mobile and cloud was well alive and booming a decade before 2014 (i guess you could very technically argue not cloud but S3 buckets on aws caught fire almost instantaneously)
There were mobile phones before the iphone. Like a whole ecosystem even! They even had screens! and browsers! and internet!
the major innovation the iphone brought was a touch screen (and a decent camera), which sort of existed, but nothing as smooth and crisp as the iphone. please i really hope people out there dont think the iphone was the invention of the cell phone.
It's like differentiating between "the Internet boom" and the invention of networking - nobody is saying the 14k modem was the invention of networking, but there was no "internet boom" before it.
But you can't build a business like Uber on Symbian. The iPhone brought about all these marketplace apps. They stopped being toys, and became more like mini computers.
- some college girl doing CS was talking about how cloud is the future. I asked her what cloud was. She didn't know but mentioned the S3 stuff.
- my aunt, a clerk, was talking about how her job was training her to put documents in the cloud. She didn't know what a cloud was either.
- I got the worst career advice of my life. Someone said I should stop doing Android and learn to make BlackBerry apps instead, because that's what all the British people were using. On the other end, someone said I'd regret not making Windows Phone apps because they were superior in every way to Android.
- we were doing SVN to our own servers because this dude Joel put it as part of a checklist, and then we switched to Git because of the cloud thing.
- Uber (and similar) were just blasting off. In my country, it was MyTeksi (2011), later GrabTaxi (2013), then Grab (2016). They were the first "unicorn" in the region, where we hadn't experienced the dot com bubble, and regional VCs would pressure to raise and burn.
- Tech jobs were not really a thing here. Someone said that with my EE degree, I could get a real job as a KFC manager and keep all the IT stuff as a hobby. But in Malaysia, tech triggered hard around 2014. SMEs became startups. Malaysian entrepreneurs from the US were coming back here, becoming angels and VCs because it was easier to invest here than in the US. And GrabTaxi started pushed a wave of hype.
It's probably different in different places. 2014 was probably a later stage in Silicon Valley, but it was quite early here in SE Asia. There's delays.
It's also why I'm optimistic on things like crypto, web3, AI, because the tech is at a mature enough stage to build things on, but it'll be years before that tech is built and many more years before it's a household product. The story really starts when the tech is used by a billion people.