The Dawning of High Mobility

[Commentary] Over the past few months, I’ve been running a series of experiments analyzing my own time spent using computers. Primarily, I’ve been tracking the amount of time I spend per day on my Mac versus on my iPhone. I’ve started doing this because of some assumptions I’ve had about the future -- mainly that the smartphone is the primary computing device for billions of people, including those in markets where PC penetration is high.

A PC is great when you can sit down to use it. For many people, their life is not spent at a desk. The shift from desktop to high-mobility solutions is where computers, software and services are all adapting to the mobile era. This is the central reason I believe we are seeing a behavioral shift in the market of time away from traditional PCs to highly mobile ones. The mobile Internet is the true consumer Internet. Business, commerce, banking, searching, discovering, and all kinds of consumer opportunities are shifting to mobile. Outside of some hardware and productivity software, there is little happening that is interesting and exclusive to the desktop or notebook computer. The world is embracing this shift because the opportunity is significantly larger. The time spent observation signals the changing of the times to our mobile future. Hundreds of millions of people live highly mobile lives, and now computing can, as well.

[Ben Bajarin is principal analyst at Creative Strategies, Inc.]