The iPhone Is Not The End Of Innovation

There’s just something when we see a dominant technology out there that makes people assume that no one will ever out innovate it, and then fear that we’re stuck with the dominant player forever. Adam Theirer has a post discussing this concept in relation to a recent paper by Robert Hahn and Hal Singer, Why the iPhone Won’t Last Forever and What the Government Should Do to Promote its Successor, which highlights how dominant platforms often appear insurmountable, but often quickly are defeated from unexpected sources. Thus, worrying about things like exclusive arrangements or if the platform is too closed off may be a waste of time. Eventually, the market ends up taking care of it. The paper points out that previous technologies are often declared the "end of innovation" as well, such as the Motorola MicroTAC flip phone (I had one, ages ago), which Fortune described in 1989 by saying:

Portable phones won’t get a lot smaller than this one. After all, they have to reach from your ear to your mouth.

Take a look one of oldest mobile phone:

And no more innovation ever happened in mobile phones over the past twenty years, right?

 

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Get a free, disposable phone number from inumbr

Savvy online shoppers will often use disposable credit-card numbers (which are available from PayPal and some banks) to protect their privacy.

Here’s a perfect companion: inumbr, which gives you free, temporary phone numbers. These throwaways are ideal for things like Craiglist ads, where you might want to include contact information–but not your contact information.

To use inumber, choose your closest city or area code (the service has roughly two dozen of them), then specify how long you want the number to last: an hour, a day, or a week.

Next, enter your real phone number, which is where inumbr will forward incoming calls. You’ll also need to supply an e-mail address in order to activate the temporary number.

Once you’ve done that, you can log into the service and access a wealth of options, including extending the expiration date, adding a second number (in case you can’t be reached at the first one), and even checking voicemail.

All this is free, believe it or not, making inumbr a must-bookmark site.

 

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