By Bryan Katz
The familiar technology world we live in becomes less familiar day-by-day, and so we need to constantly reacquaint ourselves each day with today's reality. For example, MySpace domination is ancient history, Kodak no longer makes film, the biggest international telephony carrier in the world is Skype, Apple designers drive expectations for music players and phones, and Avaya has become a software company. :-) Oh, yeah, and emoticons are no longer cool. :-(
This article glances back at how our techno-world looked earlier this decade and compares it to today's numbers. I had posted some market numbers on my wall in the winter of 2002, and it's time for an update. (By "wall", I mean a real wall. In my office. Back in 2002 Facebook didn't exist, and I believe Mr. Zuckerberg was still in High School.)
Don't worry, I'm not going to walk through a deep analysis of these numbers. I have a couple of observations, but I'd invite your thoughts on what this data means.
One thing that leaps out is that there are many more cellphones than PC's or email accounts, and the number of cellphones grew faster than anything else this decade. Some technofiles may assert that this growth is because of increased functionality provided in the evolution from Circuit Switched mobile telephony to Packet Switched and the extra services that offers. A global perspective, though, reveals that it's more likely just that the growth may be more attributed to giving telephone access to more people. The greatest growth in usage, for example, was in the continent of Africa where usage grew from about 2% in the year 2000 to about 28% in 2009. In The Gambia, for example, there were about 800k Mobile subscribers out of about a million telephone users.
Also notice that IT spending has tripled in this decade. That's interesting because the worldwide population hasn't tripled, and manufacturing industrial growth has been less than stellar during the past couple of years. Yet companies have seen the need to invest significantly in information technologies, hinting at a perceived return on investment. At this point I'll give you the choice to figure out if this ROI is real. There are some analysts that argue that this increase in IT investment directly correlates with productivity (e.g., this article from the NY Federal Reserve in 2001), while others argue that improvements in computing efficiency has not mapped into productivity (explained in this Wikipedia article on the Productivity Paradox).
Since I have a background in Statistics, I have an urge to begin a treatise on the validity of the data and things like correlation across the data sources. But, that would be oh so boring. So I'll stop here and invite your thoughts and comments on the road we've taken.....
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Disclaimers and sources:- This is not a formal market analysis by Avaya. All I did was to briefly look for statistics published on the web that may or may not fully reflect reality. I can't vouch for the data.
- I don't have the attribution for the 2002 data. :-(
- You can find the data I used by following these links: Worldwide population, PCs (this was a derivation I made based on a couple of reports), email accounts, internet users, cellphone use, mobile web, and IT Spending.
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