| ‘We’re moving away from the business of ears to the business of eyes.’
Move over Bill Gates, stand aside Steve Jobs, said the industry pundits after
CeBIT 1998, the famous trade conference. They’d just seen Nokia’s
Communicator 9110, a mobile phone with dazzling capabilities, but what
really intrigued them was the unforgettable line by Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s
legendary brand chief.
Two to three years later, we met and talked about the coming revolution in
mobile services. I was intrigued by the vision, but even more by the way. How
are we moving from ears to eyes?
That’s how The Mobile Revolution began.
In the past, mobility was driven by technology change. With increasing penetration,
the momentum is now on usage. Tomorrow, it will be on mobile
content. Yet the frameworks we deploy to understand industry change originate
from technologists, not from marketers.
According to conventional industry wisdom, technology-based innovations
are part of a continuum of change. Each wave of innovation is typically illustrated
with the S-curve, a graph of the relationship between time (the effort put
into improving a product or process) and performance (the return on the
investment). Each wave of innovation is characterized by a continuous curve.
Successive waves are characterized by discontinuities between these curves |
