ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the emergence of a digital lifestyle business model (DLBM) which for consumers, households and corporate business has revolutionized the way in which information, hardware, software (applications) and communications technologies combine to affect our everyday lives. The age of personal computing, mobile telephony and software applications is transforming the way work is done and leisure time spent.
We have lived with the PC paradigm for around 30 years now, since IBM introduced its first personal computers and pushed them into businesses in the early 80s. Until the launch of the iPad last year the only comparable change in the market had been the laptop, which led to the emergence of an army of travelling salespeople whose most urgent need was always to find a power point where they could charge their machine’s fading battery.
The iPad seems to be different – a third stage of computing. Horace Dediu, a former analyst with the mobile phone company Nokia who now runs his own consultancy, Asymco, argues that ‘the definition of a new generation of computing is that the new products rely on new input and output methods, and allow a new population of non-expert users to use the product more cheaply and simply’.
(The Observer, 27 March 2011) This is the technology that allows us to work from home, on the train, in the local coffee shop with a Wi-Fi, watch TV, listen to downloads, shop on the internet, order the food and get it delivered, pay household bills and make phone calls. This technology is ‘adaptive to today’s digital age’ and is portable and easy to use. In 1990 100 million personal computers were ‘in use’ and by 2010 1.4 billion (see Table 11.1), and in 1990 there were 10 million mobile phone subscribers in the OECD countries and in 2009, 1.3 billion (see Figure 11.1).