Examples of insight from David Wood

The 2001 essay “Towards the 100 millionth Symbian OS phone”

This extended essay, distributed inside Symbian in August 2001, makes and justifies the following prediction:

I have a prediction to share.  Some time around the year 2006, the 100 millionth phone will be sold that contains Symbian OS.

The second chapter of the book Smartphones and beyond explains the context of this prediction, and evaluates it. The full text of the essay is available here.

As this November 2006 press release confirms,

LONDON, November 16 /PRNewswire/
— Symbian Limited, today announced that 100 million Symbian smartphones have shipped to over 250 network operators worldwide since Symbian’s formation.

The “Symbian Insight” Series, 2005-2006

From September 2005 until September 2006, Symbian published on its corporate website one essay each month from David Wood under the heading “Insight”.

That website was decommissioned in 2009, but a convenient copy of each of these essays is available from this link.

November 2006 essay “From smartphones to super-smartphones”

This essay was originally intended to be the 14th in the “Insight” series but was instead published by ZDNet.

As well as predicting the evolution from smartphones to “super-smartphones”, the essay lays out the risks posed to the smartphone industry by “four horsemen of the apocalypse”:

• Fire – batteries being drained too quickly
• Flood – too much software to integrate
• Plagues – storms of mobile malware
• Warfare – a pre-occupation with “compete” rather than “collaborate”.