[Handytinge]

> Whereas I think the value proposition of smartphones was fairly obvious.

As someone who was in the industry at the time, I think you're looking with hindsight goggles on.

In the initial age of smartphones we had Blackberries (email/productivity devices) for business people, then a hodge podge of HTC Windows devices, the Hiptop, etc. There was no obvious path to ubiquity, and they were made for business men or teenagers.

Nothing at that stage indicated either the likelihood of every person in a western country carrying one, common services and businesses switching exclusively to them, the massive quantities of time spent on them or them becoming our primary computing devives.

Fast forwarding 15 years - yes, the value proposition is obvious. However it seems we're in a similar situation with a hand wavey "VR is just for gamers". Time will tell.

[thinkharderdev]

Fair enough. I may just be indexing too much on my own experience. It certainly seemed obvious to me in the mid-2000s that ubiquitous computing would be hugely valuable but I was also a nerd into that sort of thing so maybe I shouldn't generalize from that.