Important innovations in the communications business often seem to have far less market impact than expected. That is one reason why the Gartner notion of the “hype cycle” resonates.
In most cases, innovations are expected to have large impact “soon,” and often fail to deliver on those expectations, leading to a period of disillusionment and then finally to useful deployment.
Even really important and fundamental innovations (steam engine, electricity, automobile, personal computer, World Wide Web) can take much longer to produce measurable changes.
Quite often, there is a long period of small, incremental changes, then an inflection point, and then the whole market is transformed relatively quickly.
Mobile phones and broadband are among the two best examples. Until the early 1990s, few people actually used mobile phones, as odd as that seems now.
Not until about 2006 did 10 percent of people actually use 3G. But mobiles relatively suddenly became the primary way people globally make phone calls and arguably also have become the primary way most people use the Internet, in term of instances of use, if not volume of use.
Prior to the mobile phone revolution, policy makers really could not figure out how to provide affordable phone service to billions of people who had “never made a phone call.”
That is no longer a serious problem, and the inflection point everywhere in the developing world seems to have happened between 2002 and 2003.
Before 2003, one could assume that most people in the developing world could not make a phone call easily.
A decade later, most people use mobile phones. That would have been impossible to envision, in advance of the reaching of the inflection point.
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