My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

Path dependence and smartphones

tech
by Antonio on

Economists have this concept called path dependence for explaining how non-market driven equilibrium can result from past historical decisions that keep the market from developing to a more efficient point. VHS, sewers, and most natural resource-rich Latin American economies are prime "victims" of path dependence. It's an interesting concept that Tomi Ahonen has recently applied to the development of the smartphone market in the US versus the rest of the world in a rambling but insightful post.

Ahonen, a former Nokia employee and mobile consultant argues that the US has a very warped view of what constitutes a smartphone due to the path dependence of the smartphone being born in this country out of the PDA (or pocket computer) vision which sacrifices hard keyboards for screen size, and more importantly, efficient text input for application flexibility and real estate. European and Asian usage, he argues, has always been driven by the prevalence of SMS (something we didn't wake up to here until just last year) and as such, fast typing rules the roost.

However his most controversial point to do with the unique American view of the smartphone is around the future of the smartphone as a type of PC with the user customizing its functionality via AppStores:

By far the most of those 160 million buyers did not for one second consider "what operating system does this have, what apps can I download to it". You and I may have done so. You and I care. The mass market is not like you and me. And the Apple iPhone customer today is not a typical mass market customer. Do not kid yourself. Those who bought an average smartphone last year wanted a certain high-end phone with certain abilities and that given smartphone happened to match that need. Its operating system and any applications had ZERO bearing on the decision. Not for mass market consumers.
...
We do not buy - and the mass market will not ever buy - smartphones so that they could install some apps to it. The vast majority of users will be contented with the apps that come pre-loaded, and then they go to web based services to get their additional benefits.

I'm not sure he is right here. Just as we were blind to the addictive power of SMS in the US until recently, it seems that the European/Asian analysts seem blind to the power of user customized mobile computers. Perhaps our path dependence is in a different direction overall— that is assuming that it becomes economically viable to survive as a mobile applications developer.

And then again, maybe we're all in the Apple marketing vortex and at some point down the road we'll wonder why we thought that loading native 3rd party apps was such a big opportunity.