Photo: AP
I’m sure you’ve all read it, or seen it, or heard it by now. That’s right; President Obama gets to keep his BlackBerry. The latest story I read yesterday is right here. Being in the mobile business, I’ve probably heard this story from more angles than your average bear. But with all the angles I have heard, I think most folks are missing the point. The point isn’t that the president has chosen a BlackBerry (which obviously thrills RIM), nor that they are changing presidential procedures to deal with his mobile addiction, nor that the device will require some “super spy” type of security. The point is that the president can’t do without his smartphone.
In this aspect he really is a reflection of what is going on in our society. Even during a huge economic slowdown (or recession, or depression, or whatever you call it), mobile phones continue to become a part of the very fabric of our lives. In a story yesterday from RCR Wireless news, AT&T said it added 2.1 million new customers in the fourth quarter of last year. Verizon added 1.4 million new customers during the same time frame. That’s 3.5 million new subscribers with those two carriers alone, in 3 months, during the middle of some of the worst economic conditions in a very long time.
My kids reflect this same addiction. About a year ago I was looking at our family mobile phone bill, because of some additional charge that appeared. I’ll have to admit I rarely look it over as long as it is within normal operating parameters, but somebody had gone over on some service. I don’t even recall what the deal was now. Anyway, while I was looking into the detail I noticed my then 16-year-old son had sent about 7500 text messages for the month. My then 15-year-old daughter was not far behind with about 6000. I brought up the rear with about 700. As I recall my daughter said “That’s really weak, Dad.”
So what? What’s the big deal? I’ll tell you what the big deal is: we are changing the way we communicate as a society. First it was the land line telephone, then it was the cell phone, then it was email, then instant messaging, then social networking and text messaging. The point is that our society is increasingly communicating via mobile devices for their personal lives. The teens and 20-somethings of today are immersed in a mobile world. As more of them infiltrate the work force, more of how we communicate in business will change. And we won’t be able to pull out the old lines that we can’t do it that way because it isn’t professional, or it’s not secure, or it doesn’t leave the right type of audit trail. After all, the president is using it now, and to a certain extent that changes everything.
It’s one thing to hack out some code utilizing the iPhone’s accelerometer to