Quartz about Benedict Evans, the analyst who is working for a16z and is being quoted by seemingly everyone for a while now:
“The presentation, “Mobile eats the world,” is succinct (13 minutes), and worth devoting a quarter hour to viewing. But to boil it down even further for you, Evans makes two big world-view shattering points: 1) the digital processing power—the number of chips multiplied by the number of transistors on those chips—abroad in the world today is several orders of magnitude greater than during the pre-Web era of computing. 2) The ubiquity of technology—robust processing power in the compact, individualized-but-always-connected form of a phone—has made technology no longer a separate industry but an integral element of every industry.
The first implication of Evans’s point of view—which he sometimes expresses as ‘time for new questions’—is that monster valuations of the so-called unicorns can no longer be seen as the sign of a bubble. If you were to simply swivel your point of view upon Evans’s axis—from computing’s past to mobile’s future—you would see the looming magnitude of inserting software (via smartphones, now, and wearable sensors and controls, later) into nearly every human endeavor.”
