 smart phones were sold, though, representing just six percent of U.S. mobile phone sales. Up to that point, the smart phone was spreading not much faster than personal computers had done, according to Technology Review.

Still, keep in mind that It took landline telephones about 45 years to get from five percent to 50 percent penetration among U.S. households, and mobile phones took around seven years to reach a similar proportion of consumers. Smart phones have gone from five percent to 40 percent in about four years.

But it likewise took about 11 years for use of mobile phones to reach 10 percent penetration, so it took about 18 years for use of mobile phones to reach about half of people in the United States.

Since it took about eight years for smart phone penetration to reach 10 percent of people, and then another seven years to reach half of users, it took about 13 years for smart phones to reach half of U.S. consumers. And that has been about the fastest adoption rate of any appliance, in the U.S. market.

Global adoption of mobile phones in the developing world has been stunningly rapid, as well.

In 1982, there were 4.6 billion people in the world, and not a single mobile-phone subscriber.

Today, there are seven billion people in the world and six billion mobile cellular-phone subscriptions. In other words, the world has gone to about 86 percent penetration in about 30 years.

From the standpoint of human progress, that is fast. From the standpoint of any single company, that is a long time. And that is worth keeping in mind. Most truly important consumer technologies take time to reach ubiquity. Would-be market leaders have plenty of time to misjudge market progress, and fail before “ubiquity” is reached.