Ten years ago, hailing a cab meant waving one’s arm at passing traffic, consumers routinely purchased cameras and a phone was something people made calls.
At The Wall Street Journal reports, the Apple iPhone—released a decade ago this month—changed all of that and more, sparking a business transformation as sweeping as the one triggered by the personal computer in the 1980s.
The iPhone and the smartphone boom that followed gave rise to whole new industries, laid waste to others and forced new business models.
By essentially compressing a powerful, networked computer into a pocket-size device and making it easy to use, Steve Jobs made the internet almost ubiquitous and fundamentally altered decades-old consumer habits in areas like music and books. What’s more, the functionality packed into the iPhone made it a digital Swiss Army knife, supplanting existing tools from email to calendar to maps to calculators.
“It combined size, power and personalization,” says Paul Nunes, managing director at global consulting and services firm Accenture and author of Big Bang Disruption, a book about transformational technologies.
Nowhere has the smartphone’s impact been more pronounced—or unexpected—than in telecommunications. The Wall Street Journal has the full story (subscription may be required).
