Jul 15, 2017 · 26m · a16z
Mobile Is Eating the World, 2015
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this presentation at an Andreessen Horowitz event, analyst Benedict Evans demonstrates how the universal reach, massive supply chain scale, and rich sensor capabilities of smartphones cause mobile computing to 'eat the world.' He illustrates how software is outgrowing the traditional tech sector to fundamentally reorganize global commerce, demographics, and enterprise business models.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
The host as informed peer 0.0 Guest teaching 2.5 Guest disagreement 1.8 The host pushing back 0.0
speaking balance: gold is the host, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 16:40 Dismissing Eric Schmidt's TV Prediction
Evans directly calls out Google executive Eric Schmidt, noting he was completely wrong about Google TV dominating screen sales.
Hardest push from the host ▶ 0:00 No Host Pushback PresentBecause this transcript is a solo keynote monologue by Benedict Evans, no host pushback occurs.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 1:45 Raw Transistor Power ComparisonEvans illustrates the scale of mobile expansion by revealing that launch-weekend iPhone 6 sales contained 25 times more CPU transistors than all active PCs on Earth in 1995 combined.
The host holds their own ▶ 0:00 No Host Hits Back PresentThe recording consists entirely of a solo presentation, giving the host no opportunity to demonstrate expertise or counter the guest.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The host as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The host pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Global Internet and Smartphone Growth Trajectory | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | Evans outlines the trajectory toward universal smartphone adoption, highlighting how mobile expands technology to the entire global population. As this is a solo keynote monologue, host metrics remain at zero. | |
| Mobile Penetration in Emerging Markets | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | The guest explains mobile adoption in developing nations, noting sub-$40 Android devices expanding access in places like sub-Saharan Africa. Evans delivers the entire analysis without host intervention. | |
| Industry Shifts: Consumer Electronics, Microsoft, and China | 0 | 2 | 3 | 0 | Evans contrasts PC volume growth with mobile device growth, taking a mild jab at Steve Ballmer and Microsoft's shrinking market share. He maintains a polite, explanatory tone throughout his presentation. | |
| The Mobile Supply Chain as Technology 'Lego' | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | The guest describes how commoditized mobile components act as off-the-shelf tech Lego for hardware hardware innovation in Shenzhen. The presentation continues uninterrupted. | |
| Post-Web, Post-PageRank, and Unsettled Interaction Models | 0 | 3 | 2 | 0 | Evans argues that the web browser and PageRank search model are becoming outdated in an app-centric world. He offers a contrarian view on traditional search paradigms. | |
| Platform Bifurcation: iOS vs. Android Ecosystem Dynamics | 0 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Evans highlights the disparity between Android's unit volume and Apple's 4x App Store monetization advantage per user. He provides detailed market segmentation data to the audience. | |
| Messaging Efficiency: WhatsApp vs. Global SMS | 0 | 3 | 3 | 0 | The guest highlights WhatsApp's lean engineering scale compared to SMS and directly points out that Eric Schmidt's prediction on Google TV was completely wrong. | |
| Youth Media Preferences and Communication Shifts | 0 | 3 | 2 | 0 | Evans discusses youth communication habits, jokingly noting that email is for grandparents and pointing out the collapse of the standalone camera industry. | |
| Three Phases of Tech Deployment & Tech as Facilities | 0 | 3 | 2 | 0 | Evans categorizes corporate technology into three phases, re-framing traditional IT buy-in as mere office furniture or facilities management rather than strategic business drivers. | |
| Amazon's Retail Disruption and the Invisibility of Mature Tech | 0 | 3 | 3 | 0 | Evans details Amazon's retail strategy and jokes about their deliberate lack of net profits to reinvest in growth. He explains how mature technologies disappear into the background. | |
| Conclusion: Software Is Eating the World and Outgrowing Tech | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | The guest concludes his presentation by reiterating that software is outgrowing the tech industry itself as it transforms every major economic sector. |
Statements from this episode (39)
Evans: Mobile makes technology a universal product for the first time
“I think the first, and really the most important, is the sense that mobile is really making technology a universal product. That is to say, we sold mainframes to big companies, and we sold PCs to middle class families, and we sold technology in one way or anot…”
Evans: Global internet population reached 3 billion, smartphone users 2 billion
“We've gone to about three billion people online and two billion people with smartphones.”
