Mobile Tech Report 2014

If you read technology news, you’ll notice it’s not just a story of amazing new product introductions, or even that plus copycat product introductions.  All the usual aspects of business are there: fierce competition, new contenders, old survivors, great ideas but business failures, mediocre ideas that somehow seem to succeed and prosper.


As a reporter, commentator and blogger on mobile technology, I’ve collected what happened in the industry in 2013 and make predictions on what will and won’t happen in 2014.


You can read what did happen in the mobile technology in 2013.  Often I deliver a comment with the news item and usually there is a link to the web page of the original announcement.  This way you can dive into any detail level you desire, read my news feed for the overview or follow the related web link to the longer article.


History is moving so fast now that it is all recorded electronically, but I’m surprised no one else has collected it and presented it for consideration.  Here is 2013 from the mobile technology industry for your consideration along with my own observations and opinions about where things are headed.


It’s often overlooked that the technology industry is an industry.  By that I mean its main concerns are profit and growth.  As consumers we love the new products and unique abilities we are gaining from technology, but it is a business akin to any other, trying to seduce us to pry money out of our wallets.  So I cover the horse race aspect of the business, who’s up, who’s down.  Is that changing?  Is that likely to change?


The longer implications of what the technology industry is doing are vast and social.  We are moving to an always on, always connected society where we can communicate with someone instantly and find an answer to any question quickly.  The entire database of human knowledge is now available in the palm of your hand whenever you desire it.  Everything is there, the good, the bad, right and wrong, hate and love, music and noise.  We are obsessed with technology, not in and of itself, but as a means to an end.  Technology is the means to satisfy our curiosity or even our desire for self-expression.  We are taking photos machine gun-style with our smartphones and choose the few to share.  As humans we are gathering ever more data about ourselves and sharing more about ourselves than we probably thought possible.


Bill Gates was once asked why the computer industry had generated so much improvement in its products over a relatively few years.  He gave some boring answer about Moore’s Law, but the real answer is that computers are in their teenage years.  They are growing and growing.  They will not always do so.  So too the technology industry is in a state of rapid change.  I see the shift to smaller devices as a new paradigm, smashing some businesses and growing others into giants.  Their stories are here in the news.


In short here are predictions for what won’t and will happen in 2014 for the mobile technology industry, breakdowns of marketshare figures on the horse race aspect of the business, chapters on Apple, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry, Amazon, Yahoo, news about social media giants Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, SnapChat and the carriers themselves Verizon, AT&T, Sprint andT-Mobile.  You can also review my 2013 mobile predictions and see my track record on predictions.


Finally there are some essays on how all this mobile tech is figuring into our lives.


I’ve divided the news into the subjects it covers, but also put in the appendix all the news as it came out in chronological ordering.  You can read the firehose of events in the appendix, or just read about one topic at a time in the earlier chapters.


Table of Contents


Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: 2014 Predictions

Chapter 2: Mobile Marketshare

Chapter 3: Apple

Chapter 4: Samsung

Chapter 5: Google

Chapter 6: Microsoft

Chapter 7: Nokia

Chapter 8: Blackberry

Chapter 9: Amazon

Chapter 10: Social Media

Chapter 11: Yahoo

Chapter 12: Carriers

Chapter 13: 2013 Predictions

Chapter 14: Essays

Appendix