16 mobile theses by Benedict Evans
/Benedict Evans ends 2015 with a recap of sorts of his research by presenting 16 mobile theses (and corresponding posts.):
1. Mobile is the new central ecosystem to tech.
2. Mobile is the internet.
3. Mobile isn’t about small screens and PCs aren’t about keyboards - mobile means an ecosystem and that ecosystem will swallow ‘PCs’.
4. The future of productivity.
5. Microsoft's capitulation
6. Apple & Google both won, but it's complicated.
7. Search and discovery.
8. App and the web.
9. Post Netscape, post PageRank, looking for the next run-time.
10. Messaging as a platform, and a way to get customers.
11. The unclear future of Android and the OEM world.
12. Internet of Things.
13. Cars.
14: TV and the living room
The tech industry spent a quarter-century trying to get to the TV set to take it online - that was going to be the mass-market computer. Now it looks like this might finally be happening, but it’s almost a side-show - Microsoft declared Xbox is no longer a strategic asset, TVs are accessories to the smartphone, and it’s the smartphone, not the TV or PC, that delivered the computing revolution and took computing into the living room.
15. Watches.
16. Finally, we are not our users.
Go to his blog and read all of them, it is an important rabbit hole to fall into.
The 14th thesis resonated with me as I begin the year pondering television, filmed content, advertising and technology and how they are not so much converging but running on parallel tracks that sometimes touch and often depend on each other for survival.
