The decade of the smartphone

On January 1, 2010, there was no iPad and Facebook had less than 500 million users. There was no Siri, the Nokia mobile phone business was still years from being taken over by Microsoft and Amazon had less than 50% of the book market in the US. The decade also saw many new concepts taking shape. While the concept of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) was around in the 2000s, it took off only in the 2010s. The concept of DevOps also started taking form at the end of the last decade and fructified in this one.

Industry 4.0 and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) are two terms that firmly belong to the 2010s. Others which were around before but really took a life of their own were the cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and the Internet of Things (IoT). The digital worker workforce has grown by the millions too. Last year, Apple became the first company in history to be valued at $1 trillion. Some companies that were launched in 2010, which seems to have been a really good year, were: Instagram, Ola, Paytm, Xiaomi, Pinterest, WeWork, Snapdeal and GoFundMe (Uber, WhatsApp and Vivo started in 2009).

Creatively, the decade also belonged to Elon Musk, who popularized Hyperloop, gave us today’s biggest and meanest rocket Falcon Heavy, the world’s largest lithium battery and crossed half a million Teslas in total sales. Of course it was not all hunky dory. There are severe privacy issues related to giants like Facebook and Google. You also have contradictions like Uber being ultra-popular and useful and yet making losses upon losses. Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are both products of this decade and Julian Assange finally got nabbed. Cybersecurity became a hot topic with Stuxnet and the hacking of Saudi Aramco. Ransomware is getting out of control.

But the 2010s is definitely the decade of the smartphone which probably is one of the greatest disruptors of all time. While you shut the TV and desktop in the past, this one’s an always on 24X7 companion which you sleep with. Maybe this is the first step to becoming a cyborg. More people access the Internet through their mobiles than any other type of device as desktops and laptops are in decline. Web browsing. Social media. Chatting. Videos. Photography. Email. Ordering hard goods, soft goods, groceries and from restaurants. Gaming. Navigating. Political activism… It’s all a one-way street towards the mobile. That’s the only high-tech thing to have stormed rural India as we are on the verge of becoming a Tik Tok generation.

It’s probably an ominous sign that at the end of this decade, Google claims to have achieved quantum supremacy. The 2020s promise further acceleration.