Evans: The next billion internet users will be driven entirely by smartphones
“And then the next few years, we'll add another billion and all of that growth will be driven by smartphones.”
Evans: Over four billion adults globally will own smartphones by 2020
“That means that by 20 20 of about seven billion people on earth and a bit over five billion adults, over four billion will have a mobile phone, and almost all of those will have converted to a smartphone”
Evans: iPhone 6 CPU has 600x the transistors of a 1995 Pentium
“Because a CPU in a new iPhone, an iPhone six, has over 600 times more transistors than a Pentium from back in 1995, when Intel went consumer in a big way.”
Evans: iPhone 6 launch weekend sales contained 25x 1995 global PC power
“If you count up all the phones that Apple sold at the launch weekend for the iPhone six, you get about 25 times more CPU transistors than were in all the PCs on Earth in 1995.”
Evans: Sub-Saharan Africa cellular coverage exceeds access to water and electricity
“So even in sub-Saharan Africa, 70% of the population today is under cellular coverage. Not all of that is three G yet, but it will be three G soon, and even four G. And that's more than have access to improved water, more than have access to grid electricity,”
Evans: Cheap Android devices drive rapid smartphone adoption in emerging markets
“Not a smartphone yet, but that's converting quite quickly to smartphones. And of course the thing that drives that is cheap Android.”
Evans: Android entry prices dropped to $30 to $40 in 2015
“The average price of an Android device, on the other hand, is currently about 250 dollars, and the entry price for Android today is only 30 or 40 dollars.”
Evans: 4 billion people buy phones every two years, dwarfing PC sales
“So there are about four billion people on earth buying a phone every two years on average, as opposed to about one and a half billion PCs being replaced every five years, so the phone business is bigger, and it's getting replaced, it's converting from feature …”
Evans: Mobile phone manufacturing scale is comparable only to shoes or toothbrushes
“And in fact, if you want to find a manufactured product that has the same kind of scale as mobile phones, you really need to look at things like shoes or toothbrushes. There's no other kind of sophisticated manufactured product, certainly no other electronic p…”
Evans: For many global users, mobile phones are their first electrical device
“You are starting to see people at the margins of the mobile industry now for whom a mobile phone is the first electrical device they've ever owned. Not the first electronic device, the first electrical device that they've ever owned.”
Evans: Smartphones and tablets generate half of global consumer electronics revenue
“Smartphones and tablets are now close to half of the entire revenue of the global consumer electronics industry.”
Evans: Microsoft's share of connected device sales plummeted from 90% to 20%
“Microsoft's share of connected devices has gone down from 80 or 90% to perhaps 50 to 20% of the devices being sold.”
Evans: Chinese teenagers prefer iPhones and Xiaomi over Samsung
“Indeed, if you then ask Chinese teenagers what brand they want, first they say they want an iPhone, then they say they want a phone from interesting new brands like Xiaomi or Meizu and Samsung is a hand-me-down phone they get from their grandmother. They all h…”
Evans: Tech leadership has recentered on the Bay Area, Apple, and Google
“Today, it's all about the San Francisco Bay Area. It's about Apple and Google, because everything is shifted back to software.”
Evans: ARM and Qualcomm have displaced Intel as chip leaders
“And then in chips, it's not Intel, it's ARM and Qualcomm.”
Evans: Wearables, IoT, and drones are fundamentally just reassembled smartphones
“It powers wearables and Internet of Things and connected cars and drones and everything else, because fundamentally all of those things are basically smartphones just put together in a different way, but put together by the same people with the same components…”
Evans: Hardware success depends on vision and distribution, not core tech
“Today, you can just go to Shenzhen and say, we'll have a number three and number 15, please, and then it gets put together for you. And so the question is more about the vision and the route to market than the, kind of, the underlying core technology.”
Evans: Half of US online time occurs inside smartphone apps
“Half of all time spent online in the USA is now happening inside smartphone apps. So not half of all time spent on mobile, half of all time spent online is happening inside smartphone apps.”
