Matchmakers

Chapter 7

Beyond the Castle Walls

Building a Platform and Ecosystem That Can Create Value

The mobile phone looked like a runaway success in 2005. More than 1.5 billion people had one.¹ Mobile carriers were adding subscriptions at a rapid clip, and sales of handsets were keeping pace. The mobile phone was one of the most successful consumer products ever introduced.

The future seemed to look bright for the industry that year. The feature phones that most people had were only useful for making phone calls and sending text messages, but they were being replaced with phones with chips that made them handheld computers. These “smartphones” still had a small market share in 2005, but their numbers were growing rapidly. As faster mobile broadband ...