Special Letter: Democratizing Computing: Cellphones as the New Computing Platform

Author(s): Mark Anderson

You have watched the industry strategic energies move over time from fewer users of more powerful machines, to a global base of users of many types of less-expensive computing and communications devices. It is almost fair to wonder about the cart and the horse: do cellphones improve the economics of emerging poor, or do those moving from poverty to basic, consumer-level incomes buy more technology? The answer to both is a clear “Yes.”