> How are we better off as a society if Apple, Google, Samsung don't put powerful, usable smartphones in the hands of a few hundred million people?
Respectfully, you're again arguing the merits of ends without discussing any means. Making the argument into "smartphone or no smartphone?" is like asking "candy or no candy?" Which do you think people will choose? But even free candy has costs; put the person who receives it on a scale a week later and you'll see them.
One can certainly point to societal costs that the information economy has imposed that go beyond the costs of individual products. When Marc Andreesen says that "software is eating the world," what he's saying is that it takes wealth that used to be held by people outside Silicon Valley -- travel agents, booksellers, and recording artists, to name a few -- and transferring it to people inside Silicon Valley. And since software requires no human intervention to do the same thing over and over again, the number of people who are on the receiving end of this wealth transfer is naturally much smaller than those who are on the other; once you've got an algorithm for picking the best airline flight, say, money that used to provide a living for tens of thousands of travel agents can all flow instead to one guy -- the guy who owns the algorithm. So that one guy becomes crazy rich, while the travel agents lose their livelihood.
Does the inegalitarian result of that wealth transfer outweigh the benefit to society at large that the algorithm provides? I'm guessing from your comments that you would say it does not, and I would probably agree with you on that. That's a more complicated question than whether or not people would prefer travel sites or no travel site, but it at least attempts to take into account the costs such sites create beyond what the individual user pays for them.