Smartphones will outsell PC by 2011 according to Silicon Valley Insider:

Smartphone sales

Your first reaction might be "interesting chart, so what's the big deal?"  That's the way a lot of people react to news about market shifts.  Like the shift is important maybe for the suppliers, but what difference should it make to me?  That's kind of how a lot of people reacted to PCs when they came along – and those businesses ended up with IT costs that were too high and processes that were too slow.

Market shifts affect us all.  As the number of smart phone users keeps doubling, the number of new PC buyers doesn't.  You may not care today that there will be more smartphones sold in 2011 – but if you think about it, you should.

  • Do you deliver information across the internet?  If so, are you formatting content for access on a PC screen – or on a smartphone?
  • Are you publishing information for long-format page views like a PC, or short-format small views like a smartphone?
  • Are you planning to continue sending people information on email, or will texting be more efficient and practical soon?
  • Do your on-line ads present well on a smartphone?
  • Do you print things you should send immediately via smartphones?  Could you stop printing?
  • Do you have a PC in your family room – and will you need to have one there when everything you want to know is available on a smartphone?
  • If you can access 90%+ of your information on a smartphone, will you still carry around a laptop?
  • Will fax machines become obsolete?  What will that do for land-line demand?  What does this portend for maintaining land-line service to your home or business?

These are just a few thoughts about how things could change as smartphone sales grow.  There will be more.  The biggest risk in this chart isn't that the lines meet in 2011 – but that as we get into 2010 smartphone sales keep growing on a log (rather than linear) line and PC sales don't recover anywhere close to the projections shown here.  Realizing that forecasts tend to be wrong by more than 25% as often as they are correct within 10%, we can realistically expect that in 2011 smartphone sales might be more than 500MM units, and PC sales might be less than 250MM units – or rougly double!!!  When that sort of impact happens, we see sales fall off a cliff of old technology.  Do you remember when every admin had a typewriter – then suddenly none did – like in a matter of months.

So, are you preparing for this possibility?  If you did, could you gain advantage over your competition?  If you were the first to aggressively plan for, and implement, smart phone technology use can you lower your cost?  Better connect with customers?  Find new customers?  React faster to customer needs?  Offer new services?  Promote new products?  

If you wait, what can your competitor do to you?  How could she clip your customer relationships?  Lower her prices?  Expand her offerings?  If you wait, how could you find yourself doing poorly?

This will be a big deal for the technology companies.  This shift is the kind of thing that could expose the great weaknesses in Microsoft's and Dell's horribly Locked-in  Success Formulas.  It also could catapult Apple, Google — or maybe an outside player like Motorola (largely given up for dead) into a leadership position.  Positions could change very fast if the adoption rate turns more aggressive.  Is your investment portfolio prepared?

We see these kind of charts all the time.   But do you do anything about it?  Market shifts happen.  They obsolete old Success Formulas.  They put businesses at risk that aren't paying attention.  They create new winners out of companies that aggressively pursue the shifts.  We often see the shift coming – but Lock-in keeps us from doing anything about it.  Perhaps you need to consider Disrupting your status quo and setting up some White Space to see what you can do to improve your position!