alt Hacker News> If you were in tech in 2005-2007 you were part of a small minority of the general population. It often didn't feel like a small minority because, well, you knew all those other people on the Internet, but that's a pretty strong selection bias.
Didn't we only pass 50% of households having a home PC in like... '00 or '01 or something? And I mean just in the US, which was way ahead of the curve.
> Here's Wired in 2007 saying, in reference to Facebook, "no company in its right mind would give it a $15 billion valuation". [2]
I actually think that's correct... if the smartphone hadn't taken off right after that. The "consumer" Internet and computing, the attention economy, et c., functionally is the smartphone. A desktop computer and even a laptop aren't in use when driving, at the store, at the park, every moment on vacation, et c. It'd still only be nerds lugging computers everywhere if nobody'd managed to make a smartphone that's capable-enough and pleasant-enough-to-use to expand the market beyond the set of folks who might have had a beeper in earlier years (the part of the market Blackberry was addressing). A gigantic proportion of the "GDP of the Internet", if you will, exists because smartphones exist.
I'm reminded of the quote that ATMs didn't unemploy bank tellers, smartphones did. While not owning a laptop may seem inconceivable to us here, smartphones exist as the only connection to the Internet for many.
The interesting question is without Apple and the iPhone, would RIM/Blackberry have "figured it out"? Would we be on 2-way "pagers" with keyboards and stupidly expensive data plans that you have to order separately? Because while the original iphone was a marvel in terms of hardware, I think the bidet contribution was the integration with AT&T for the cellphone plan, which only Steve Jobs had the clout to pull off.