Billions without Buzz

Reading between the lines somewhat, there's an eye-opening point embedded here that is often missed by the ultra-connected in my experience. That is, the majority of people in our industry (let's say that's software development, for the sake of argument) are not on Twitter every day, are not famous, do not have significant social media presence in respect to their jobs, are not on Hacker News, and so on.. and they're a huge, important, and profitable market that is often overlooked by those who assume everyone is reading HN or hanging out on Twitter all the time.

I've written elsewhere before[1] about the fact that journalists give us all a skewed interpretation of what's actually going on and where the money is.

Far more of the world's wealth is flowing between companies than between consumers and companies; but those flows are only visible to those close to them. But every journalist is a consumer, so they are all "experts" on whatever the final consumer-facing products are. Hence, those products get the attention and we overestimate their importance.

[1] http://chester.id.au/2013/01/05/on-selling-to-consumers/

>"Companies who still need high growth to justify their stock price (read: Apple) are distressed about the notion that everybody on the planet who can afford a smart phone already has one"

Not true - India has ~800+ million mobile subscribers and only ~100+ million of them currently have smartphones. So there is a huge market waiting to be tapped - although Apple may still be distressed as 90%+ of these 700 million potential customers are probably going to buy a sub-$100 smartphone made by the likes of Micromax and running Android...

Just my opinion, but to me cloud is more disruptive to B2B than mobile. Not that mobile doesn't have some level of impact that varies by industry, but most people working in my office aren't using their mobile phones and tablets for data input - a key action that is performed by most office workers. For B2B, therefore, web will likely be #1 and then they will have a mobile app that exist to reference into that system and do some specialized tasks. In this way, the mobile app is just another application accessing the same system vs. a mobile app that exists on it's own (such as, say, Instagram).

As an example, Salesforce.com, the "standard" in SaaS CRM has a mobile app, but the majority of the time users are in front of a laptop or computer during the day. They may use the mobile app on the go, but people are not walking around our office using these apps - they're at their desks where they've got a keyboard.

This obviously varies by industry - I'm sure people can provide examples where it would make a big difference (thought of one: services businesses with a lot of remote/scheduled workers ala lawncare).

Cloud infrastructure has been disrupting both in the delivery of SaaS applications and lowering the cost of developing and delivering a service. I'm just not seeing mobile having the same level of impact. The fact that most mobile apps that support SaaS applications are thrown in with the service may show that they don't add huge value to overall revenue a SaaS company may see.

As the partial subject of Eric's post it's awesome to see more people getting into these topics (although I wasn't expecting to have my twitter follower count ever be a topic of discussion, thanks Eric). My focus is on helping these enterprise leaders understand the big impact of tech for process improvement and driving change. This is a very under served market that more of us from the tech side need to see (and step away from the latest shiny new language/platform/gadget once in a while).

I agree that much of the enterprise focused work out there draws less attention today, but I expect that to change. As these businesses reinvent the way they run using mobile that's going to drive big changes to how most people do their jobs. That's also going to mean better ways of connecting consumers directly with organizations (the power of mobile goes beyond connect people to information and really lies in connecting people to each other).

As we see industries change the way they do business it'll be more apparent. With leaders like Sonic Automotive changing the car buying process with iPads in the hands of all sales people so that one person can find you a car, appraise the trade in, work the finances and sign the deal -- without bringing anyone else into the discussion -- that takes a lot of pain we all have felt out of the process.

> Companies who still need high growth to justify their stock price (read: Apple)

Terrible example. Apple in fact has a very low P/E for this sector (it's 1/2 that of Google). Apple could have zero growth and remain highly profitable for years.

I know it's ironic given the larger point of this post that I came out of it with a tangential technical question, but... Can anyone elaborate on this?

Databases. When you have 500 million users, you can't afford unique constraints and foreign keys in the db layer anymore.

Is he just saying that fully featured RMDBs don't have the performance to handle that scale? It seems like in some applications those checks will be necessary, and often the db will be the most efficient place for them. Not everything makes sense as nosql. Maybe I'm missing the point though.

> Manufacturing. Foxconn is enormous. What was the biggest manufacturing facility on earth before the iPhone?

Is that claiming that Foxconn has the largest (by size) manufacturing facility in the world? I would expect that the Boeing Everett Factory still claims that title by a long shot.

> It won't re-challenge our notions of scale. (Walmart's 2.2 million employees would be a small user base by today's standards.)

But sensors on everything in their supply chain are where the growth is. How many items per day does Walmart transport?