The Creative Destruction of Technology

From the Washington Post: 

"As sophisticated mobile devices begin to dominate the consumer marketplace, the peril is growing for the multibillion-dollar empires built on the popularity of personal computers.

...Although online advertising is tremendously lucrative when users of personal computers are the targets, that’s not yet true for mobile devices, which have smaller screens and don’t have the same track record of converting pitches to sales — especially when it comes to big-ticket items.

It’s the riddle many in the tech industry are desperate to solve.

“Here’s the scary thing: It’s not being disrupted by a lucrative new business. It’s being disrupted by a social reality," Gartner tech analyst Whit Andrews said. “There’s not a big business yet in mobile advertising and mobile money making."

...Americans used 114 million smartphones in August, up from 101 million in the beginning of the year...

...Worldwide shipments of personal computers, meanwhile, fell 8.6 percent in the third quarter compared with 2011...

Consumers use tablet computers in ways that are not profoundly different from personal computers, surfing websites, seeing ads and making purchases. Smartphones mark a clearer departure. Web searches on such devices tend to be more contextual, relating to where users are at the moment.

More than one-third of smartphone users, for example, reported using their devices to engage in “showrooming," meaning doing Internet research on a product they see in a store but making the eventual purchase elsewhere...

The problem is so serious for retailers that BestBuy and Target have offered to match prices that shoppers find online.

But advertisers potentially lose out, too, because that research does not always lead directly to a sale.

Often shoppers will travel to a different brick-and-mortar store for a better price.

Sometimes they return home, do more research, and only then complete purchases.