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Home » Blogs » Technology » Another Milestone in Mobile Technology
Thomas P. Gale

Another Milestone in Mobile Technology

By    Thomas P.  Gale 
October 12, 2009
More about:  MDM Blog,  Technology
Massive technology shifts have changed how business is done.
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Cellular phone expenditures surpassed spending on residential landline phone services beginning in 2007, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey report released last week. In 2001, cellular phone service held about 23% of the market; by 2007 cell phones held 55% of the market.

It’s one of those statistics that seems almost invisible as cell phones have become such a part of daily life. But the stat verifies massive technology shifts of the past 15 years from fax to email to mobile devices. For distributors, a key aspect of this transition has been new product development in the past 10 years – datacomm products, smart sensors, wireless technology – that has spawned new product lines and life cycles, as well as emerging customer segments.

 
From a business perspective, consider how dramatically communications tools have shifted in even the past few years. Salespeople and executives have much better visibility into real-time transactions, customer behavior, daily sales trends, inventory availability and just about any other chunk of data you want from your ERP or specialized software tools. The best sales reps have leveraged these tools to get even closer to customers and prospects (and stay out of the office, i.e. more productive!). Of course, the trick is to not get buried by mountains of data or added work to meet the needs of the technology.

A little added perspective: Some of us in a superior state of aging remember the original phone exchange or central office, where the telephone company owned buildings in every neighborhood with banks of switches and relays with twisted-pair wires out to every house. Mine in St. Louis was Woodland 2, or WO2-5585. I believe it was in the early Sixties when it was a shocker of a transition to go from the abbreviated exchange letters to numbers.

The graph below is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

 

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