The Apple flock lost their shepherd several weeks ago. While the herd still has a shiny new gadget to distract themselves with as they mourn the loss of their leader, I’ve taken to reflecting on how Mr. Jobs affected the industry in a larger picture. When I first came up with the idea of this article, I thought about my current co-op job in the imaging section of the smartphone industry. Would I have my job if the iPhone wasn’t invented? It’s a question I wanted to answer.
As most people know, Apple first released their iPhone in 2007, but as they may not have known, the smartphone industry existed years before then. At that time, the market hadn’t penetrated the consumer market just yet. In fact, even in 2010, only 18.5% of all mobile phone sales were smartphones, so there’s still much room for this market to grow in the coming years.
Apple entered the market adding a consumer touch to the smartphone. A sleek candy-bar style device with a large touch-screen encompassing the majority of the front facing device real-estate. Instead of using some type of joystick navigation or stylus, users would use, as Steve Jobs put it, “the best pointing devices everyone already has.” In case you haven’t already guessed it, that would be your fingers. As most now know, the impact of the iPhone has been huge. It completely changed the smartphone game, and today, we’re still just getting started.
What does this mean for those of us working right in the middle of this smartphone game? If Apple hadn’t released their iPhone back in 2007, would the smartphone market be the same today? Would there be as many jobs in this industry today? I contacted CECS for job data from several major handset and technology companies to try to find a trend. I specifically look at how many students were hired by Apple, Google, RIM, Palm, and Qualcomm.
From 2006 to 2007, student job growth by these employers hit 27.5% year over year and hit 18.1% between 2007 and 2008. Job numbers with these employers fell back 1% in 2009 likely to do the financial crisis but sprung back up to 13.7% growth between 2009 and 2010 once the market recovered. In 2011, student employment numbers fell 10% from 2010 in this market which is likely to do with Research In Motion’s hiring pullback, but this decline is still not certain.
In terms of smartphone shipments over the same period, 2007 showed 79.7% growth over 2006 with shipments of 115 million smartphone units. In 2008, growth slowed to 31.3% while the financial market began to falter. In 2009, this growth slowed even further to 15.23% before exploding in 2010 with 70.47% growth and shipments just below 300 million units.
To my dismay, these numbers don’t really show a definitive impact of the iPhone on the increase in student jobs and smartphone shipments as I would have hoped. They do however show a general increase in the popularity of the smartphone. It’s possible Jobs’ iPhone product release, which did, as I mention, revolutionize the smartphone industry, pushed for faster consumer-friendly features in smartphones. Better form factors, better interfaces, better cameras; you get the trend. A push for these features and at a higher pace would put demand out for more talent to deliver upon the requests of the market, increasing jobs in hardware, software, marketing, sales and other aspects of product development.
Also, if one talks about iPhones, one must also talk about the impact of applications. Entire companies have been created with the sole intention of developing applications for these platforms. In Apple’s more recent product release, the company mentioned that over $3 billion has been distributed to developers through application sales. That’s a lot of money in a few short years. Other companies have increased their user participation by developing applications for these platforms, allowing their users to utilize services in the mobile domain. Take Twitter for example – by releasing Twitter-branded applications on BlackBerry and Android, mobile participation increased an astonishing 62%!
Bottom line – even if the data I found in a short period of time presented in this article does not prove my theory for sure, it’s hard to deny that Apple’s competitive push to evolve and create new markets has not created increased opportunities for students and people alike to work in such a fast paced and exciting industry. Although it’s hard to see sometimes, in short, competition is a good thing.
Leave a Reply