Re:Google employees who work from home could lose money
by lostcolony on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @11:50AM
(#28130324)
It was probably IBM; the Simon Personal Communicator in '92. Depends how you define smartphone, but it could take/make calls, send/receive emails and faxes, and had some apps like a calulator and an alarm clock. All for the low low price of $1100 1992 dollars, and rockin' a fat 1 hour worth of battery life.
So who built the first smartphone?
It was probably Nokia. And what happened to them?
BlackBerry? They were the one's that made Google and Apple pay attention, because they built the first real baseline use cases for data networks. But was that even a smartphone?
Of course, the iPhone was not the first smartphone, but it was a breakthrough of sorts, but if we leave that product - that aside, how many companies can you think of that generally create this level of 'breakthrough' product?
Almost none.
'Disruption' almost always comes from smaller, newer companies, where there is a fundamentally new strategy that is at the core of the companies existence, i.e. it's inherent in the nature of the company itself.
The reason you might misunderstand this is likely due to the fact that popular understanding of the business world is completely skewed towards interesting and novel companies and technology.
'Business' is not what we see on TechCrunch or even the more classical business press really. The Economy is mostly made up of classical companies of varying sizes wherein my comments apply even more appropriately.