The ascendancy of mobile devices as the professional and personal platform of choice has become unmistakably clear as
And so the question for businesses is this: are your mobile strategies and processes for everything from new products to E-commerce to enterprise applications fully optimized to exploit this profound mobile phenomenon?
From an article late last week in the Wall Street Journal:
Strategy Analytics, a research and consulting firm, estimated that Apple shipped 17.7 million mobile phones to grab a record 34% of the U.S. market during the quarter, up from 12.8 million units shipped and a 25.4% share in the fourth quarter of 2011.
Samsung, meanwhile, shipped 16.8 million mobile phones for a 32.3% market share, up from 13.5 million units and 26.9% in 2011.
For businesses, the challenge—and the opportunity—is that this rapidly accelerating mobile trends touches both employees as well as customers and consumers.
As I wrote last week in a piece called Steve Jobs' Vision of Software Meets the Internet of Things:
Each and every day, in every facet of our lives—at work, at home, on the road, at lunch, and in stores and schools and shops and fitness centers and bars and on airplanes—we’re reminded constantly that the mobile phone has become as ubiquitous and indispensable as clothing.
At a deeper level, that also means that software is becoming more pervasive and more essential as it spreads from its formerly limited confines of computers, phones, and tablets and permeates the full constellation of stuff that surrounds us: from light bulbs to refrigerators, from buses to shoes, from tractors to televisions, and from the meat section of your grocery store to the jet engines in the plane you rode in on.
Apple continues to report widespread and eager adoption of the iPhone among the Fortune 500, while simultaneously expanding the number of countries in which its hot-selling iPhone is available, signing up more carriers, and broadening its retail presence across the globe.
In light of the stunning growth at Apple, as well as the continued excellent mobile-phone performance from Samsung and the resurgence of
- Is your website optimized for E-commerce for customers using iPhones? That doesn't mean, can mobile-phone users access your site; it means, is your site fully optimized for mobile-phone users to give them the best possible experience and engagement?
- Does your company offer iPhone apps that describe or demonstrate your products and services?
- Among people who use iPhones or other mobile devices to visit your website and evaluate your products and services, do you you feel you’re giving them a superb experience, an average experience, or a disappointing experience?
- Have you done any research to substantiate your hunches?
- As mobile phones and social media become fused, are you confident that your mobile preparedness and social awareness reflect positively on your company?
- Or, are you scared that it’s a major vulnerability to how you’re perceived and how you’ll fare in the future?
The Strategy Analytics report cited in the Journal article also noted that customers are looking for phones with more intelligence and more capabilities, “with demand growing among customers for 4G smartphones and 3G feature phones.”
That means those customers—and your own employees—are looking for and expecting better experiences plus more power and flexibility from their phones as those people grow increasingly dependent on them in both their personal and professional lives.
Indeed, the article predicts that the intense competition between Samsung and Apple will surely heat up and result in even more powerful and more innovative devices in the future: “Samsung, the market leader in smartphones, has been able to raise its status against Apple with a combination of engineering prowess and clever marketing to provide phones to rival the blockbuster iPhone.”
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