Evans: The internet is moving beyond Google's PageRank and web pages
“As a consequence, we've also moved on from the single unified paradigm of Google, because Google is fundamentally about analyzing links and sending you to web pages, but if the internet is no longer just about web pages, then that PageRank model breaks down, j…”
Evans: Apple holds 15% of global phone sales, Android 50-60%
“Apple has about 15% of all the phones sold on Earth, and Android is the next 50 to 60%, and then the rest are feature phones that are converting very fast to those 35 dollar Androids I talked about earlier.”
Evans: Apple devices account for the majority of global mobile web browsing
“Apple devices have a majority of all the web browsing happening on mobile devices.”
Evans: The average Apple device generates 4x the app revenue of Android
“And then if you look at App Store revenue, you see that Apple devices contribute about two-thirds of all the revenue, and Android devices one-third. And that's even though there are at least twice as many Android devices in use as there are Apple devices. So t…”
Evans: Facebook built a $7.5B mobile ad business in two years
“The obvious expression of this is Facebook, which has built a seven and a half billion dollar mobile advertising business from scratch in the last couple of years.”
Evans: WhatsApp handles 50% more volume than global SMS with 40 engineers
“WhatsApp is doing about twenty billion messages a day, and the entire global SMS system of every mobile operator on Earth is doing about twenty billion. So WhatsApp is 50% bigger than SMS with 40 engineers.”
Evans: Building a basic tech service in 2000 required $10M to $20M
“And in fact, if you wanted to do anything, you had to raise 10 or twenty million dollars, because that was what it cost just to get the hardware and the software in place to implement even the most basic kind of service.”
Evans: Mobile expanded the software market 100x while crashing go-to-market costs
“On the one hand, the size of the addressable market is increased by an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude. On the other hand, the cost of going to market, the cost of building those businesses, or at least the cost of getting to the first million or…”
Evans: 5 billion square feet of LCD screens are sold annually
“About five billion square foot of screen will be sold this year, so roughly one square foot for every adult on Earth.”
Evans: TV sets are now a minority of video-capable devices
“Not the minority of consumption, which is still heavily on TV, But a minority of the devices that people can use. It's now heavily outnumbered by all these other screens.”
Evans: 800 billion photos were shared on social networks in 2014
“2014, at least eight hundred billion photographs were shared on social networks across Facebook, Snapchat WeChat, and the other major networks.”
Evans: Smartphone sales exceed the camera industry's entire historical unit sales
“And more iPhone and Android, more iPhones and Android phones have been sold and were sold by the camera industry in its entire history.”
Evans: Digital disruption first enhances legacy products before fully replacing them
“And this is something that you see quite often as digital impinges upon old-fashioned industries, that it's first of all digital makes the old product better, and then all of a sudden it creates a new product that kills the old product entirely.”
Evans: Technology deployment evolves through three distinct phases
“There tend to be three phases of technology deployment. There are companies that make technology, and that's the companies that you've seen today, that you'll see later on, the companies that we invest in, that everybody in this part of the world builds. Then …”
Evans: Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft are not fundamentally technology companies
“And in the same sense, Airbnb and Uber and Lyft are fundamentally enabled by smartphones. They may, they would not be possible without smartphones. They certainly wouldn't be possible without the internet, but they're not in The technology business. They're no…”
Evans: Amazon accounts for only 1.5% of US retail revenue
“Amazon only has about one and a half percent of the entire US retail industry by revenue excluding automotive and gasoline and things like that.”
Evans: In 2005, Airbnb would have tried selling software to Hilton
“10 years ago, Airbnb would have tried to sell software to Hilton, and that probably wouldn't really have worked at all.”
Evans: When a technology is fully adopted, it disappears into background infrastructure
“Another way of thinking about this, I think, is that when technology is fully adopted, it tends to disappear.”
Evans: Technology is outgrowing the traditional tech industry
“Software is kind of outgrowing the tech and technology is outgrowing the tech industry. Because technology is no longer selling technology as technology to people who are writing a check for it, while the people are using technology to build things that are no…”